With reporting by Margo Vansynghel, Jake Goldstein-Street, and Alex Garland

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The first count in the race for the District 3 was anything but definitive but challenger Egan Orion opened up Election Night 2019 with an eight-point lead over incumbent Kshama Sawant.

At Orion’s party held at Pike/Pine’s Sole Repair, the early crowd included his family, supporters, and Uncle Ike’s owner Ian Eisenberg.

“Thousands of voters have talked to me at the doors and they know who I am,” Orion told CHS Tuesday night.

“I know Kshama would like this to be a contest between her and Amazon, but at the end of the day, she’s got me. And I’ve got a really long record of engaging with the community and really getting things done,” he said as someone handed him a BETO for President hat.

“What went well in the campaign? Well, number one that I wasn’t Kshama Sawant,” Orion said earlier in the night before the first count. Orion said he felt only a “9 or 10 point” lead would be really comfortable, given later batches will favor Sawant. 7 or 8 percentage points? That could be OK. But “5 or 6 is like hah,” Orion said, making a distressed sound.

“[Voters] want to see someone that’s accomplished, that’s not too far afield from Kshama and her values and so I think the voters see me as someone that can take those values and get things done,” he said.

Meanwhile, hundreds gathered for the first ballot results with the Sawant campaign in the Central District at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute — the scene of Sawant’s Primary Election Night triumph this summer. When the Election Night results hit, the music stopped and then restarted and subdued conversations began. “Within range, within range,” one Sawant fan reassured another supporter.

Before Sawant made her way to the stage after the numbers dropped, she received a bouquet of colorful flowers from a supporter. As she walked to the stage after, smiling, she received a standing ovation.

“I could ask how everybody’s feeling but I think you’ve already given me the answer,” she said to scattered applause.

“We have run not only the strongest grassroots campaign Seattle has ever seen, but we have taken the nation and indeed many parts of the world, by storm,” Sawant said.

“Anybody has seen the initial result,” Sawant continued after taking a few digs at Jeff Bezos and Mayor Jenny Durkan. “We have received 45.6% of the vote. Our opponent has received 53.99, which makes it an 8.3 percentage point difference. Those of you who were with us in 2013, will remember what happened.” In 2013, Sawant beat incumbent Richard Conlin, who eventually conceded after late votes swung to his opponent and results showed he was down by 1,640 votes — or approximately 1% of the vote. On election night 2013, Conlin was more than 7 points ahead of Sawant, with a 6,000 vote lead, but Sawant refused to concede the race.

In her speech Tuesday, Sawant clung to the late voter turnout, and the overflowing ballot box near Seattle Central, as a sign of hope.

“My friends, we as working class people, those we are marginalized, we have always had to fight hard. We are going to have to continue to fight hard, we are going to have to make sure of every ballot of otherwise disenfranchised” people is counted, Sawant said and continued to sign the praises of her campaign’s door-knocking effort (without “paid canvassers,” she said, a jab at Egan Orion’s campaign) and the money raised from small donations: “We have raised — and need to raise more in the coming days — over $500,000, without a dime in corporate cash,” Sawant said, signaling the campaign, somewhat cash-strapped in the weeks leading up to Election Night, might have gone into debt in the last days of GOTV.

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Later in the r