McCarthy joins the Pierce County Executive race

Pierce County Auditor Pat McCarthy has joined the race for County Executive. This is exciting for the voters of Pierce County since we now have four well qualified candidates for County Executive in the first year of using ranked choice voting.

With the four candidates who have already announced (Shawn Bunney (R), Calvin Goings (D), Mike Lonergan (I) and McCarthy (D)), it becomes quite likely that no candidate will receive more than 50% of the first choice votes. This means it will be important for candidates to go after both the first choices of voters, but also the second choices.

In particular, it seems likely that McCarthy will want to get voters who are planning to choose Goings as their first choice, to select her as their second choice. And vice versa. Meanwhile, Bunney and Lonergan will be trying to break into that mix.

Likewise, there will be Lonergan supporters looking at who their second choice will be. Will Goings go after those voters? How about Bunney and McCarthy?

It will be interesting to see if this has any impact on the amount of negative campaigning amongst the candidates. We can always hope.