State Senator Joe Nguyen (D-White Center) announced his bid for King County Executive last week, promising a “New Deal for King County.” The move added immediate excitement to a sleepy race that had looked like a coronation for the incumbent. Executive Dow Constantine is seeking a fourth term and didn’t have a serious challenger until Nguyen jumped in, nor had he faced a strong challenge since his initial win in 2009 versus former Republican state party chair Susan Hutchison.
Now, he’s got one in Senator Nguyen, an outspoken progressive leader in the state senate running against him. Nguyen’s campaign stresses urgency on progressive priorities like climate change, wealthy inequity, racial justice, mobility justice, exclusionary zoning, and reducing homelessness through tackling root causes. He said expanding basic needs programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) was one of his proudest accomplishments in Olympia. Systemic change was an objective for him both in legislative output and how the legislative body itself operated.
“When you’re inside of a system that wasn’t built for you — oftentimes the members of color in our first-year caucus talk will talk about this — the legislature clearly wasn’t built for people like us,” Nguyen said. “Whether it was women, whether it was people of color, whether it was young people or renters. It wasn’t built for us, and there’s all these unwritten rules.”
