A poll of likely District 3 voters shows Central District cannabis entrepreneur and community leader Joy Hollingsworth with the brightest prospects for taking the district’s seat on the Seattle City Council.

Election Day is tomorrow with ballots due by 8 PM Tuesday night.

The poll from the Northwest Progressive Institute of 327 likely voters interviewed last week in D3 showed 52% said they had voted or would be voting for Hollingsworth.

Hollingsworth’s challenger, First Hill community leader and transit advocate Alex Hudson, tallied a much lower mark with 28% saying “they had voted or would be voting” for the candidate.

NPI says 16% were not sure, 3% said they did not recall how they had voted, and 1% said they would not vote in the contest. The poll was conducted online and has a margin of error of 5.7%, NPI says.

UPDATE: Hudson campaign consultant and longtime Seattle political analyst Sandeep Kaushik says the NPI poll is “garbage.” In a statement sent to CHS, Kaushik attacks the organization’s methods and says there are “red flags in the data to show that the results are likely to be unrepresentative of the actual voter universe in D3.” The full statement from Kaushik is below.

How will it all shake out starting Tuesday night? CHS is asking, too, with an open survey asking for your choice, your prediction, and what factors were most important to you in your decision. While nowhere near scientific, CHS’s primary prediction survey of readers nailed the final top three in order in August. You can add your choices through Election Night.

Create your own user feedback survey | View results

CHS ELECTION 2023

• WHY YOU SHOULD VOTE FOR… HOLLINGSWORTH   |    HUDSON
• PUBLIC SAFETY — ‘I’m at a 1’ — Questions of crime and just how safe Seattle really is loom over District 3 race
• DEVELOPMENT AND AFFORDABILITY: Redlining, upzones, and a NIMBY letter — District 3 candidates spar over development and growth
• DRUG LAW: How would the District 3 candidates have voted on the Seattle public drug use and treatment legislation? Yes and No
• CAMPAIGNING: From 22nd and Pine to the wraparound porches of Denny Blaine, the candidates hit the streets of District 3
• CONTRIBUTIONS: One District 3 candidate has powered through Seattle’s political fundraising cap, the other isn’t far behind — but the $ totals are nowhere near D3’s last election battle 
• More…

Hollingsworth, a Black, queer, business owner and Central District leader is also the mayor’s choice, winning Mayor Bruce Harrell’s endorsement and leading the way with the most financial contributions to her campaign as she has championed middle of the road progressive positions and a tendency toward accessible takes and straightforward answers and solutions that veer toward a more centrist approach to the council. She has said she would support Harrell’s plan for increased spending on SPD staffing while calling for more accountability at the department.

First Hill’s Hudson, formerly the leader of the neighborhood improvement association and the head of the Transportation Choices Coalition transit advocacy group, has spent her campaign time solidifying her position as a wonk with first-hand experience shaping legislation and the political process around it. Her advocacy for public transit and “upzones everywhere across the city” has set her apart from Hollingsworth who has also called for the development of more housing in the city but in more moderate forms like ADUs that are, she says, less likely to lead to displacement.

The NPI poll’s results mirror some early trends in voting patterns. CHS reported here on early enthusiasm pushing the district to the top spot in early voting enthusiasm in the city as voters in D3’s wealthier neighborhoods were quick to return their ballots for counting. That position has since faded with D3 dropping into third place in Seattle with a still relatively strong 37% turnout through Monday morning. Hudson’s campaign hope is that the district’s typically later voting, more progressive voters will show up as usual at the last minute to match the early enthusiasm shown by voters in the district’s neighborhoods outside the Capitol Hill core.

As the Stranger reported last week, that get out the vote challenge of reaching apartment dwellers in areas around Broadway and Pike/Pine is a major challenge for Hudson’s campaign team and volunteers — a stark contrast to Kshama Sawant’s political organizing power seen in past D3 elections.

CHS reported here on the door to door get out the vote styles and strategies of the two campaigns.

Corporate money has continued to flood into the race — though nowhere near the spending seen in 2019 in the unsuccessful bid to unseat Sawant. CHS reported here on the massive boost in contributions supporting Hollingsworth supported by independent expenditure committees including a committee from the National Association of Realtors and labor-associated groups.

Public safety has been a key center of debate in the race with Hollingsworth making a headline by rating her feeling of safety in the city at a “1,” the lowest possible level. But the NPI poll also found that its sample indicates likely D3 voters mostly think of their neighborhoods as safe:

Respondents were given the ability to rate their feeling of safety, or lack thereof, on a scale of zero to ten, with zero equating to feeling not safe at all and ten equivalent to feeling very safe. 64% of our respondents picked 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10 on the scale. 14% picked 5, and 22% picked 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4.

This finding matches up with longer-term trends around low public safety concerns in the Capitol Hill and Central District core neighborhoods. So, what drove voters in the poll to support Hollingsworth? Her supporters cited the mayor’s endorsement “as an important consideration, along with her biography and public safety stances,” NPI reports. Hudson’s supporters, meanwhile, “cited their personal conversations with her and said she was well prepared to govern, with well thought out positions on issues like transit,” NPI said.

As for the NPI poll’s results favoring Hollingsworth, a CHS analysis based solely on the primary results predicts a much tighter race with a narrow Hollingsworth victory the most likely outcome thanks especially to strength in her home turf neighborhoods around the Central District.

Election night events for both candidates, in the meantime, have been set. You will find the Hollingsworth campaign at 14th Ave’s First AME Church while the Hudson campaign will watch results at Broadway’s Olmstead.

Voters have until Tuesday, November 7th 8 PM to return their General Election ballot.

UPDATE: The full statement from Hudson campaign consultant Sandeep Kaushik:

The NPI “poll” of D3 that was released on Friday is, to put it bluntly, garbage. I realize you might expect me to say that, given that I’m consulting for Alex Hudson, but as a general rule I never publicly question the accuracy of conventionally done polls, even when they return results I don’t like. But this was not a conventionally done poll. As a long-time political and public affairs consultant in Seattle, I’ve done a shit ton (and I believe that is the technical term) of polling, and fancy I know something about polling methodology. And the methodology used here is a bizarre outlier.

There are red flags in the data to show that the results are likely to be unrepresentative of the actual voter universe in D3. For example, in their sample 48 percent of respondents said they had voted already at a time (the sampling was conducted between Oct. 31 and Nov. 3) when King County was reporting less than 16 percent of ballots in the district had been returned. So that means that their sample has a huge skew towards early voters, who tend to be older and more moderate (we expect Alex to be trailing in the initial ballot count tomorrow, and then to make up ground rapidly in the later counts).

More broadly, the methodology of this “poll” is wildly unconventional. For example, 131 of the 327 respondents were people who were identified by placing ads on Facebook and Instagram, social media sites that skew older and are wildly unrepresentative of the social media choices of the actual D3 electorate. That’s a highly questionable way of deriving a representative sample for polling purposes. As the old adage goes, garbage in, garbage out.

There are other obvious problems in the data. In their breakdowns, of the people who say they have yet to vote — still a majority of the electorate, even with their huge oversample of early voters — they found that 42 percent of those voters were undecided. This late in an election, that’s not credible.

None of this is to say that I know who is going to win this race. All indications are that this race is going to be close, perhaps very close, just as it was in the primary. We have two strong candidates battling it out in a closely divided district. The final outcome could go either way. This will become clear to your readers once the votes are counted, but I can say right now with confidence that the finding of this “poll,” that Joy has an overwhelming lead and is headed to a blowout win, is a joke.

 

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