Kshama Sawant will be hard to beat in the 3rd District.
  • Kelly O
  • Kshama Sawant will be hard to beat in the 3rd District.

Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat has an answer to a question you probably weren’t asking: Is he running for Seattle City Council against Council Member Kshama Sawant?

Nope.

In his most recent column, Westneat says he got “repeated e-mails” asking if he was running, after Seattle Weekly founder David Brewster posted about the possibility on Facebook. But Westneat calls himself “a few clicks to the right of all the current city council members” and says no one is going to win a seat on the city council by running to the right of someone else.

Good instinct, Danny. Sawant certainly isn’t an easy target: Recent polling showed she has the highest name recognition of all the council members, the second highest approval ratings (with 50 percent, just 1 percent behind Nick Licata), and even better approval ratings in her district.

But she is also divisive. That same poll showed she has the highest unfavorable ratings on the council. So whoever jumps into this race, it’s going to get ugly. And while we wait around to figure out who that might be, let's pass the time by pretending for a moment that the Danny Westneat trial balloon wasn't so quickly popped.