“This was not an easy decision for our union, but in these challenging times, PROTEC17 members are looking for a shared vision for a better city and a clear plan for how we’ll get there,” the union’s executive director Karen Estevenin, said. “”PROTEC17 members are deeply concerned with affordability in our city… [and] creating pathways that should have been created years ago for progressive revenue so that we can address the city deficit and prevent the loss of critical services right now.”
Although the largest coalition of local labor unions, the MLK Labor Council, endorsed Harrell, a number of smaller unions, along with the Working Families Party and all of the local Democratic Party groups, have endorsed Wilson—who, as the head of the Transit Riders Union, played a leading role in the passage of higher minimum wage laws around the region, renter protections in Seattle such as caps on move-in costs and late fees, and the JumpStart payroll tax that has saved the city repeatedly from devastating budget cuts.
“It’s not an easy thing to challenge an incumbent mayor who’s been in office a very long time, and I know that it is not an easy thing for people and organizations with skin in the game to support a challenger to such an incumbent, especially when that incumbent is your boss,” Wilson said Thursday. “I believe that we will win this race, and despite the enormous challenges facing our city, from a quarter-billion-dollar budget deficit to an escalating homelessness crisis to attacks from the Trump administration, I feel immensely hopeful for the future of our city.”
2. For its part, Harrell’s campaign has decided to go with the evergreen tactic of “paint our opponent as the second coming of Kshama Sawant.” In a recent campaign mailing, Harrell said Wilson was “clear in her support for an arbitrary 50% cut in the SPD budget”—linking, perhaps assuming no one would click, to a Crosscut article in which Wilson laid out a detailed plan for the city to replace police by using less expensive civilian workers for jobs like directing traffic at events and responding to mental health crises.
In the email, which echoed a recent poll testing whether voters would buy that Wilson is a “loud,” “angry,” “divisive” woman, Harrell even referred to the entire Defund the Police movement from 2020 as “Wilson’s defund movement– led on council by her longtime ally Kshama Sawant,” and blamed Wilson indirectly for “an exodus from SPD and a dramatic rise in violent crime, crime that disproportionately impacted lower income and communities of color.”<
‘Lest it be forgotten, Wilson was never strongly aligned with Sawant—in fact, Sawant blamed the “Katie Wilson-dominated liberal activist layer” for “crowding out” Socialist Alternative, her political party at the time, during the city budget debate in 2019. Sawant has not been a council member since 2023.
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3. In a separate Harrell campaign email, deputy mayor Tim Burgess (a man who very specifically owes his job to Harrell) said he was supporting the mayor because he would “strengthen the positive momentum for change”—a bold assertion, given that Harrell has been either a city council member or mayor for 16 of the last 18 years. Burgess’ email encourages voters to think back to how bad things were during the pandemic— “The police chief resigned. Tents appeared everywhere, cluttering parks and sidewalks”—and thank their lucky stars that Harrell was elected mayor.
Burgess’ email attributes the turnaround Seattle has seen since 2020, including a decline in tents on sidewalks, lower violent crime rates, and even an increase in shelter referrals (a statistic Harrell’s predecessor Jenny Durkan also loved to throw around) to Harrell’s bold actions. In reality, while Harrell has dramatically increased no-notice encampment sweeps (a contrast to 2020, when Durkan was forced to pause sweeps at the height of COVID lockdown) the number of people experiencing homelessness in Seattle has only increased, with Native, Black, and Latino people most affected.
(“Referrals” to shelter remains a meaningless metric. It’s like declaring victory when the number of 911 calls for overdoses goes up; the true measure of success is how many people enroll in shelter and move on to more permanent housing, or how many lives first responders actually save after they show up.)<
“Police arrests,” Burgess wrote, are “at their highest level since 2020″—a metric Harrell’s supporters may view as an unmitigated good, but which should cause more skeptical voters to ask, “Arrests for what?” The city has made many illegal activities extra-illegal since Harrell was elected, including drug use and possession, sex work, street racing, graffiti.
4. Harrell’s fundraising email also blasted his opponent Joe Mallahan, saying “How dare a candidate say anyone overreacted to the murder of George Floyd. Harrell was mischaracterizing Mallahan’s comments about “the overreaction” to the murder of George Floyd . In fact, Mallahan’s views about the 2020 protests are right in line with Harrell’s own message in the same email—that city officials were out of line for even considering cuts to police spending in 2020.
Mallahan doesn’t need Harrell’s help to put his foot in his mouth. At a campaign forum in Columbia City on Wednesday night, Mallahan talked about how he and “my immigrant wife” “stumbled into” the Royal Esquire Club a few years ago and were welcomed with open arms by the people there.
The Royal Esquire Club is a private social club for Black men where Harrell served in leadership roles and to which he has steered city funding. Harrell came under scrutiny in 2018 and 2019 for allegedly pressuring the city’s Office of Labor Standards to drop a investigation into wage theft based on the allegations of five women who worked at the club.
Mallahan later compared the Royal Esquire to the Greenlake bar and venue the Little Red Hen, which he called “basically the Royal Esquire Club for the white folks on the north side” in response to a question about how the candidates would work to “save the Hen” and other “creative third spaces” in Seattle.
During his closing statement, Mallahan did an “I have Black friends” routine, saying, “I have a Black man who’s 39 or 40 years old, who calls me his father” as well as a Black nephew. He also worked on the campaigns for Obama and Kamala Harris, he added.
