Welcome to a Thursday edition of Progress Report.
Texas Democrats are going home, California Democrats are moving forward with their gerrymander, and Washington DC is sinking further into martial law.
Now that we’ve got our updates out of the way, let’s get to tonight’s main story, about the incredible progressive campaign being run by Seattle activist and mayoral candidate Katie Wilson, who joined us live on Wednesday.
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The elements are all there:
A major coastal city with an iconic skyline, overseen by a centrist incumbent mayor known for doing the bidding of major corporate donors and allegedly creating a hostile work environment for women.
A community organizer, largely ignored and given little chance of winning, running a grassroots campaign with little institutional buy-in.
A voter base fed up with billionaires who have hijacked the city and sent housing prices skyrocketing.
A double-digit upset victory in a primary election that shocked the political establishment.
And a general election rematch that promises to be a political and ideological slugfest.
As a New Yorker, I’ve written a lot about Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s rise from little-known legislator to political phenomenon, but the narrative arc above isn’t exclusive to the likely next Mayor of New York City. A similar story is playing out across the country in Seattle, where an activist, organizer, and first-time candidate named Katie Wilson just dominated the city’s mayoral primary election.
Wilson cracked 50% in the primary, putting incumbent Bruce Harrell on the ropes ahead of the general election, a rematch between the progressive insurgent and business-friendly Seattle institution. The first round victory was all the more stunning because Wilson had not planned on running for mayor at all until February, when Seattleites voted overwhelmingly to fund a new social housing program by enacting a 5% tax on salaries over $1 million.
Social housing, a kind of publicly-financed housing that gives residents an ownership stake and is interspersed throughout the community, is common in Europe but almost non-existent in the US. Seattle’s program has a chance to be groundbreaking, especially now that it’s being funded through the new tax; an estimated $50 million first year influx will allow the city to begin securing financing for new projects. The opportunity presented, Wilson figured, could not be entrusted to the pro-business mayor who served as the face of the opposition campaign and has defunded other housing initiatives.
“Our current mayor, if he's in office for another four years, he can easily undermine this new social housing developer,” Wilson explains. “And if it fails, people are going to lose faith in it. That's really bad, not just for Seattle, but for other places around the country that are looking to us here. So I began thinking about running because I'm like we really need to get this right.”
The vote also proved how out of touch Harrell was with the needs of the city’s working and middle class residents, which Wilson understands quite well. She now pays $2000 a month to send her daughter to daycare for four days a week, a plight I also understand all too well.
The special election in February also indicated to Wilson that there was an opening for a new voice and a hunger for the deep, systemic change that she’d spent 14 years pursuing at the grassroots level.
As the head of the nonprofit Transit Riders Union, Wilson helped pass a wave of progressive reforms in the late 2010s and early 2020s. The wins included a significant minimum wage increases in Seattle and a number of surrounding cities, a tax on Amazon and other trillion-dollar corporations that have remade the city, and a renters’ bill of rights. All that organizing helped made it possible for Wilson to stand up a whole campaign in just a few months’ time, a significant achievement that was aided by the democracy voucher program, Seattle’s unique public financing system.
(Wilson, who also writes about policy for local publications, wants to expand that program to funding journalism. The idea would be to give residents three $50 vouchers that they could use to pay for subscriptions or donations to their favorite local outlets, which would be a godsend to both publications and the people in news deserts who suffer from a lack of good information. Count me all the way in.)
Backlash to the backlash
In 2021 and 2023, after a spike in crime and homelessness caused by the pandemic, along with mass protests after the police murder of George Floyd, voters in Seattle shifted to the (relative) right, fueled by a campaign by conservative business interests, real estate, and daily editorials published by the Seattle Times. As a result, residents elected a city council that promised to crackdown on the causes of urban decay, but have little to show for it. New Yorkers, who elected Eric Adams mayor in 2021, have had a similar experience.
“I think that part of what's going on here is just that people aren't seeing progress on the very issues that those more moderate council members were elected on,” Wilson says. “They also came into office and they tried to roll back parts of our minimum wage law, they tried to roll back minimum wage for gig workers, they're trying to roll back renter protection. That's not the stuff they were elected on. They're overstepping their mandate, and so they are getting punished for that right now.”
Several moderate council members and the conservative city attorney were also topped by progressive challengers during last month’s primary, further underscoring the anger and energy currently emanating from the Democratic Party’s left flank. Concerns about affordability have overshadowed everything else, especially in a city as expensive as Seattle, and anger at the financial elite is rendering the same tired warnings about capital flight and other forms of extortion rather inert.
Winning the primary is no guarantee of winning in November, and business interests are going to be waging an all-out war to prevent Wilson from winning city hall. Like Mamdani, Wilson comes from a new generation of leader that is uninterested in the typical quid-pro-quo of establishment politics, and a victory in November would serve notice to Democrats that they can’t crush progressive grassroots campaigns with gobs of PAC money. If you care about building progressive power changing the direction of the party, this is a race worth watching.
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