(bright intro music) (dramatic upbeat music) - Welcome to The Newsfeed.

In today's episode, Washington's early August primary, mostly played out as political pundits expected, but there were a few curve balls in some races as we head toward the general election.

We'll recap the primary and introduce you to a new face in the Cascade PBS newsroom.

I'm Paris Jackson.

Today's top story, the state primary is in the rear view with the top two vote getters advancing to the general election on November 5th.

To get a breakdown on the recent primary, I sat down with Cascade PBS state politics reporter, Shauna Sowersby for an inside look at the takeaways.

I wanna welcome one of our newest members to the Cascade PBS News team, reporter, Shauna Sowersby.

Welcome aboard.

- Thanks for having me on.

Now you cover the state politics bit, and we just had our state primary the beginning of August.

What were some big takeaways from that primary?

- There weren't too many surprises after the first night.

Democrat, Bob Ferguson, who's our current attorney general is taking a commanding lead over Republican Dave Reichert in the race for governor.

I wasn't quite expecting to see how much he actually had a lead over Reichert in that.

They're sitting at about 45% and 28% after final counts.

The other races weren't too surprising, pretty along the lines of what we would normally see in an election.

Although Pete Serrano is leading in the race for attorney general over two Democrats.

He will be going against Nick Brown in the general election.

While Manka Dhingra did not have enough votes to make it to the general election, - There's gonna be a runoff, meaning a hand recount of the commissioner of public lands race.

What makes this race so interesting?

- The thing that makes this race so particularly interesting is that after the first drops on election night, there were two Republicans that were in the lead for that race.

Now, the race is narrowed a little bit.

Jaime Herrera Beutler, who is a former US rep, she voted to impeach Donald Trump, and so she lost her seat a couple of years ago, and so now she's actually leading this race above Upthegrove and Sue Kuehl Pederson.

- One of your recent reports is an analysis of what if.

What if Democrat, Bob Ferguson becomes governor and Republican, Pete Serrano becomes attorney general.

What would the relationship look like?

- I spoke with former Governor Christine Gregoire, and former Attorney General Rob McKenna, who is a Republican.

Gregoire is a Democrat, and they talked very glowingly about each other and how much they got along during their time in office.

I don't think that sort of relationship would be the same between Serrano and Ferguson.

They're pretty different.

They actually could not be more different ideologically.

So while it probably won't shake out that way, it was kind of fun to look at what that type of dynamic and relationship between those two would look like.

- Interesting.

And it's a good piece, so people should definitely check that one out.

Thank you so much for joining us on The Newsfeed.

- Thank you.

- If you would like to learn a little bit more about our election coverage as well as our reporting, all you need to do is go to the Cascade PBS website and click on the politics tab.

(bouncy upbeat music) In Arts and Culture News, a signal of the final days of summer is here.

To the delight of music and festival lovers, Bumpershoot is this weekend, running August 31st through September 1st.

The annual event is at the Seattle Center.

I'm Paris Jackson.

Thank you for watching The Newsfeed, your destination for nonprofit Northwest news.

Go to cascadepbs.org for more.

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