By Erica C. Barnett
An analysis of primary election results shows that Mayor Bruce Harrell lost badly in the primary on his own home turf—Southeast Seattle’s 37th District, where he won just 36 percent of the vote to challenger Katie Wilson’s 56 percent. Overall, Harrell didn’t win a majority in any Seattle legislative district except the sliver of the 32nd that dips down into Seattle from Shoreline, but his 47-42 victory in that area represented a majority of less than 5,000 votes.
Although the 37th LD, which roughly overlaps with the council district Harrell represented between 2015 and 2019 (the boundaries were redrawn in 2022) also went for Harrell’s opponent, then-councilmember Lorena González, in 2021, the gap was much smaller—González had 36 percent to Harrell’s 33 percent, with the remainder going to other candidates.
That’s a major comedown from Harrell’s 2015 election to represent City Council District 2, when he got nearly 62 percent of the primary vote and went on to narrowly defeat Tammy Morales, who won election to the same seat four years later. Harrell was an incumbent, but ran for the Southeast Seattle seat after the city switched to district elections.
González was the more progressive candidate in the 2021 race, so her supporters serve as a rough proxy for Wilson’s voter base.
In other legislative districts that are fully or mostly located in Seattle, voters flipped from supporting Harrell in the 2021 primary to supporting Wilson this year. These include the 34th District (West Seattle), the 36th District (Queen Anne, Magnolia, Ballard), and the 46th District (North Seattle). Harrell also lost to González in the 11th District, which included some of South Seattle, in 2021, but that area was also redistricted and the part that was in Seattle is now in the 37th. In the 43rd District, which includes Capitol Hill and the University District, Harrell trailed Wilson by 14 points, 40 to 54.
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Harrell will have to close a nearly 10-point gap with challenger Wilson if he wants to win reelection in November—a feat that, as we documented last week, no sitting mayor has accomplished in at least the last 28 years.
Of course, the electorate itself changes between the August primary and the November general election, when turnout is generally higher—about 40 percent of Seattle’s registered voters, or around 200,000 people, voted in the primary, a number that will likely spike well above 50 percent in the general). And people can change their minds and vote for a different candidate in the general, including voters who chose one of the six candidates who didn’t make it through.
But there are reasons to expect that that last group of voters won’t move the needle much in Harrell’s direction: Unlike in the 2021 election that made Harrell mayor, when nearly 34 percent of voters went for candidates other than Harrell or González, the other candidates split just 8 percent of the vote this year, which doesn’t “free up” many voters to choose Harrell or Wilson.
When we asked Joe Mallahan, a candidate to the right of Wilson whose votes would theoretically go to Harrell, if asked if he was voting for Harrell, he responded “fuck no” and said he’s supporting Wilson.
