Seattle isn't the only city in the state where a sitting mayor is in electoral trouble because of a transportation issue. We know what happened to Greg Nickels, but down south in Vancouver (which is the 4th biggest city in the state) things are getting serious for 3-term boss Royce Pollard.

The biggest issue down there is the proposed I-5 bridge over the Columbia River between Vancouver and Portland, Oregon. And while the big, expensive project up here (the tunnel) is anti-transit, the one down there is pro-transit. The new bridge would have more traffic lanes, but would also connect the Portland MAX light rail into America's Vancouver.

Challenger Tim Leavitt, a city council member, has been running on a promise to exclude any tolling to help pay for the bridge, and it has catapulted him to a narrow lead in the mayoral primary. The problem is, according to Pollard and a couple of other local politicos I've heard from, not tolling the bridge would cause the project's funding to come up short.

Both Leavitt and Pollard are sure to make the general election, but it will be new territory for the mayor, who earned 72, 64, and 63 percent of the vote in his three previous elections.

The next image from the White House's official photostream:

There's widespread speculation that Mayor Greg Nickels is going to concede defeat at a press conference at 10 a.m. in City Hall. "I assume he's going to hang it up," says Blair Butterworth, one of Seattle's career campaign consultants. Nickels has been in third place, falling further behind Joe Mallahan and Mike McGinn, and none of the new batches of ballots has shown Nickels with enough votes to make it into second place, thereby advancing to the general election. "They would have to change dramatically and there is no evidence after all these results have come in that there is any pattern like that," Butterworth says.

"All Greg has ever done has been in politics, so I guess he has a pretty firm grip on the reality like that," he adds.

"The irony of all of this, you know those musical chair games where they pull out chair and person hits the floor? The remaining candidates have run on change, but what happens if there is no mayor?" says Butterworth. "The chair has been removed and they are going to be faced answering what they want to do, not what they don't want to be."

The conflict between Mallahan and McGinn, he says, could boil down to classic grassroots versus grass tops, neighborhoods versus downtown, and youth versus the older establishment. "The potential is that it becomes one of these cultural clashes that will define Seattle's direction for the next decade," Butterworth says.

Ian Stewart, a partner of EMC research, who has worked on the Nickels campaign, said he couldn't provide details about what Nickels would announce. But, he says, "You're going to want to be there."