By Erica C. Barnett
I did a couple of post-election appearances this week to talk about the implication of the national elections on Washington State and Seattle, and how much political observers should read into Alexis Mercedes Rinck’s extremely decisive win over appointed city council incumbent Tanya Woo.
On Seattle Channel’s City Inside/Out—which, if all goes well, the Seattle City Council’s budget will save along with the rest of the channel’s original programming—host Brian Callanan, Seattle Times cartoonist David Horsey, and longtime pollster Stuart Elway, and I discussed our post-election reactions, which were quite fresh when we sat down the Wednesday morning after Tuesday’s Trump rout.
We also dug into the results of the four initiatives filed by Redmond hedge-fund manager Brian Heywood, a self-described “economic refugee” from California whose failed proposals would have repealed the state’s capital-gains tax, eliminated the state’s long-term care program, and ended the state’s carbon pricing program, a centerpiece of outgoing Gov. Jay Inslee’s administration.
Then, on the “Casual Friday” edition of KUOW’s podcast Seattle Now, host Patricia Murphy, Stranger staff writer Vivian McCall, and I talked more about the election results, including the election of anti-Trump crusader (and current attorney general) Bob Ferguson as governor and former US Attorney Nick Brown as attorney general.
We also discussed the three regressive Heywood initiatives the legislature decided to pass preemptively earlier this year, seemingly trying to avoid the expense of an election whose conclusion legislators believed was already determined. The three measures include one that removes restrictions on dangerous police chases and another that gives parents the right to view their kids’ school health records without consent, depriving young people of safe spaces to talk about birth control, gender and gender-affirming care, abortion, and mental health.
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Legislators and most media outlets described the legislation as a simple “parental rights” measure, but it goes much further, intervening in the lives of kids who may have good reasons to feel unsafe talking to their families about sex and identity.
We also got into a discussion of what will happen in red states, where people with progressive values have been fighting the good fight since time immemorial.
Unlike my former boss Dan Savage (who appeared, via David’s new podcast Blue City Blues, in our Seattle Nice podcast feed last week), I don’t think we should write off people who choose to live outside urban areas, nor should we insist on the superiority of cities as places for liberal-thinking people to live.
Vivian and I are both from red states (I grew up in Mississippi and Texas), and I enjoyed our conversation about the tremendous individual and political diversity that exists even within places that “voted for Trump” (which, in fact, contain many people who voted and fought their hardest for Harris.) People live in places for reasons, and people find each other, and build communities, no matter where they live, and that ought to be something to celebrate, not discourage.
