Washington's Primary Election Tuesday Could Reshape the State Supreme Court

Washington voters have until 8 p.m. Tuesday to return a ballot that will thin the field in one of the most unusual primary election cycles the state has seen in years. A majority of the seats on the Washington Supreme Court are on the same ballot for the first time in recent memory, the state's only true swing congressional district is drawing national money into a closely fought contest, and a Yakima-area U.S. House seat has turned into a public dispute over which Republican actually holds President Trump's endorsement. Add a $480 million property tax measure for Seattle's library system, and Tuesday's results will shape Washington politics well past November. Because the state's top-two primary sends every candidate, regardless of party, through the same first round, Tuesday will not settle any of these contests outright. It will simply decide which two names in each race make it to voters in November.

How Washington's Mail-Only Primary Actually Works

Washington has no polling-place voting for a primary like this one. Every registered voter receives a ballot by mail and returns it either by mail or through a secure drop box, and the deadline is 8 p.m. Tuesday, August 4, according to KNKX. A ballot mailed back must be postmarked, not just in transit, by that time. King County alone maintains 91 drop boxes, which county election officials describe as bolted to the ground and fireproof, with ballots pulled and secured daily so none sit unattended for long stretches. Washington uses a top-two primary: every candidate for a given office, regardless of party, appears on the same primary ballot, and the two who draw the most votes advance to the November general election, meaning two members of the same party can occasionally face each other in the fall. Certification of Tuesday's results is expected roughly two weeks later. King County Elections has been blunt about the stakes of a primary that typically draws lower turnout than a general election: if voters want a say in which two names appear on their November ballot, officials note, the primary is the only point where that choice actually gets made. The top-two system itself is only two decades old. Voters approved it as Initiative 872 in November 2004, by a 59.8 to 40.2 percent margin, after courts struck down the state's older "blanket primary," and Washington ran its first top-two primary in August 2008. Unlike a traditional partisan primary, it does not guarantee either major party a spot on the November ballot in every race, which is part of why a handful of Tuesday's contests could plausibly send two members of the same party into the fall.

A Rare Chance to Reshape the State's Highest Court

Five of the nine seats on the Washington Supreme Court are up for election in 2026, enough that Democrats have openly discussed protecting what they describe as the court's progressive majority, while Republicans have emphasized how consequential the justices' rulings can be, according to Range Media. Four of those five races have a primary on Tuesday's ballot. Position 3 is open because Justice Raquel Montoya-Lewis is not seeking reelection, drawing candidates including Mike Diaz, David Stevens and Jaime Hawk. Position 7 is open because Chief Justice Debra Stephens' term is up, with Todd Bloom, Karim Merchant and David Shelvey among those running. Position 5 is a special election to finish out a term after Gov. Bob Ferguson appointed Justice Theo Angelis to the seat in April; he now faces challengers Dave Larson, Sharonda Amamilo and Greg Miller. Position 4, where Justice Charles W. Johnson is ineligible to run again under the state's mandatory judicial retirement age of 75, drew only two candidates, Sean O'Donnell and Ian Birk, so that race skips the primary entirely and goes straight to the November ballot. Both parties have pointed to the same case as the reason any of this matters to ordinary voters: a pending legal challenge to the constitutionality of Washington's new tax on millionaires, which the newly elected justices are likely to help decide. Under the court's staggered six-year terms, only three justices typically face voters in a given cycle, according to MyNorthwest, which quoted former Attorney General Rob McKenna calling five seats on one ballot "an unusual number" that will bring "unprecedented" attention and spending. Washington's judicial ethics rules bar candidates from commenting on how they would rule on specific legal questions, which is part of why these races typically draw far less public attention than the fight over who fills them would suggest.

An Outside-Money Fight in Spokane's Backyard

Washington's 5th Congressional District, covering Spokane and rural Eastern Washington, has drawn enough outside PAC spending and dueling advertising narratives that a regional newspaper devoted a full fact-check investigation to the competing claims this weekend. Republican incumbent Michael Baumgartner faces the top-two field alongside independent Nate Powell and Democrats Bajun Mavalwalla and Carmela Conroy, per The Spokesman-Review. Baumgartner is only in his first term, having won the open seat in 2024 after previously serving as a state senator from 2011 to 2019 and as Spokane County treasurer from 2019 until his election to Congress, a resume that gave him deep ties across the district before he ever ran for the seat. Outside groups have poured money into the race on competing theories of how to beat Baumgartner. Fire House PAC and Fuse Washington have run ads built around polling from Tavern Research arguing Powell is the only candidate positioned to unseat him, a claim that leans on the fact that a majority of respondents in that poll said they wanted to "fire the incumbent" rather than reflecting genuine enthusiasm for Powell by name. Conroy, meanwhile, is making her second run at the seat after losing by a little over 21 points in 2024. The primary will not settle the general election, but it will determine which two names, and which theory of how to beat an incumbent in a longtime Republican district, Eastern Washington voters get to choose between in November.

Misleading Ads Flood the 5th District Airwaves

A claims review published by The Spokesman-Review this weekend found that outside-group advertising in the 5th District race has repeatedly stretched the truth in both directions. One Fire House PAC ad claimed Baumgartner's vote threatens the closure of eight rural hospitals in the district; the review found that figure traces to a Public Citizen report that identified those hospitals as at financial risk, a designation the report's own authors called "descriptive rather than predictive," not a forecast that all eight will actually close. A separate PAC ad said Baumgartner's vote cut Medicaid for 230,000 people in the district, including 87,000 children, numbers the review found represent the total Medicaid caseload in the district rather than the number of people projected to actually lose coverage, though Gov. Ferguson's office has separately projected roughly 250,000 Washingtonians losing coverage statewide from the underlying federal law. A Mavalwalla campaign video's broader claim that gas, grocery and childcare costs are all rising held up as accurate, though the review found the video likely understated the war's cost to the federal budget, which independent estimates put closer to $2 billion a day than the roughly $1 billion the ad cited. None of this settles the underlying policy debate either way. It means Eastern Washington voters are being asked to weigh genuinely disputed numbers on both sides before Tuesday.

Two Open Races Reshape the State's Congressional Map

Two of Washington's other House races are drawing national attention for very different reasons. In the 3rd District, covering Southwest Washington, Democratic incumbent Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, the Skamania County Democrat who unseated a six-term Republican incumbent in 2022, is seeking a third term against state Sen. John Braun, a Republican, in a race KUOW describes as one of just 18 House seats nationwide "without a likely outcome in November," and rated a toss-up by the Cook Political Report. Gluesenkamp Perez has raised more than three times what Braun has, $3.45 million on hand compared with his $918,000, though strategists expect that gap to narrow once national money floods in ahead of November. In the 4th District, covering Yakima and Central Washington, six-term Republican Dan Newhouse's retirement, announced in December, has drawn eleven candidates into the open seat, led in fundraising by Yakima County Commissioner Amanda McKinney, who had raised more than $981,000 of her own by mid-July and drawn an additional $779,000 in outside spending from American Mission, a super PAC tied to the AI industry, according to The Spokesman-Review. McKinney says President Trump gave her his "Complete and Total Endorsement" on Truth Social, and House Speaker Mike Johnson has separately endorsed her. But fellow Republican Jerrod Sessler, who ran against Newhouse in 2024 on Trump's endorsement that cycle, says he also has the president's backing this time, a dispute significant enough that The Daily Chronicle reported the White House itself was asked to clarify which candidate it actually supports.

A Seattle Senate Seat and a $480 Million Library Levy

Closer to the ground, two Seattle-area contests carry real weight for the city's next decade. In the 43rd Legislative District, covering Capitol Hill, Senate Majority Leader Jamie Petersen faces her first serious primary challenger in more than ten years in Hannah Sabio-Howell, who is running to Petersen's left, alongside a third independent candidate, per KNKX. And every Seattle voter, regardless of legislative district, will decide Proposition 1, a $479.76 million, seven-year library levy that would replace the city's expiring 2019 levy, which raised $219 million over its term, according to KOMO News. The new levy is earmarked for long-delayed building maintenance, seismic upgrades and modernization projects at the system's 27 branches, alongside collections, technology and operating hours, and the city budget office estimates it would cost the average homeowner about $0.23 per $1,000 of assessed property value each year. Because Proposition 1 is structured as a levy lid lift rather than a standard excess levy, it needs only a simple majority to pass rather than the 60% supermajority Washington law requires for most other property tax measures, making Tuesday's turnout, not persuasion, the more likely deciding factor for whether it clears. There is no organized opposition campaign, and no "no" statement appears in the King County voter's pamphlet, but the measure has drawn a notable critic in The Seattle Times editorial board, which recommended a no vote on the grounds that the package grew too large after the City Council added roughly $69 million in amendments to Mayor Katie Wilson's original $410 million proposal, which the council unanimously approved for the ballot on April 14. Supporters counter that about 70% of the levy simply continues services already funded by the outgoing 2019 measure, meaning the doubled dollar figure reflects seven years of inflation and deferred maintenance more than any expansion of what the library system does.