The most important King County election no one is talking about

A crisp October Sunday recently in Bellevue's Downtown Park found more than a few visitors using the blue, sunny sky as a backdrop for a social media video.

Some middle schoolers were doing a TikTok dance, a runner was filming by the fountain, and under the fluted Piloti sculpture, a man in a black pea coat held a fuzzy mini microphone while a campaign staffer recorded with a phone.

“My name is Girmay Zahilay, and I'm running for King County executive," he said, "and the first question people always ask me is, ‘What the hell is that?’”

Zahilay had bags of chocolate-chip cookies to hand out to passersby if they could tell him what a King County executive was. He ended the shoot with plenty of leftovers.

No one, not even two Bellevue Police strolling by, knew the answer. When pressed to guess, parkgoers in puffy jackets said “councilmember” (close – Zahilay is currently an elected member of the county council) and “some kind of judge.”

“Really close,” Zahilay said. “It is a government position.”

On Nov. 4, voters will choose a new leader for King County government for the first time in 16 years. Former Executive Dow Constantine stepped down earlier this year, before the end of his fourth term.

This fall’s election is an important one for a job overseeing more employees and a larger budget than the mayor of Seattle. Voters will choose either Zahilay or Claudia Balducci, another King County councilmember who is also Ivy-educated and a progressive Democrat.

Because they are similar candidates, Balducci and Zahilay have each focused on persuading county voters they can do the job better – Balducci with lots of experience going back decades, Zahilay with an underrepresented perspective.

But many of those voters may not even be aware of what the King County executive does.

What county executive does

As Zahilay explained to people in his video filmed that day, the executive runs the county sheriff, public health, and jail, among other departments, managing a nearly $20 billion budget and funding for mental health and drug treatment. The executive oversees county parks and trails, and for roughly a quarter of a million county residents in areas like White Center, outside of incorporated cities, the executive is the de facto mayor.

If trends hold, less than half of registered voters in King County will cast a ballot for that job next month.

And many of them won’t have a strong sense of what the job does: In February, a survey of likely odd-year voters found 27% were “not sure” about the job performance of then-Executive Dow Constantine, despite his long tenure. That was a much higher percentage than Seattle’s mayor (14%), who is wrapping up his first term, or Washington’s governor (17%), who had been in office for less than a month at that point.

At Zahilay’s own fundraisers, he’ll ask people to raise their hand if they know what a King County executive is. Around half often don’t, he said.

"That is not a position that's in any movies, in any TV shows," Zahilay said. "Only political insiders have heard that, and I'm trying to change that."

While local government jobs like mayor and governor exist anywhere in the U.S., county executives’ jobs vary greatly state to state or sometimes even county to county. In some places they’re not even called executives.

“Some go by ‘county mayors.’ Some go by ‘judges,’” said Dan McCoy, president of the County Executives of America and also Albany County executive in New York. Mitch McConnell was a "Judge-Executive" before rising to lead the Senate.

Others are county managers chosen by the county council or commissioners rather than the voters.

Whatever title, county leaders are often invisible. Once in the county he leads, which has a population of over 300,000, McCoy attended an event in a town of roughly 3,000. The mayor of the town was seated in the front. McCoy was seated in the back.

“I'm chuckling, just like, ‘OK, I’ll sit in the back,’” McCoy said.

But county executives’ jobs are also often much bigger than mayors’, McCoy said.

“The budgets, obviously, are a lot bigger, but it has more of an impact on people's day to day life," he said, "and the best part of our job is when they don't realize what we're doing.”

Residents here in King County often interact with systems the executive manages behind the scenes — like going to the bathroom.

Councilmember Balducci said the thing she has to remind people of most often is that King County runs the regional wastewater treatment system.

“I've been told by political consultants not to talk about sewers on the campaign trail,” Balducci said. “But the biggest capital investment we make is in those pipes and those treatment plants and the pump stations. And if it doesn't work, we're polluting Puget Sound.”

The choice

Instead of sewers, Balducci talks on the campaign trail about the county bus system. She's the former mayor of Bellevue and a hardcore transit advocate often credited with getting Sound Transit to open the Eastside’s 2 Line early last year.

In fact, when Balducci spoke with KUOW, she was waiting for the A Line bus in Tukwila. It was after midnight when she boarded, am/pm coffee in hand; a bus operator on the union’s endorsement board suggested Balducci see what it’s like. (The bus drivers' union has endorsed Balducci.)

“Look at how full this bus is at this time of night,” Balducci said, looking around. “And these are not baseball fans. These are people coming home from work. This is a workhorse route.”

Driving and operating these buses at this time of night can be dangerous. A driver named Shawn Yim was stabbed to death last year around 3 a.m. in the University District. Balducci called a task force to make changes, like adding stronger barriers on driver screens, and hiring more transit police, among many other things.

That’s her pitch to voters: experience and familiarity with the less flashy levers of government. In over 25 years working at the county jail, Bellevue City Council, then county council, she’s developed subregional agreements for homeless shelters, negotiated settlements, and “frog-marched” Sound Transit to open light rail on the Eastside.

“You need somebody who can run this big agency, run it well, take those visions and make them into reality. That means driving change through a big bureaucracy,” Balducci said. “I know how to move a government.”

She and Zahilay are almost the same as far as what they want to do — left-wing Democrats who want to build more housing and fund more addiction and mental health services.

Balducci has criticized Zahilay for floating bold ideas that didn’t come to fruition, like closing the youth jail and opening a county bank in his first campaign, and leveraging the county’s debt capacity to build rent-restricted housing during his second term.

Zahilay defends himself by saying he's open to studying new ideas rather than settling for the "status quo," and points to accomplishments like proposing and passing a $1 million gun violence prevention plan, or securing a million dollars for road safety in unincorporated areas of the county.

Zahilay is younger and has a shorter resume, but he's persuaded more voters and politicians so far that he's the right choice. He led the August primary 14 points ahead of Balducci and snatched up high-profile endorsements from Gov. Bob Ferguson, both of Seattle’s Congressional representatives, and even the only Republican candidate in the race who dropped out after Zahilay’s impressive primary win.

“Girmay delivered five new mental health and addiction centers,” Ferguson said in Zahilay's TV spot running this week. ("Delivered" might be generous; Zahilay was a big advocate for a crisis care levy in 2023, but only one center has received funding from it so far.)

Zahilay also brings up that he’s had up-close experiences with local government services, or the lack thereof, since he was a child: Coming over from Sudan as a child refugee, Zahilay’s family stayed in shelters and public housing in Seattle.

His mom bought a home in unincorporated Skyway — where the buses came far less frequently, and the county executive is essentially the mayor, since there is no city government.

“I've seen a lot of people that I've grown up with living on the streets right now, and there are so many opportunities for intervention before somebody gets to that point,” Zahilay said to a voter at the park named Nick Nguyen.

Nguyen asked what Zahilay's top priority would be as county executive.

“I'm sure you drive through some of our cities and you see people experiencing that cycle of homelessness and addiction and incarceration over and over again,” Zahilay told Nguyen, “and I want to break that cycle, making sure that people have the services that they need to break that cycle and live a healthy life on a path to recovery.”

Nguyen didn’t know what a county executive is, but when Zahilay pressed him to take a guess, he said, “Someone that runs the executive branch in King County?”

"Sounds like you know what you're talking about," Zahilay said, laughing.

Nguyen got a cookie.