Eastside voters to decide balance of power in Legislature

By Rachel La Corte / Associated Press

OLYMPIA — Voters in the suburbs east of Seattle will determine whether the state Senate will remain the only Republican-led legislative chamber on the West Coast.

Tuesday’s race for the 45th District, one of eight special elections for the state Legislature this year, has broken all previous legislative spending records in the state because of the significance of the outcome. As of Monday, more than $8.7 million had been spent on the race, with much of it — about $5.9 million — being spent by third-party groups.

Republicans, with the help of a Democrat who caucuses with them, currently control the Senate by a single seat. If the Washington Senate flips, the state will join Oregon and California with Democratic one-party rule in both legislative chambers and the governor’s office.

Democrat Manka Dhingra and Republican Jinyoung Lee Englund are seeking to serve the last year of a four-year term left vacant by last year’s death of Republican Sen. Andy Hill. The winner will need to run again in 2018.

Under the state’s vote-by-mail system, ballots just need to be postmarked or dropped off by Tuesday, which means that final results may not be known for days.

Dhingra, a 43-year-old senior deputy prosecuting attorney with the King County Prosecutor’s Office, had a 10-point lead over Englund in August’s top-two primary as both advanced to the November ballot. Dhingra was born in India, and her family moved to the U.S. when she was a teen. She oversees therapeutic alternative courts for the mentally ill and veterans and founded a nonprofit to address domestic violence in the area’s South Asian community.

Englund, who is Korean-American, was previously a staffer for U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington as well as for The Bitcoin Foundation, a digital currency advocacy group, and worked on projects for the military.

There are four other special elections in the Senate, and three in the House, though none of those races are expected to change the current balance of power in the Legislature.