Maybe no image better represents the swirling passions in Seattle politics right now than one taken nine months ago, 3,000 miles away.
You remember it, I’m sure. The tech titans lined up, with Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), and Elon Musk (Tesla), preening at the feet of Donald Trump on the day of his inauguration last January.
It was a historic concentration of immense wealth at the gates of American democracy.
“That event … it was like it flipped a switch.”
That’s the view of Tim Ceis, a Seattle lobbyist and campaign moneyman. Known as “The Shark” for aggressive tactics when he was a deputy mayor at City Hall 20 years ago, he’s now trying to save incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell’s political life with a $1.4 million independent ad campaign.
I asked him what is the possible path to a Harrell comeback victory, after a brutal 9-point loss to upstart challenger Katie Wilson in the August primary. He outlined a theory for one, which I’ll get to in a minute. But first he took the temperature of our city.
“Voters here are pretty upset,” Ceis said. “Anger has continued to show up in the polling. People who self-identify as progressive are the most angry. You can’t overestimate how much Trump’s return is influencing local politics around the country.”
Seattle pollster Stuart Elway agrees. His most recent survey found voters here are the most disgruntled they’ve been in decades. Seattle voters are the most hacked off bunch of all.
“It means choppy waters ahead for incumbents generally,” Elway said.
The Democratic Party is as unpopular as it’s been in 30 years. The main reason for the low marks, though, comes from within. Democrats don’t like their own party right now.
Add the capitulation of blue-city tech elites to Trump, along with some media and universities, and you’ve got the ingredients for a “left populist backlash surge,” says Erik Olsen, professor emeritus of political science at Seattle University.
We’ve all heard of “drain the swamp.” Now the left wants to do that, too, Olsen says.
“It’s a version of what happened with MAGA and the Republican Party,” he said. “There’s a palpable frustration now over on the left. It’s the same current charging up the New York City mayor’s race.”
Enter Katie Wilson, an activist, 43, who hasn’t held elected office or any government post. She had been helping a Seattle social housing push last winter, and, when it won, she was electrified. That night she decided to run for mayor.
The Seattle measure gave voters a choice between paying for some housing out of existing revenues, as Mayor Harrell advocated. Or taxing wealthy corporations, with a new levy on pay packages north of $1 million.
Polls showed a tight vote. After the tech oligarchs lined up at Trump’s inaugural, and the Elon Musk DOGE fiasco began to set in, Ceis says the tax-the-rich plan took off.
“It just popped,” he says. “It won by 26 points.”
Wilson, a socialist in a city cleaved by extreme wealth disparities, was perfectly situated to marshal all the above trends.
“The establishment Democratic party failed to stop the train wreck of Trump’s election, and there’s been a strong counter reaction to that,” Wilson told me last month. “People are hungry for a new kind of leadership, whatever label you want to put on it.”
Harrell’s campaign is exasperated that after years of identity politics, Seattle progressives seem blithely open to swapping out a Black mayor, from a blue-collar family in the Central District, for a policy activist who grew up in the ivory tower.
Harrell, though, has been backed by most of the elected power structure in the state, as well as top corporate executives at Microsoft and Amazon.
It has set up an awkward dynamic. Harrell is The Man. But with the electorate so restless, he also wants to be seen as a disrupter.
“Continue the Change,” read one strained slogan tried out by Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess in an email blast.
“A lot of people in Seattle are not necessarily angry at Harrell,” summed up Mark Alan Smith, a UW political scientist, to The New York Times. “But they’re absolutely angry at politics.”
Those are the tremors beneath the surface. So does Harrell have a shot at dodging an earthquake?
Ceis says the pro-Harrell PAC held some voter focus groups after the primary. Wilson had pushed some now-radioactive far-left ideas only a few years ago, such as defunding both the police and the criminal division of the City Attorney’s Office, which would have made the prosecution of most misdemeanor offenses impossible.
That’s all stale news, the focus groups said.
Wilson also has proposed up to eight new taxes, on corporations, land and wealth. Eight is probably a campaign record, even for Seattle. But it hasn’t stuck as a negative issue.
“We tried to show she was too far left, but that fell flat as hell,” Ceis said.
So the campaign pivoted to attacking her lack of experience. Ceis contends Seattleites know the city’s recovery is fragile. So Harrell’s hope is that voters will flinch at putting a newbie at the helm.
“Katie Wilson isn’t ready to be mayor,” reads one of an avalanche of mailers from the PAC, with a copy of Wilson’s thin resume.
The experience question can cut two ways, though.
“Bruce Harrell has been in office 16 of the last 18 years. We know EXACTLY what we’ll get with four more years,” a recent Wilson mailer reads.
“This election, let’s not rinse and repeat,” reads another pro-Wilson mailer, depicting Harrell and City Council President Sara Nelson in a rusty old washing machine.
Olsen, of Seattle University, predicts: Advantage Wilson.
The city’s condition has improved under Harrell, but it likely came “too little, too late,” he said. “I do think this election will be closer than the primary. But there’s this massive cultural unease, about Trump and Big Tech dealing for more corporate tax cuts, about the weakness of the Democrats, and so on. It’s probably too much to overcome.”
Amazon dropped an October surprise, announcing major layoffs. Harrell seized on the bad news to ask his big closing question: Is now really the moment for Seattle to try another political experiment?
But then Amazon also announced it had raked in record profits, up 38%. The stock soared. The company’s valuation rocketed up $225 billion — more than the entire valuation of Boeing in a single day — raining unfathomable wealth, once again, on elite parts of its home city. A city still with homeless encampments and a budget deficit.
Remember when they used to say all politics is local? Not anymore.
Danny Westneat: dwestneat@seattletimes.com. Danny Westneat, a metro news columnist at The Seattle Times since 2004, takes an opinionated look at the Puget Sound region’s news, people and politics.