Seattle Has Its Own Zohran Mamdani Only It's A LADY!
(Add your own Jerry Lewis voice.)
A funny thing happened in Seattle’s August 5 primary election: Incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell, a centrist Democrat who won his first term on a “law and order” platform following the pandemic and attendant voter worries about crime and homelessness, got thumped by political sort-of newcomer Katie Wilson, who ended up with more than 50 percent of the vote in the city’s mayoral primary. Under Washington’s “scramble” primary system, the top two winners of the primary go on to face each other in the November general election.
Harrell barely managed 42 percent, and suddenly went from looking like he had a lock on reelection to being the underdog. Wilson’s a longtime progressive activist who among other things co-founded and heads the “Transit Riders Union,” a group pushing for better public transportation, helped lead drives for a $15 minimum wage in several Seattle suburbs, and is running on an unapologetically progressive platform. She’s benefiting from a lot of buzz that she’s a Left Coast version of New York Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani. Even better, Wilson benefits from an already progressive voter base that’s super pissed off at Donald Trump, and from not having both the New York Times and Fox News gunning for her.
Wilson, like Mamdani, is a big public transit nerd who’s made “affordable and abundant housing” a key plank of her campaign. She was a leader in the 2020 JumpStart Seattle initiative, which taxed corporations with high salaries to create a fund that would invest in long-term affordable housing. (Her campaign site rips Harrell for instead using much of the funding to eliminate a city budget shortfall, rather than raising more revenue through conventional means. Bummer, people needing affordable housing.)
Wilson is also pushing for a smarter progressive approach to homelessness that acknowledges the problem’s complexity but doesn’t handwave away public concerns about crime, mental illness, and public drug use, either. In a very thoughtful guest column in The Stranger back in January, before she got into the mayoral race, Wilson argued that the solutions that definitely work best for most of the unhoused population — housing first, with significant supportive social services — aren’t a simple or quick fix, and may not be enough to reach people with the most high-visibility problems like serious mental illness or chronic drug dependency. But they’re still so much better for so many people than the “get tough” approach favored by conservatives that they’re worth pursuing:
I’m not suggesting that the left relax our insistence that affordable housing at scale is needed to solve the homelessness crisis. But we also need to talk more about mental illness and drug addiction, and show ourselves to be the adults in the room when it comes to solutions.
So yes, supportive housing first, but also acknowledge that “most permanent supportive housing, in its current form, isn’t set up for the people with the most severe challenges,” and — here’s the really hard part — work toward building the service infrastructure needed for that small portion of the unhoused population for whom a roof over their head won’t be enough. Not acknowledging that leaves the problem open to exploitation by rightwingers who pretend we just need to crack down on poor people so they’ll stop being poor.
Yeah, we like this Katie Wilson a lot! If you can spare ten or fifteen minutes to sit with her Stranger essay, you might even start feeling something like hope, even if you can’t vote for her in Seattle. (You can always send her campaign a few Ameros, too!)
Seattle voters can also help Wilson out with her campaign by using the city’s innovative public campaign financing system of “Democracy Vouchers,” which voters renewed for another 10 years in the primary election Wilson won. Funded by property taxes, it’s a $4.5 million program that gives each adult voter in Seattle four $25 campaign funding vouchers that they can donate to local candidates. The program started eight years ago, and in that time,
studies have found that the vouchers have strengthened the influence of everyday residents on local politics and allowed a wider array of candidates to launch campaigns, decreasing their reliance on big-money donors.
Unlike most public funding approaches, there’s no matching-funds component here, although candidates who can persuade voters to donate their vouchers also tend to bring in more small-dollar donations, too. A recent study also found that the vouchers tend to be used mostly by younger voters and those with lower income, giving them new power in local campaigns. And hell yes they have already been helpful to Wilson, according to her campaign manager, Alex Gallo Brown, who said the vouchers were a huge factor in Wilson’s primary win.
“It really takes some of the corporate influence out, and it allows someone who has never held political office, who lives in a one-bedroom apartment, who doesn’t have a car, to be competitive,” Brown told Bolts. “It’s really leveled the playing field.” (Harrell, Wilson’s opponent, backed the renewal of the program and also used democracy vouchers in the primary.)
The Seattle Times recommended a no vote, grumbling that since outside money hasn’t been limited by the voucher program, vouchers just added more money to campaigns without much benefit, but phooey on that, and yay it passed. It’s getting more people involved in local elections, and that’s pretty fucking great. More of this around the country, please!
[The Week / Stranger / Nation / Bolts / Katie Wilson For Seattle]
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Trump and Putin just rode off together in the Presidential limo called "The Beast". If Trump had brought a corsage it would have looked like prom night in hell.
"...used mostly by younger voters and those with lower income, giving them new power in local campaigns..."
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