Washington uses a top-two primary. Every candidate goes on one ballot. Party labels are advisory, and the top two finishers move to November. Six names appear for the tenth district seat on Tuesday.

Four of the six served in the military. Adam Arafat is a retired Army officer. Alex Scheel is an Iraq War veteran. Kurtis Engle, running as an independent, is a disabled Navy veteran. Derek Maynes, also independent, served in Iraq.

The two who didn’t serve are Marilyn Strickland, the Democratic incumbent, and Chris Chung, the Republican pharmacist. Strickland is the heavy favorite. That arrangement should bother anyone who argues, as we do, that military service moves Democratic voters.

Scheel is 38. He joined the Army in 2007 and worked as an interrogator in Iraq until 2011, then in intelligence in Afghanistan the following year. He left in 2014, moved to Washington, and went to Evergreen State College. Much of the decade since ran through the Democratic Socialists of America. In his branch he was housing justice chair, then secretary-treasurer, then membership coordinator. He also worked with About Face, a group of veterans opposed to the wars they fought in.

The interrogation work is what turned him, by his own telling. He told The Intercept that sitting across from Iraqi and Afghan men his own age, day after day, left him thinking he would have done what they did in their position. Whatever else that is, it is not a story a consultant writes for a candidate.

He quit a job in the craft beer industry to run. His launch came on 13 June.

Graham Platner’s win in Maine is what pushed him in. Scheel has said the shared veteran background was part of the appeal, and he launched four days after that primary. Platner’s Senate bid collapsed in July after an accusation he denies. The model he built is still circulating, though, and it is circulating among veterans in particular.

His platform is not one this site usually covers with approval. He wants military aid to Israel ended. The Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma should close, he says, and he described living a mile from it in words we’re not going to soften. Fund the VA rather than farm it out. Medicare for All. Those last two put him closer to Dan Osborn than to anyone in party leadership.

Adam Arafat is also an Army veteran, and he works in Pierce County government. Medicare for All leads his platform. Ask him about the race and the first thing he says is that he takes no corporate PAC money and no AIPAC money.

Where he separates from Scheel is on taxes. Arafat has made a no-new-taxes pledge. Scheel, by contrast, wants a levy on vacant housing held by absentee landlords. Both back a housing-first approach to homelessness, and both attack the war on constitutional grounds rather than moral ones.

That framing matters. Arafat isn’t so much arguing the Iran war is wrong. His case is that Congress never voted for it, and that families near the base pay for the gap. Jason Crow and Pat Ryan have made the same case on the House floor. Here it’s aimed at a Democrat.

Here’s where the tidy version falls apart.

Strickland has no military service. Her father served in World War II and Korea, which she mentions often, and that’s the whole of the family claim. Mayor of Tacoma from 2010 to 2018, and before that head of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce. On paper she’s the party insider in a year that is punishing party insiders.

But look at the committee work. Strickland sits on House Armed Services. From that seat she pushed the 14.5 percent pay raise for junior enlisted troops and got the housing allowance restored to full rate. The base has an $89 million airfield fire and rescue station coming, plus a $35 million special operations maintenance shop. An amendment of hers renamed bases that had honored Confederate officers. She has also pressed the VA again and again on community care delays hitting veterans at home.

Set that against two challengers whose combined budget won’t cover a single mail piece. If a military family near the base votes on who has actually moved money and policy, they vote for the woman who never wore the uniform.

Strickland will almost certainly finish first. The real contest is for second place, and that’s where the format gets interesting.

Chung is the only Republican, so he collects the Republican vote by default in a district Harris won with 57 percent. That’s usually enough for second. If the anti-war vote consolidates behind one of the two Army veterans instead, November becomes a Democrat against a Democrat, and Strickland spends three months answering for a war she didn’t start.

Scheel and Arafat splitting that vote makes the outcome much less likely. Neither has shown any sign of standing down for the other. So the most probable result on Tuesday is the boring one, which is Strickland first, Chung second, and both veterans well back.

A fair critic would say we’ve picked a race that proves nothing, and the criticism largely lands.

Our argument is about close general elections. It says veterans win Democrats a hearing with voters who would not give the party one, in seats that actually change hands. This seat does not change hands. Harris took it by seventeen points. Whoever wins the Democratic line wins in November, so no seat moves and no majority turns on it.

The money makes it worse. Scheel had raised about $5,000 by early July against an incumbent sitting on roughly $800,000. Two underfunded candidates losing a safe-seat primary isn’t evidence of anything. It’s what usually happens.

There’s a longer version of the objection too, and it’s the one that should worry us most. Party committees have been recruiting veterans into hard races since Rahm Emanuel ran the DCCC, and the record is patchy. Amy McGrath in Kentucky, MJ Hegar in Texas, Marcus Flowers in Georgia: each drew enormous national money on the theory that a service record would pull moderates and soft Republicans across. Each lost badly. If that history is the base rate, the profile is worth less than the fundraising it attracts.

We accept all of that. What survives is narrower and it’s still real. The claim we make isn’t only that veterans win, it’s that voters extend them particular trust on war and on the VA. Tuesday puts that claim in front of a district built around the largest base in the West, with two veterans making a war argument against a non-veteran. If the trust transfer worked the way we describe, they should at least be competitive. They are not close.

Because of what it says about the next two cycles.

With Honor counts 752 veterans running for federal office this cycle, up from 513 in 2024. That’s a 47 percent jump in two years. Most went into swing seats, which is the plan working as drawn up. But a pipeline does not come with a filter. The profile that makes a veteran useful to the DCCC makes one just as useful to the DSA.

Michigan is showing the same thing from a different direction this week, where a Navy SEAL and a former ambassador have spent the closing weeks attacking each other while a progressive organizer stands to take the nomination. Maine showed it in June. Tacoma is the version where the insurgent is himself the veteran.

Watch the second-place number Tuesday night, not the winner. If Scheel and Arafat together clear fifteen percent in a district this blue, with almost no money and six weeks of campaigning, somebody will try the same thing next cycle in a seat that matters.