Washington voters will soon decide whether to elect their first Democratic secretary of state in six decades or, instead, send a longtime county auditor to be the state’s first nonpartisan chief elections officer.
Republicans were shut out of the state’s top-two primary in August, which sent current Democratic Secretary of State Steve Hobbs and nonpartisan Pierce County Auditor Julie Anderson to the general election.
Hobbs was appointed by Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee last November to replace Republican Secretary of State Kim Wyman once she took a key election security job in the Biden administration. While his appointment marked the first time a Democrat held the office since the mid-1960s, Hobbs has not yet faced voters, so November’s election will determine who serves the last two years of Wyman’s term.
“It’s obviously a sea change for the office given the fact that it’s been in Republican hands for so long,” said Cornell Clayton, director of the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy at Washington State University. Where voters will land this year, he said, “is just very hard to predict.”
Clayton said adding to the uncertainty was the write-in campaign of Republican Rep. Brad Klippert, whose name won’t appear on the ballot but who has been endorsed by the state Republican Party and could potentially pull enough votes to make a difference in a tight race between Hobbs and Anderson. Unlike Wyman, who lauded the state’s election system and security, Klippert is among those who have echoed election fraud conspiracies and wants to do away with the state’s mail voting system and require in-person voting.
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