Five initial lessons from the August 2025 Primary

The Friday after Election Day is a pretty big day for me. That’s when the first round of precinct-level data is released. Using that data, I dive into the maps to see if there are any lessons to be learned.

Until I get to a couple of Olympia School District (OSD) races, I colored the maps in this post all the same way: for any candidate, blue indicates where they did better, and red shows where they did worse.

1. Paul Berendt is probably fine.

I don’t expect his campaign to ease up, but the big risk he faced in how this election was set up didn’t materialize. Berendt definitely isn’t a right-leaning candidate in any broader sense beyond being an Olympian, but running against a DSA-endorsed progressive puts him on the right side of the scale here. Also, in my part of town, his signs have consistently been paired with candidates who would be classified as right-leaning, no matter how you slice it. The Maria Flores vs. Taluana Reed race shows how traditional left candidates, when paired against far-left candidates, can produce a map that highlights a base of support in more traditionally right-leaning areas of Olympia.

The risk is that the neighborhoods that show up in August don’t necessarily match those that turn out in November. A strong showing in August, generally in SE Olympia, can box a candidate in come November when other neighborhoods show up. So, what Berendt needed was support from a diverse range of neighborhoods, which, as we can see below, he achieved.

2. Winning maps look similar.

Robert Vanderpool had a winning map very similar to Berendt’s, though arguably he was running in the same lane as Berendt’s opponent, Caleb Geiger. Is this the advantage of being on the council right now? There’s a slight west-side shift in Vanderpool’s map, likely reflecting the different lanes, but I want to chalk this up to how people in Olympia vote, which isn’t always the laundry list of issues campaigns highlight.

3. Wendy Carlson’s long road to November.

The key to winning from the right or moderate side is to dominate the areas where you’ll be safe in November (SE Olympia and some far west-side precincts) and be competitive everywhere else. This was not the case for Carlson (or Justin Stang, for that matter). I’ve included Carlson’s map here to illustrate. While she did produce lighter reds throughout SE Olympia, these are places she would have wanted to lock down now so she could expand her support in November.

To be completely fair to Carlson, mapping the winning and losing precincts in a multi-candidate primary using this system isn’t super helpful if the candidate wasn’t in first. What I should do is just map where she got a plurality of the vote and go from there.

4. Winning maps look the same Part 2: Renee Fullerton dominated, only losing in Rhyan Smith’s SE Olympia stronghold.

What was actually surprising in these races was that Jeremy Ruse also failed to advance out of the primary, but the map doesn’t help clarify why. Fullerton’s map is a classic August winner, taking nearly everything except SE Olympia—ironically where her district is centered. For some, this could be an argument in favor of district elections in school boards.

5. The interesting race now shifts to the Olympia School District’s west-side contest, where Emily Leddige and Gil Lamont bested right-leaning candidate Ruse.

I did something different with their maps, shading for overall support instead of simply above or below 50 percent. The basic story is that Leddige seems to have a west-side shift compared to Lamont. I’m not sure what this means for electoral strategy, but Lamont is slightly ahead, so he might be better positioned to pick up whatever votes remain from Ruse.

Here is Leddige’s map:

And Lamont’s:

There are a few more things I want to do with this election’s precinct data. In addition to remapping Carlson’s race, I’m going to stretch out to Lacey and look at their Prop 1 parks vote that failed, and extrapolate the port data to see what I find there.