The voters have spoken: Katie Wilson will be the next Mayor of Seattle.
On Wednesday, incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell announced that he will deliver remarks to “the people of Seattle,” presumably a concession speech, tomorrow.
“We are tremendously grateful for everyone who has supported and guided our vision for the city of Seattle,” the Wilson campaign said in a statement. “This campaign was driven by a deep belief that we need to expand the table to include everyone in the decisions that impact their lives. That is what we will be working to do every day as we set up this new administration.”
I’m out of town, having assumed (ridiculously, it turns out) that the election would be over by now when I made my travel plans earlier this year. So you won’t be getting any live updates from Harrell’s speech. What I can say, assuming Harrell is conceding to Wilson, is that this race shouldn’t have been this close, given Wilson’s incredibly strong showing in the August primary (50.75 percent to Harrell’s 41.2 percent, with six other candidates on the ballot).
Unlike other progressive candidates on the Seattle ballot, Wilson actually lost ballot share, ending Wednesday’s count with just 50.19 percent of the vote to Harrell’s 49.48 percent—enough to win, but barely. Wilson’s fellow progressives Dionne Foster (incoming Position 9 city councilmember), Alexis Mercedes Rinck (the incumbent Position 8 councilmember) and Erika Evans (the incoming city attorney), in comparison, took a greater share of votes in the general election than the primary, demonstrating that the extraordinarily close mayoral election was due to factors specific to that election.
The primary factor that helped the unpopular mayor surge, in my view, was an effective negative campaign claiming that Wilson was too inexperienced to be mayor, a charge that for some reason didn’t stick to former mayors Charley Royer or Mike McGinn, neither of whom had previously held elective office. (McGinn, like Wilson, worked for a lefty nonprofit before becoming mayor; Royer was a TV journalist. While Royer served three terms, McGinn served just one and began Seattle’s long, since-unbroken string of one-term mayors.).
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Misleading ads and mail suggested Wilson had never had a real job and was basically a privileged princess, a pretty openly misogynistic tactic Harrell compounded on the campaign trail, when he refused to address Wilson by her name, referring to his opponent instead as “she” and “her.” A KUOW story highlighting the fact that Wilson has received help from her parents paying for child care (which the story initially implied, incorrectly, was something they’d been doing for years), led to exaggerated and false claims that she was “living off her parents’ money.”
None of the stories about Wilson accepting help from her child’s grandparents noted that Harrell, 67, is worth at least $15 million and has been a very wealthy attorney for many decades. Then again, neither did Wilson—a pointed decision that helped Harrell march all over her and almost certainly reclaim some on-the-fence voters who picked Wilson or another progressive in the primary. Instead of hitting back at Harrell’s misstatements and hypocrisy, Wilson ran a generally positive campaign, focusing on her plans for the city instead of responding to her opponent’s attacks.
Unanswered attacks have a way of becoming de facto truth, and Wilson would probably have won on election night if she had reacted in kind. After all, Harrell’s own history includes many potential opportunities to go negative—or, as consultants say, to “contrast” their records.
But no matter—Wilson is ahead, as of this story, by 1,976 votes and by a 0.71-point margin, which is enough—and in the long run, people don’t tend to remember whether mayors have “mandates,” just which candidate won. “Mayor-elect Wilson” sounds pretty good to us.
