Will Dreher

Will Dreher earned a high school diploma from Montgomery Blair High School, a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University in 2009, and a law degree from Harvard Law School in 2013.

Dreher's career experience includes working as an attorney.[1]

Who are you? Tell us about yourself.

Will is a former federal prosecutor, clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, and public school teacher whose career has been dedicated to championing progressive, common-sense values.

Will grew up in a middle-class family that emphasized service. His father was an environmental lawyer and his mother was a nurse. A product of diverse public schools, Will began his career working with union-affiliated voter contact organizations. After college, he taught fourth grade at a public elementary school.

After attending law school, Will litigated clean energy and environmental cases that solidified the legal foundation of clean energy subsidies nationwide and slowed efforts to drill for oil in the Atlantic. He also advocated for the civil rights of a teenager shot by the U.S. Border Patrol.

In 2019, Will moved to Seattle to serve as a federal prosecutor. He spent three years prosecuting Jan. 6th defendants for assaulting officers and ransacking the U.S. Capitol, then served as the office’s Civil Rights Coordinator, investigating hate crimes and civil rights violations by officers.

In 2024, Will left the federal government and shifted his focus to tackling corporate misconduct. Will has sued some of the biggest corporations in America to hold them accountable: oil companies for failing to plug old oil wells; tobacco companies for addicting kids; utilities for sparking wildfires; and AI companies for stealing authors’ copyrighted works to build their AI models.

Please list below 3 key messages of your campaign. What are the main points you want voters to remember about your goals for your time in office?

Big tech governance is becoming the defining issue of our time. As someone who sues AI companies and as the only state candidate who has made AI/tech regulation a top priority, I am unafraid of industry and eager to pass aggressive legislation. On AI, I will: regulate or stop new data centers to preserve climate progress and keep electricity prices sane; protect data privacy from AI surveillance; ban the replacement of public school teachers and essential workers with AI; stop the spread of disinformation and deepfakes; tax AI to slow job losses and pay for AI’s disruptive impacts; and address the catastrophic risks that AI applications pose. And I'll enact social media restrictions to protect teens from app addiction.As a graduate of public schools and a former public elementary school teacher, I understand that fully funding our public schools is paramount. But I'm the only candidate focused on also improving public school performance, where we lag behind other states. What we need are the things that have been proven to work in other states. I would work with schools to eliminate outdated literacy instructional practices; fund reading and math specialists and additional educator professional development; pursue additional annual universal reading assessments, dyslexia assessments; and fund summer reading camps and other interventions. We should have a top-5 K-12 education system nationally; we can make that happen within a decade.Many Americans are rightly alarmed by this country’s dangerous slide into authoritarianism, and every candidate talks the talk about resisting it. But only one candidate in this race spent years actually combatting it. For three years I volunteered my nights and weekends to prosecute Jan. 6th rioters, and understand the sacrifices that required to preserve our democracy. But given the Trump Administration's ever-changing tactics, we need more than talk. I have constitutional law expertise at the highest level (the Supreme Court), experience suing the Trump Administration, and experience investigating federal agents for civil rights violations. I will help lead the caucus in crafting creative and legal responses to what D.C. does next.

What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about?

In addition to the issues described above: combatting climate change, which I worked on for years as a clean energy and environmental lawyer, and which is a foremost commitment of mine; affordable housing and urban density via increased housing supply, transit, and bike lanes and pedestrian areas; affordable childcare and making it easier to open new childcare facilities; protecting vulnerable groups like our LGBTQ+, ethnic, and religious communities; and crafting common-sense, evidence based approaches to public safety that include both accountability and community-based programmatic interventions, which other cities like Baltimore have pursued to great effect, but which some of Washington's largest cities have not yet implemented.

What organizations or individuals have endorsed your campaign?

Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans, Seattle City Councilmember Dionne Foster, former Seattle Chief Public Safety Officer Dionne Foster, former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington Tessa Gorman, College Democrats of Washington, former AFL-CIO Political Director Steve Rosenthal, Vivek Prakriya, Redmond City Councilmember, and more.