Two Democrats are vying to represent northeast Seattle’s state House seat in the 46th Legislative District, which includes Green Lake, Roosevelt, Wedgwood and the University District.
State House Rep. Gerry Pollet has held the seat since 2011. His opponent, political newcomer Will Dreher, is a former federal prosecutor who now works for a Seattle law firm.
Pollet finished with 51% of the vote in the three-way August primary. Dreher finished with 31%, defeating a third opponent, Ron Davis.
Many Democrat-on-Democrat races this year feature a younger, more progressive outsider challenging an older, establishment incumbent. But both Dreher and Pollet think the dynamics of their race are a bit more complicated.
“I am a progressive. I know Representative Pollet refers to himself as a progressive as well,” Dreher said. “So I actually think he and I agree that might be too simplistic a way of thinking about it.”
Pollet argues that his record as a champion for the environment and public education makes him the more progressive choice.
"That narrative that you've seen kind of driven nationally about progressive challengers is not what is happening in this race," Pollet said, adding that Dreher "doesn't have my record on progressive revenue for making our tax system more fair. He doesn't have my environmental record."
Approaches to AI
Dreher said he has a lot of respect for Pollet’s work as an advocate for schools and the environment in the Legislature. His decision to challenge Pollet is driven instead by a feeling that Pollet and other state lawmakers have been too slow to regulate artificial intelligence.
“I think many people are anxious about how quickly it is moving, about all the ways in which it is infiltrating our daily lives, whether it's education or our jobs or these cyber security risks we’ve heard about or the AI slop that we see online,” Dreher said. “There isn’t really any good excuse for the Legislature’s inaction to date on AI.”
Pollet disagrees, saying that the state is taking action on AI.
“We are leading the nation,” Pollet said. “We have a lot of people with a lot of expertise about AI and data in the Washington Legislature.”
Pollet co-sponsored legislation earlier this year that would have regulated data centers. He plans to bring it back next year and said he is also collaborating with Oregon lawmakers on a bill to tax data center operations.
“That drives down their electricity use, drives down their water use and puts that money into retraining people who lose their jobs, puts the money into water and electricity and renewable energy,” Pollet said.
Pollet has questioned his opponent’s commitment to regulating AI, noting that Dreher has received a large number of out-of-state contributions from people who work at AI companies like Anthropic.
Dreher dismissed the idea that his contributions from people involved in AI would push him toward AI-friendly policies.
“Many of the folks who work in the industry are the ones who are most worried about what the public doesn’t know about the capabilities of the frontier models they work on,” Dreher said. “I don't know those folks, but from what I have read in their public statements, they are pretty desperate for anyone to strongly regulate AI.”
Dreher said he would also support a full moratorium on data centers, both because of their environmental impacts and because it “helps with the broader effort of slowing down the pace of AI development.”
Crime on Aurora Avenue
Both candidates say a top priority is addressing problems with sex trafficking and gun violence on Aurora Avenue.
If elected, Dreher said he would fund a “muscular state sex trafficking task force” that would include outreach workers, trauma-informed patrol officers, vice detectives and prosecutors who could work together to rescue victims and arrest perpetrators.
Pollet said he helped secure $50 million in state funding to improve public safety and pedestrian safety along Aurora Avenue. He said Seattle is in jeopardy of losing the money because the city has been sitting on it for too long; he plans to pressure the city to use the funding soon.
Development and short-term rentals
Both candidates say they are focused on improving housing affordability in their district. Pollet pointed to his efforts to tax Airbnbs and other short-term rentals and said he supports ensuring new development near light rail stations has affordability requirements.
Dreher said he supports Seattle’s experiment with mixed-income social housing and wants to find ways for the state to support more such projects.
Social housing is “a really elegant solution to some of the income segregation patterns and problems and displacement that we have sometimes seen with either market-rate housing or affordable housing developments,” Dreher said.
Before his election to the Legislature, Pollet co-founded Heart of America Northwest, which advocates for cleanup of the Hanford nuclear site. As a state representative, his proudest achievements include lifting the cap on the number of special education students who the state provides funding for, expanding access to affordable higher education and securing funding to renovate and improve schools in his district to address overcrowding.
As a federal prosecutor, Dreher worked to prosecute people who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021 riots at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. He now works for a private Seattle law firm and has led lawsuits against big tech companies involving the use of copyrighted works to train AI models.
