Four candidates are facing off for the 41st District’s state representative Position 2 seat in the Aug. 2 primary.

Incumbent Judy Clibborn (D-Mercer Island) is bidding for the seat against fellow Republican Michael Appleby, as well as Libertarian candidate Angel Jordan and Democrat William Popp, Sr.

Clibborn is hoping to return to the state Legislature for her 15th year this fall and continue to work on bipartisan solutions for Washingtonians.

A former City Council member, mayor and Chamber of Commerce director in Mercer Island, Clibborn now serves as the chair of the House Transportation Committee and helped pass a $16 billion transportation package in 2015.

“I’ve been around long enough to know how state government works,” she said. “There’s not a big enough majority in the House or the Senate to push something through. You need to have that bipartisan overlap.”

She said that the No. 1 priority going into this session is fully funding education without destroying the state’s safety net, which includes funding for mental health and other important services. Clibborn began her career as a nurse and has been working to increase health care access and support families.

She said that she would like to show how her stewardship of the transportation budget would translate to the general fund, hoping to find middle ground on a complicated issue that will likely need a new, fairer source of revenue.

“We don’t want to just cut things,” she said. “There are reforms that we can do that will use the money in a better way.”

Appleby, 53, hopes to use his financial services background to tackle the state budget, education and transportation. But the former Prudential Financial vice president is eschewing a more traditional platform in favor of listening to what residents want and responding.

“My job, I think, is to listen. Figure out what voters want and bring the two sides in the state Legislature together. We have two ears and one mouth for a reason,” he said.

Appleby originally hails from Connecticut and worked as a machinist for many years before putting himself through college. He has been setting his platform on the feedback he has received from locals while going door-to-door — the vast majority of people he has interacted with have the same major concerns, Appleby said.

Among them are the future of transportation, education and preventing a state income tax.

Appleby would like to either get rid of or recalibrate tolling on Interstate 405 while setting forth a dual mandate of congestion relief on highways and implementing better mass transit. He also wants to ensure schools are funded appropriately, but are fiscally prudent.

“If I thought the Legislature was doing a good job, I wouldn’t be running,” he said. “I realized, if people like me don’t jump in and make a change, who will?”

Evergreen state transplant Jordan, 24, wants to put choice and liberty back into the hands of Washington citizens, he said. To do that, he would seek to vote down bad bills in the Legislature and keep the scope of government small.

“I want to bring the power back to the state, to the people,” he said. “We are all Americans, but we are Washingtonians as well.”

The Mercer Island High School graduate and member of the Army National Guard decided to run for state office after becoming frustrated with the presidential candidates and what he sees as superfluous costs and restraints on citizens. An admirer of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, Jordan wants to prevent new taxes and eliminate the tolling on I-405.

“We taxpayers pay for the roads, so why should we be paying to use them?” he said.

Killing bad bills, Jordan added, would be more important to him as a legislator than passing good ones. He doesn’t see himself as a career politician — rather, Jordan would like to do his time in office and then move on, allowing for the next generation to have their influence on the state. Overall, he decided to run for office to do what he thinks is best for his homeland.

“I may not have been born here, but Washington is my home,” he said.

If Popp is to succinctly sum his reasoning for running for a legislative seat in the 41st District, he says it’s because “congestion relief and quality of life are inseparable.”

Popp, a Bellevue-based transportation engineer with 50 years of experience, believes highway tolling and congestion management do not go hand in hand. His background includes working with the Puget Sound Council of Governments, which later became the Puget Sound Regional Council.

“What inspired me to run is the fact that we are destroying our freeway system with this tolling concept,” he said. “What we’ve done is taken freeways and made them tollways, and tollways by their nature require congestion to be effective to work. If there was no congestion in general purpose lanes, there’d be nobody paying tolls.”

Popp is running as a Democrat, though he believes he can speak to people on both sides of the aisle. He says he wants to see data-driven allocation of financial resources for schools. He says other issues he is sensitive to include homelessness, poverty and mental health. Ultimately, he wants to bring his engineering expertise to the Legislature.

“I understand where Republicans and Democrats are coming from, and I think common ground can be forged and we can come together,” he said. “This thing doesn’t have to be so binary in Olympia. I can be a voice in the caucus.”

Katie Metzger and Joe Livarchik contributed to this report.