By Erica C. Barnett

Recent campaign finance reports for City Attorney Ann Davison’s reelection campaign served up a mystery: Who, exactly, is the Common Purple Collective, Davison’s campaign consultant? The firm, which Davison’s campaign paid more than $65,000—all in July—to produce mailers, videos, and online content, isn’t a familiar name in Seattle; in fact, Davison is its only client.

A quick search on several search engines yielded just one result for the name: A Delaware LLC set up in April 2025 by Incorp, a national firm that serves as a registered agent for companies whose owners want to prevent their personal information from becoming public. Delaware is a popular state for business registration because of its pro-business tax structure and privacy laws that make it hard for the public to get detailed information about companies and their corporate structure; the state provides companies’ annual reports, by mail, for a fee, but because Davison’s consultant has only existed since April, its annual report won’t be due until April 31 of next year.

Common Purple Collective does list a Seattle address on its campaign filings—600 1st Ave, a building in Pioneer Square—but the full address corresponds to a private mailbox, an alternative to a US Post Office box that provides a “real” street address without revealing the physical address of the person or company who registered it. The company does not have a business license in the state of Washington or the city of Seattle, which are both subject to Washington’s robust disclosure laws. Nor are they listed in the American Association of Political Consultants database.

Flummoxed, I asked a number of local political consultants about who Davison’s mystery campaign consultant might actually be. Although every consultant I spoke to said they were not, nor did they know anything about, Common Purple Collective, several said that whoever it was, their efforts to conceal their identity indicated that they were willing to go to great lengths to avoid being associated publicly with Davison.

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There’s reason to believe local consultants might shy away from associating with a candidate who joined the Republican Party in 2020. When she ran for city attorney in 2021, after losing earlier races for Seattle City Council and lieutenant governor, Davison used the local firm C4N partners, run by consultant Dean Nielsen, who received a fair amount of blowback for working for a Republican. (Nielsen said he has nothing to do with the Davison campaign this year.)

Not every local consultant I contacted got back to me—and it’s entirely possible that whoever Common Purple Collective is, they’re located out of state. (If that’s the case, though, they’d presumably have less reason to conceal their identity.) Davison’s campaign did not respond to my questions, nor did deputy city attorney Scott Lindsay, one of her most prominent supporters.

So, the mystery continues. One thing we do know is that Common Purple Collective, whoever they are, has delivered a pile of mail to local Seattle voters, most of it giving Davison credit for making Seattle’s streets safer by cracking down on drug users and eliminating a backlog of misdemeanor cases (mostly by dismissing them). The Common Purple Collective-produced mail touts endorsements from most of the Seattle City Council and controversial former city attorney Mark Sidran. It also credits Davison with closing down an “open-air drug market” in the Chinatown International District that is very much still a going concern.