By Erica C. Barnett

At least two Seattle candidates are betting that this is the year voters will decide to replace longstanding Democratic state legislators with progressive newcomers who want to move forward quickly with pro-housing, pro-worker agendas. If either succeeds, it will be a repudiation of the received wisdom that entrenched incumbents have an unshakeable advantage.

The first candidate, Ron Davis, will be familiar to PubliCola readers—he ran for City Council in northeast Seattle’s District 4 in the 2023 election, losing narrowly to Maritza Rivera in a year when moderates swept the council elections. Davis is running against 46th District Rep. Gerry Pollet. Pollet, appointed in 2011, leads an environmental group that advocates for cleaning up the Hanford nuclear site; as a legislator, he has worked to defeat or water down bills that would allow more housing in single-family neighborhoods.

In 2022, the state House Democratic Caucus voted to remove housing issues from Pollet’s committee—a decision that was quickly followed by several years of pro-housing legislation that forced cities dominated by suburban-style housing to allow apartments in neighborhoods, not just on busy streets.

Davis is hoping his North Seattle neighbors will get behind his explicitly urbanist agenda—and reject what he calls Pollet’s anti-growth approach.

“He’s been sort of the chief NIMBY in the Democratic caucus,” Davis said. “He does not want anything that involves changing the landscape in any way.” For instance, Davis points out Pollet’s opposite to accessory dwelling units, his support for adding additional environmental review to the long-delayed completion of the Burke-Gilman Trail through Ballard, and opposition to the low-density multifamily buildings known as “missing middle” housing.

“I think there is a set of people whose idea of being an environmentalist, like his, remains sort of stuck in the 1970s Malthusian, Thanos kind of worldview—like, ‘There should be less people in the world,'” Davis said. “I really don’t think that’s going to be most voters.'”

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(After we published this story, Pollet’s team contacted us to say that Pollet co-sponsored HB 1110, which required cities to allow up to six apartments per lot; that he co-sponsored a transit-oriented development bill we covered last year; and that he voted for a middle-housing bill, HB 1782, that included a huge number of loopholes and exemptions.

He also sponsored his own middle-housing bill,  HB 1981, which included poison-pill elements such as concurrency requirements—a common preemptive tactic for preventing new housing—and protections for historic buildings, trees, and “access to sunlight” in residential areas, among other provisions that would restrict new housing. Pollet sponsored amendments to water down both 1110 and 1782), for instance, and attempting to make it harder to build in areas at “high risk of displacement” where urbanists would argue more housing is also necessary.

Pollet has championed the inclusion of more affordable housing in new developments, backed rent stabilization bills, and supported adding back neighborhood centers that former mayor Bruce Harrell removed from Seattle’s comprehensive plan. However, he also argued the city should require private developers to ensure that up to 25 percent of all new units near transit are affordable to people making as little as 0 percent of median income (and up to 80 percent), an idea that seems designed to kill rather than encourage housing even without the bill’s language about protecting trees, historic structures, and access to sunlight.)

On the surface, there seem to be plenty of voters in North Seattle who agree, at least nominally, with Pollet’s slow-growth agenda; in 2024, running essentially unopposed (the other candidate was a Republican), Pollet got more than 83 percent of the vote.

But Davis thinks North Seattle voters will support his ambitious vision, which also includes universal child care; removing police accountability from the list of conditions police unions can negotiate as part of their contracts; replacing endless highway megaprojects with state investments in local transit; and using creative tools like revolving loan funds and state-funded Section 8-style vouchers to expand access to affordable housing and backfill federal funding cuts. All of this would probably require more funding than the state will take in from the “millionaire’s” income tax, which still has to withstand a court challenge after passing this year; Davis says that even with that tax in place, Washington’s tax system will still be more regressive than most other states.

Davis also said he wants to see stronger sanctions against ICE than Democrats in the legislature managed to muster so faåår.” I see our Democrats in Olympia saying, ‘Oh my God, there’s a fascist takeover of the federal government. It’s a threat to our basic freedoms,'” Davis said when we spoke late last month. “And then they’re like, ‘We have a mask ban that says maybe you could sue, but only if they violate your constitutional rights.’ I mean, God, are you fucking kidding?”

Davis said he’d support creating a state-funded “civilian response team” to serve as “the vanguard of resistance” if and when ICE descends on Washington state en masse. He’d also support legislation to “punish Vichy collaborators,” like a proposal last session that would have barred law enforcement agencies from hiring people who worked for ICE during the second Trump Administration.

In fact, Davis says he’d support going even further, by keeping them from taking “any state- or locally funded job, or contracting job, ever again.” Asked whether this kind of mass punishment paints every ICE employee with too broad a brush, Davis said, “I’m talking about who’s participating in this process [of targeting and abducting people perceived as immigrants] now. So you time bound it, and give people notice that they have six weeks or two weeks to quit or whatever.”

When Davis ran for council in 2023, he had a hyperlocal pitch: Elect me, and I’ll work to establish 15-minute neighborhoods and build “intermediate” housing solutions for people experiencing homelessness, including tiny house villages. Three years later, it’s clear that most of Seattle’s new urbanist policies were the result of action by the stateles  legislature, including Sens. Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia) and Emily Alvarado (D-34, Seattle), which forced cities to allow denser housing near transit stops and in traditional single-family neighborhoods, to widespread NIMBY chagrin.

Davis said his own experience “putting together the coalition that passed the parking reform bill”—a Bateman bill that placed limits on how much parking cities can require in new developments—made him realize “I could get more done in just a few months” in Olympia than the council, with its Seattle Process, often gets done in years. Not only that, he said, the state has the power and funding potential to pull off bigger things—like universal child care, housing, and supplementary funding for local buses.

When I mentioned the conventional wisdom that legislators don’t have much power until they’ve been around a while, Davis pointed to examples like Bateman (elected in 2020) and Alvarado (elected to the House in 2022). “It’s not as if they showed up and the skies parted,” Davis said, “but I do feel like they’ve moved much more quickly, and they haven’t listened the conventional wisdom, which is that you have to put your head down for many, many years” before getting anything done.

Next up: Progressive renter Hannah Sabio-Howell challenges Sen. Jamie Pedersen, a member of the state legislature for 20 years.