Tacoma Mayor’s race: The News Tribune’s endorsement
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TNT Election Endorsements 2025
Ballots are due on Tuesday, Nov. 4. Here are the endorsements we made this fall:
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This year’s final candidates for Tacoma mayor are hardly a study in contrasts.
Both have represented District 1 on the Tacoma City Council. Both hold progressive values and try to balance their ideals with pragmatism. Neither is afraid of a deep dive on complicated policy matters.
Their biographies aren’t that different, either. For example, they graduated from public high schools in Tacoma within just a few years of each other. They’re both products of a city they love and want to make better.
So in choosing a candidate to endorse, The News Tribune Editorial Board had to look deeper. In Anders Ibsen, the board saw someone who isn’t satisfied with the city’s current policy approaches, and who wants to push for more out of the council’s approaches to our biggest problems. He wins our support.
Ibsen, 39, served on city council from 2012 to 2019. It wasn’t always smooth sailing. When he ran for reelection in 2015, all but one of his colleagues on city council endorsed his opponent, John Hines. Colleagues accused Ibsen of being difficult to work with, unwilling to negotiate, and unskilled at winning better outcomes through compromise.
But we prefer a candidate who doesn’t go along to get along. If Ibsen can effectively push the city council beyond what’s comfortable, we think he’ll be a strong leader.
He’s shown what that can look like already. In his current campaign, Ibsen often calls back to his work on a 2015 minimum wage ballot initiative. Dueling measures went before voters after much back and forth between the council and local advocates on how to implement an increase.
At the time, his colleagues blamed the failure to put one unified approach on the ballot on Ibsen’s unwillingness to compromise. But the council’s measure, which rolled out the wage increase more gradually than the plan advocates pushed, won the day.
Ibsen also won his reelection bid on that ballot, so the support of the other council members turned out to be unnecessary. Hines went on to represent District 1 after Ibsen termed out, and now the two are locked into another election showdown, this time for mayor.
Hines, who has another two years left on his last term in city council, was a teacher and coach before becoming an instructional facilitator at Tacoma Public Schools. In that role, he supports Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate instruction as well as the AVID skill-building program.
From a policymaking perspective, Hines has taken action on some of the most pressing issues in Tacoma while on council. He sponsored an ordinance banning encampments within 10 blocks of homeless shelters. He’s now seeking to expand this buffer to include schools, parks and libraries.
Not one to push the problem out of his own neighborhood, he helped bring a tiny home village near his home in west Tacoma. That’s something Hines, 43, said he had to convince neighbors to give a chance.
Still, Ibsen rightly criticizes the policy for not being effective enough. He’s not alone in pointing out that sweeping encampments without enough follow through on getting people services just moves people to new spots down the road. We would like to see someone willing to offer this kind of pushback leading the city.
It should be said that Tacoma’s Board of Ethics investigated Ibsen after he sent out a promotional email that mentioned his city council role while marketing his real estate appraisal business. The board found Ibsen in violatation of the city’s code of ethics, but didn’t recommend a penalty after noting that he’d changed his marketing materials. Ibsen has referred to this as a marketing mistake that he won’t make again, and committed to creating appropriate boundaries between his current real estate business and a political office.
If he wins the election this year, we will hold him to that.
Just like the last time he faced Ibsen, Hines has the backing of most of the city council. That includes endorsements from Olgy Diaz, Kristina Walker, Sarah Rumbaugh and Sandesh Sadalge, as well as outgoing mayor Victoria Woodards. He also lists endorsements from regional organizations like the Rental Housing Association of Washington and the Tacoma Pierce County Association of Realtors, in addition to labor organizations like the Tacoma firefighters’s union.
However, Ibsen continues to enjoy broad support from voters, winning more than 38% of the vote in the six-person mayoral primary. That amounted to roughly twice the raw number of votes Hines received in his second-place finish.
The exact reasons behind his public support are hard to pin down, but Ibsen has won plaudits for being available to constituents since his council days. He has also tirelessly campaigned at people’s doorsteps, beginning his doorbelling months before the filing deadline to run for mayor.
And while Ibsen isn’t endorsed by anyone on the city council in this election, he has the endorsement of former council colleague Keith Blocker, and Democrats Jani Hitchen and Bryan Yambe on the Pierce County Council. He’s also endorsed by the Democratic state lawmakers of the 27th, 28th, and 29th Legislative Districts, in addition to more than 20 labor unions.
Those don’t seem like the endorsements of someone who’s too uncompromising to get things done. Instead, we’re hopeful that they’re the endorsements of someone who’s willing to push for better outcomes even when his colleagues are satisfied with what’s already been tried.
The News Tribune Editorial Board is: Laura Hautala, opinion editor; Stephanie Pedersen, TNT president and editor; Jim Walton, community representative; Justin Evans, community representative; Bart Hayes, community representative.
This story was originally published October 17, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect that Ibsen was found in violation of Tacoma’s code of ethics, but that no penalty was recommended after he changed his marketing materials.
