Jaime Hawk and David Stevens are both Washington superior court judges seeking a seat on the state’s highest court. The similarities largely end there.

Hawk, a King County judge and the former legal strategy director for the state ACLU, was cheered at this year’s state Democratic convention, is endorsed by most of the state’s Democratic leadership and cites liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the U.S. Supreme Court justice she most admires.

Stevens, a Mason County judge, Navy veteran, former public defender and prosecutor, is supported by the state Republican Party, sometimes campaigns with a handgun on his hip and cites arch conservative Clarence Thomas as the current U.S. Supreme Court justice he most admires.

With five state Supreme Court seats up for election this November, and the chance to reshape the court for years to come, the Position 3 race between Hawk and Stevens presents one of the starker choices on the ballot. It is also one of two Supreme Court races with no incumbent, only the second and third contested races for an open Supreme Court seat in the last 14 years.

The two are running for the seat currently held by Justice Raquel Montoya-Lewis, who did not seek a second six-year term.

Stevens won the three-person August primary with 35% of the vote, to 33% for Hawk. But Hawk may still be favored: Hawk and a third candidate, Mike Diaz, who also drew endorsements from prominent Democrats, may have split liberal voters.

On the highest-profile issue justices might encounter — the income tax on high earners, approved by the Legislature but now on the ballot — Hawk declined to comment, citing judicial rules about speaking about litigation likely to come before the court.

Stevens offered some thoughts while saying he didn’t know how he would rule. The Supreme Court’s 1933 decision, striking down a progressive income tax, was “precedent,” he said, and the state constitution is very clear that taxes have to be a “uniform” rate.

He said he disagreed with the court’s recent decision allowing the state’s capital gains tax to stand, calling it a “clever way of getting around” the constitution’s uniformity requirement.

Stevens said that in evaluating when to turn over a precedent you look to not only whether a decision is wrong but whether it has been relied upon. He cited the example of Miranda warnings — the warnings police are required to give when arresting someone that they have rights including the right to remain silent — which stem from a 1966 U.S. Supreme Court decision.

“A judge who’s an originalist like me and a textualist might say, ‘Listen, there’s nothing in the U.S. Constitution that mandates you give these warnings, but it’s been on the books for so long and it’s not causing any harm,’ ” he said. “So then someone like me would say, ‘OK, we continue with Miranda.’ “

Hawk said that when overturning precedent you look to whether the decision was both wrongfully decided and harmful.

She talked about the importance of being careful in overturning precedent, discussing the Dobbs decision, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion.

“There was an established constitutional right for over 50 years,” she said. “And then whenever a right is so abruptly taken away or overturned, I think it can really undermine public trust and confidence in the courts.”

Hawk said a position on the state Supreme Court has never been more important, with “our rights and liberties being challenged in many ways, it’s important to have justices with a track record of protecting those rights and liberties.”

Hawk, 49, of Federal Way, went to Gonzaga for undergrad and law school. She worked for former Sen. Ted Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee, before becoming a state and federal public defender in Spokane. She became legal director at the state ACLU in 2015 and was appointed as a King County Superior Court judge by Gov. Jay Inslee in 2022.

Stevens, 64, of Shelton, Mason County, joined the Navy out of high school, where he was stationed in Bremerton and later went to the University of Washington for undergrad and law school. He has served as both a public defender and a prosecutor in a variety of jurisdictions: prosecutor in Spokane, Okanogan and Mason counties and for the U.S. attorney’s office in Sacramento, Calif., public defender on the Colville Reservation and for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Nevada and Wyoming.

As a prosecutor he said he was known as “No Deal Dave” for his reluctance to offer plea deals to repeat offenders.

In 2023, he ran for superior court judge in Mason County, defeating an incumbent who had been appointed by Inslee the year before.

Stevens is running for the Supreme Court because he’s been “very disturbed” by some of the court’s recent decisions and actions. He cited the 2021 Blake decision, which ruled the state’s felony drug possession law unconstitutional.

“It was settled law,” Stevens said. “And all of a sudden the Washington state Supreme Court finds that it was never constitutional even though the Washington state Supreme Court had said twice that it was constitutional.”

He also pointed to one of the court’s most prominent efforts to push back against what it has called systemic racism in the legal system: the court’s adoption of a new rule to target racial bias in jury selection.

In 2018, the state Supreme Court changed the rules to ban any juror challenges based on “implicit, institutional, and unconscious” racial bias. If an “objective observer” could see race as a factor, the juror challenge should not be allowed.

Stevens argues the rule change itself introduces bias.

“They didn’t think there was enough representation of minorities on juries,” he said. “So now we presume we treat jurors differently based on their race.”

Stevens said he objected to two open letters the court wrote — one in 2020 addressing institutional racism and one this summer addressing discrimination against tribal communities — and likely wouldn’t have signed them.

“I think it’s performative,” he said. “What legal function does it do?”

Hawk said she appreciated the letters, and the court’s proactive push to address the legal system’s history of discrimination, and would have signed them.

“It’s really kind of a call to action for the legal community to be mindful about the impacts and harms of racial injustice,” she said. Lawyers have repeatedly cited the 2020 letter in arguments to the court. “I generally think that those letters have been helpful and encouraged the legal community to look at those issues and to take action.”