this year with one appearing to have a solid chance of winning election since he is the only person to have filed for the seat when registration closed Friday.
Two are Democrats running for seats in the state legislature from the Seattle area and the third is a very conservative Republican seeking to be governor.
The gubernatorial candidate is Shahram Hadian. Born in Iran, he came to the United States at age seven and as an adult converted to Christianity and became a Christian minister.
He has staked out a position on the far right, opposed to abortion, gay marriage and labor unions. He says he is 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 will 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 is expected to be between Republican State Attorney General Rob McKenna and Democratic Congressman Jay Inslee. But seven others have filed as candidates, three Republicans and four Democrats. Hadian is the only one of those seven who has so far been raising money for a campaign.
The best chance for an Iranian-American victory is in the 48th Legislative District because Cyrus Habib, a blind Rhodes Scholar, is the only candidate to be seeking the office. The incumbent, Deb Eddy, is retiring. No Republican and no Democrat other than Habib filed by the deadline, so Habib faces no opposition in the primary or the general election.
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 is Sahar Fathi, who is running for the State Legislature from the 36th District in downtown Seattle, where she lives with her partner, Jordan. She is a Democrat and will face four other Democrats, one Republican and a Progressive party candidate in the August 7 top two primary.
The district is rated as solidly Democratic, but with five Democrats running, it is hard to predict who will win. The incumbent Democrat is retiring.
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 does not mention his ethnicity.
