By Erica C. Barnett
Our latest podcast episode (subscribe and get a new one every week!) focuses on the mayor’s race—how Katie Wilson won it, why she won it, and how incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell tried very hard to keep her from winning it.
I kicked things off by talking about Harrell’s not-so-gracious concession speech and Q&A with reporters, in which he suggested baselessly that there were “anomalies” in King County Elections’ vote count and grumped at a reporter who asked, reasonably enough, if he understood what it was it was like to struggle with affordability in Seattle in 2025.
Harrell, who worked as a corporate attorney before being elected to the city council in 2007, told a reporter it was “offensive” to even ask that question, given that he spent his whole life suffering from “scars” such as having to share one bathroom in the Central District house his parents owned. (The fact that Harrell frequently brought up this fairly common annoyance with living in an older house as proof he relates to the present-day challenges of working people in Seattle says a lot about why he lost).
History probably won’t care about the fact that Harrell and his allies used tired misogynistic tropes to attack Wilson, painting her as a privileged, Oxford-educated princess who never worked a day in her life, but I do—especially since Harrell’s gendered attacks created the playbook for national right-wing media like Fox and the New York Post, which will probably never tire of calling her a hypocritical socialist who “lives off her parents’ money.” (If you’re not familiar with this trumped-up issue, Wilson’s parents helped her pay for day care temporarily so she could campaign).
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Sandeep suggested it’s a bit hypocritical for left-leaning white people who “got on the identity train” a few years ago to “throw over the Black, Asian mayor” in favor of a white woman now; Harrell banged this drum at length during his campaign, suggesting that “Seattle’s Black community” monolithically supported him and his policies. And David asked whether I’m not a bit hypocritical for
defending Wilson, who has never worked in government, after criticizing the new city council voters elected in 2023, most of whom had little or no government experience. (This one didn’t feel correct to me—in general, council members don’t have much or any government experience—so I looked it up. Turns out: Nope! I criticized the incoming council cohort for their policy positions and the things they said about how local government works, which were often simplistic.)
Also, for some goddamn reason, we’re still debating whether Wilson promised to lower the price of pizza (she didn’t!)
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in later this week for a special bonus episode.
These comments are so bleak and shows how civics education has been an utter failure in this country. City governments play an incredibly important role in the cost of housing, business expenses, and the general economic activity of the area. Cities collect taxes, yes, but they also set rates for business and occupation rates, they directly fund housing as well as incentivize housing development through a complex set of local, state, and federal programs. Cities convene stakeholders, set policy that guides housing, transportation, and economic development. All of these things impact affordability and the direct costs that burden city residents. Modern liberalism has brainwashed us into thinking that cities are powerless and we just have to let the “market” take over and dictate the hows and whys (while handing over fistfuls of cash to the police) and that couldn’t be further from the truth. People like Harrell know this and they actively avoid taking responsibility and refuse to be real leaders.
She said she’ll explain why housing makes pizza more expensive. Restaurant owners said housing cost has nothing to do with it. Katie said she will make housing affordable and this we can conclude pizza prices will lower. So she does imply she will make pizza less expensive. Sorry.
Can Seattle government really do much about affordability? Seattle is a high cost west coast city with many new high income tech workers. Land prices are high and going to be higher. With global warming, more folks will be moving into the Pacific Northwest. Both candidates want to induce the market to build more housing; when zoning is changed, there is no market clap unless developers respond to the opportunity. New housing tends to be costly; newness in a pricey attribute. City government cannot change pizza prices very much. City government should do its own functions well. Increased city revenue comes from taxes; can they be fair, given the RCW? How housing permits provided quickly and efficiently? How is SCL? SPD? SFD? Seattle can control how well transit flows; some projects have improved the network; some projects have slowed the network.
Harold loss because he voted to exempt drug pushers lied to the business community and tainted the entire budget with bad policies that are baked into the budget that exacerbate the crisis of Public Safety in the homeless crisis and the workers crisis and Main Streets crisis because of the exemptions from jail and the priority of skin color in the refusal to judge the content of a character and because Katie Wilson has been working with the homeless industrial complex that has been financing her to broker deals behind the scenes that have the entire smorgasbord of every worker in town countering all of the sellouts who are trying to put restrictions on the comprehensive plan so they can sell out with their double triple flipped second mortgage on a rental deregulating the abuse of the workers forced to pay three times the original value on the dilapidated slum piece of Real Estate owned by the Chamber of commerce and banks that need to write off the debt to renegotiate the property values that devalue the working class values that drain Main Street for the middleman donor petting one against another hating on the workers hating on the small business cheerleader to backstabbed the workers to pay the middleman they’re inflated lease they’re inflated insurance cost. the workers are being denied their pursuits of happiness while the foreign and domestic non-working shareholder middlemen investors are using a deregulated oppressive capitalism left over from Chuck Schumer’s Rothschild revenge and Mitch McConnell’s slave owners Offspring privilege to continue abusing the working class and lie about the bourgeoisie non-working shareholder unforeseen capital gains that has been stolen and drained from main streets working class for too long
and you think electing a socialist is going to fix all of this?
Some of it…Yes
yes…she won’t steal $309 million from Jumpstart to balance the budget for more cops than we can afford.