Two were Democrats running for seats in the state legislature from the Seattle area and the third was a very conservative Republican seeking to be governor.
The gubernatorial candidate was Shahram Hadian. Born in Iran, he came to the United States at ageseven and as an adult converted to Christianity and became a Christian minister.
He staked out a position on the far right, opposed to abortion, gay marriage and labor unions. He said he was the sole candidate “standing for the sanctity of marriage and life. He wants Washington to become a right-to-work state with tighter restrictions on unions. He even opposes taking federal funding for schools.
Washington State uses the “top two” primary system. There is not a Republican and a Democratic primary. Instead, everyone runs in one primary and the two finishing on top in the August 7 primary go on to compete in the November election. That may send two Democrats or two Republicans to run against each other in some elections.
The battle for governor will be between Republican State Attorney General Rob McKenna, who got 43 percent of the primary vote, and Democratic Congressman Jay Inslee, who garnered 47 percent. Of the seven others who filed as candidates, none got more than 3.33 percent and Hadian came in fourth with 3.13 percent. None of the remaining five even reached 1 percent.
Hadian is the only one of those seven minor candidates who actually raised money and ran a campaign, so the fact that he did so poorly surprised some observers. Clearly, only Inslee and McKenna were taken seriously by voters.
The one Iranian-American victor was in the 48th Legislative District where Democrat Cyrus Habib, a blind Rhodes Scholar, garnered 56 percent of the vote and Republican Hank Myers won 44 percent. No one else filed for the primary so it was known those two would go on the November ballot even before the primary was held. The district is generally Democrat, so it would take an upset for the Republican to win in November. The district is in King County, and directly across Lake Washington from Seattle.
Habib, 31, is a lawyer assisting startup technology firms with their early stage legal needs. Born in Maryland, he grew up in the Seattle suburbs and lost his eyesight to a rare form of cancer at the age of eight. He has suffered two other bouts with cancer as well.
After a year at Oxford on a 2003 Rhodes Scholarship, Habib went to Yale Law School where he served as editor of the law review. He describes himself as moving “from Braille to Yale.”
In 2008, Habib’s mother, Susan Amini, ran unsuccessfully for King County Superior Court judge. His father works for Boeing.
The third Iranian-American candidate was Sahar Fathi, running for the State Legislature from the 36th District in downtown Seattle, where she lives with her partner, Jordan. The district is heavily Democratic. She is a Democrat and faced four other Democrats, one Republican and a Progressive party candidate in the primary. The incumbent Democrat is retiring.
Fathi came in fifth in this field of seven, beating one Democrat and the Progressive. Here are the results, which pit two Democrats against one another on the November ballot.
Gael Tarleton D 29.8%
Christina Frame D 21.9%
Brett Phillips D 14.4%
Ryan Gabriel R 13.9%
Sahar Fathi D 12.6%
Evan Clifthorne D 5.5%
Linde Knighton P 1.9%
As the percentages show, there were two clear front-runners, a trio including Fathi clustered with less than 2 percentage points separating them, and a pair of candidates who weren’t taken seriously. Fathi did well enough that she might have a chance in a future political outing if she chooses to work toward that goal.
Fathi received her law degree from the University of Washington and worked for the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
When she was 26, she started the Middle Eastern Legal Association of Washington, which she describes as the first legal clinic designed primarily for Middle Easterners in the United States.
For the past three years, she has served as legislative aide to Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien.
In her campaign website, Fathi makes a great deal of her Iranian background, noting that if elected she would be the first Iranian-American woman ever to serve in any state legislature in the United States. She also says she is trying to follow in the footsteps of women she grew up idolizing, such as Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, whom she notes was the first woman to become a judge in Iran.
Hadian and Sahar both put their Iranian origins at the very top of their biographies on their campaign websites. Habib did not mention his ethnicity in his website biography.
