Category: Elections

Elections, Mayor Harrell

With Half the Ballots Still Uncounted, This Mayoral Election is an Open Contest
Mayor Bruce Harrell’s election night party, just before the first results came in.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell gained a point on his challenger Katie Wilson yesterday, as King County Elections tallied a batch of about 21,000 ballots that were sent in the mail by Election Day. Those ballots left a gap of just over 11,000 votes between the two candidates, with Harrell leading Wilson 53.8 percent to 45.7 percent.

That’s a big gap, but the math to close it is relatively clear. With total turnout in Seattle around 55 percent, according to data from the Secretary of State’s office, there could be as many as 140,000 votes still uncounted. (This number can still fluctuate, since King County hasn’t finished counting every ballot). That’s about half the votes in Seattle. Based on those numbers, Wilson will need about 54 percent of the outstanding votes to make up her current 11,1134-vote gap. Put another way, she’ll need to gain eight points compared to her election-night showing in order to win.

Is that doable? Seattle’s electoral history suggests it is, although there are other factors at play in this election that I’ll get into in a moment. In 2023, for instance, Seattle City Councilmember Tammy Morales trailed challenger Tanya Woo by 8.9 points on election night and ended up closing that gap to win by 1.6 points. In 2021, mayoral candidate Lorena González came out of election night 29.6 points behind Harrell, narrowing that gap in late-counted votes to 17.4 points—a 12.2-point gain. Harrell obviously won that race, but late voters overwhelmingly favored González, the progressive candidate in that race.

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As I mentioned, there are other factors at play this time. Harrell is the incumbent, and he had millions of dollars behind him, including not just his own campaign (which has raised around $1.2 million) but a real estate and big business-backed PAC that could accept unlimited contributions (and has raised just over $1.8 million). Three million dollars can buy a lot of attack ads, and Harrell hammered away at Wilson, bombarding voters with online and TV ads, mailers, text messages, and social media buys in the final days of the campaign.

The pro-Harrell ads mocked Wilson as inexperienced and privileged, and Wilson (and her own PAC, which raised a comparatively meager $400,000) chose not to respond in kind, hitting Harrell on policy rather than highlighting his own political and personal shortcomings. These attacks may have made a dent in Wilson’s progressive support in the final days of the campaign, by creating the sense that she would be ill-equipped to handle federal attacks and funding cuts in the remaining years of the Trump Administration.

On the other hand, it’s also likely that some voters were turned off by Harrell’s over-the-top attacks and obvious contempt for his 43-year-old opponent, which could have flipped some votes or inspired some on-the-fence voters to fill out their ballots.

Today’s ballot drop, which will happen around 4 pm, should provide some answers to those questions.

Elections, Mayor Harrell

Uncertain Outcome in Mayor’s Race While Progressive Council, City Attorney Candidates Celebrate Wins

By Erica C. Barnett and Andrew Engelson

Mayor Bruce Harrell’s election night party started with an empty room—an hour before results came in, a handful of staff filled a corner of the vast, brightly lit Royal Esquire Club on Rainier Ave. S.—and ended with a prayer, as First AME Pastor Carey Anderson praised Jesus and asked God to “do what you do best and give us victory.”

Harrell himself seemed cautiously pleased with the night’s results, which put him at ahead of his challenger, labor activist Katie Wilson, 53.3 to 46.2 percent.

“This is still a nail-biter,” Harrell said shortly after the night’s tally of around 120,000 votes came in. “I mean, we know how votes change. I’d rather be where we are right now than where my opponent is, let me put it that way.”

“We always keep things positive,” Harrell said. We see a half full glass everywhere we go, because that’s our North Star.”

Across town, at an overflowing hall at El Centro de la Raza on Beacon Hill, Wilson said the numbers were “promising,” and suggested that the result could come down to the wire. “We are going to be pulling out all the stops in the next couple of weeks between now and when ballots are certified to make sure that every vote is counted,” she said.

“If we prevail in this race, which is very possible,  I want everyone in this great city of ours to have a roof over their head. I want world class transit. Stable, affordable housing for renters. 

Despite the less-than-definitive results, the crowd at Wilson’s event was buoyant and loud.  “This is your city,” Wilson told the crowd, who chanted, “Katie, Katie, Katie!” in response (At around the same moment, the crowd at the Royal Esquire Club was chanting “Bruce, Bruce, Bruce!”)

The uncertain result for the progressive activist trailing the establishment mayor contrasted starkly to election victories for progressives elsewhere in the country, including Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, who defeated Andrew Cuomo in the New York City mayor’s race, and Democrats claiming the governor’s mansions in Virginia and New York. 

Wilson’s campaign consultant Jake Simpson said he hoped the remaining votes would break strongly in Wilson’s favor. “This is well within the realm of what we were thinking was possible to overcome,” Simpson said. “We don’t feel like it’s an unsurmountable deficit.”

Harrell may currently lead by a 7.1-point margin, but in Seattle, late votes from younger, more left-leaning voters often swing races by eight points or more once all the votes are tallied. (Election-night results typically represent people who voted shortly after getting their ballots, a group that tends to skew older and more conservative).

On primary election night, Harrell had 44.9 percent of the vote to Wilson’s 46.2. with six other candidates splitting the rest of the votes; by the time all the ballots were counted, Wilson had increased her lead over Harrell to 50.8 to 41.2, meaning that Wilson gained 8.6 points once all the ballots were counted. If Wilson gained a similar amount in the general, she would defeat Harrell by 1.5 points.

But nothing in elections is apples to apples—more voters turn out for general elections than primaries, and candidates going after later, undecided voters have more time to sway the electorate with ads, mailers, and other last-minute persuasion efforts.

In the weeks leading up to the election, Harrell hit Wilson hard on several fronts, arguing that (as a college dropout whose parents helped her pay for child care during the campaign) she was too privileged and out of touch; lacked Harrell’s long experience in government, where he’s been for most of the last 20 years; and would send Seattle backward by allowing homeless encampments to proliferate and defunding the police.

Wilson, who said on election night that she was “glad we ran a clean campaign,” didn’t attack Harrell with similar vigor, leaving that to a union-backed PAC that just wasn’t as ferocious as the $2 million independent effort against Wilson, which was the source of some of the most intense (and misleading) attacks on her experience. (Several mailers from the Bruce Harrell for Seattle’s Future PAC printed a CV Wilson submitted to the city when applying for a board position 10 years ago and claimed it was her current résumé.)

Instead of striking back—focusing on, for example, concerns about Harrell’s ethics while in office, his frequent out-of-town travel, his troubled police department, or the allegations of misogyny against him—Wilson focused on her key issue‚ affordability, ducking opportunities to slam her opponent even as he treated her with clear, sometimes discomfiting contempt.

Campaign volunteer Suresh Chanmugam, an organizer with Tech 4 Housing, said he appreciated that Wilson kept it positive while Harrell went low.“They looked at internal polls and [going negative] was the only choice they had,” Chanmugan said. “They have all the money and they know that their only tactic is to spew half-truths and really negative character assassinations on someone who’s incredibly selfless.”

Harrell’s campaign party was filled with mayoral staffers, department heads, and other people who depend on Harrell for their positions. Down the street at Black and Tan Hall, where future city attorney Erika Evans, future city councilmember Dionne Foster, and victorious council incumbent Alexis Mercedes Rinck were celebrating their wins, one person quipped that the party was neutral ground—a place city employees could go without worrying they’d be caught failing to support the mayor, as they would if they attended Wilson’s party.

When PubliCola arrived, shortly before 9, we were told the place had “emptied out”—meaning it was only a mildly suffocating concentration of people—but that before the results were in, there had been a line down the block. The party was a foregone celebration. Rinck beat Republican fringe candidate Rachel Savage 79-21 to retain her citywide Position 8 seat, while Foster defeated incumbent Position 9 Councilmember Sara Nelson 58 to 42 percent. Evans beat Republican City Attorney Ann Davison 63 to 37 percent.

District 2 winner Eddie Lin, who was holding a splinter party of his own on Beacon Hill (just kidding, but our three-person election-night team couldn’t get there) was defeating staffer Adonis Ducksworth 69 to 31. It was a low-profile race with two affable candidates who genuinely seemed to get along, making them a boring breath of fresh air among many tense contests.

The race for King County Executive, like the Seattle mayor’s race, is still up in the air, with Girmay Zahilay leading his fellow King County Couniclmember Claudia Balducci 50 to 48, a gap of just over 4,000 votes.

The next batch of votes will come in tomorrow afternoon around 4:00; check PubliCola and Bluesky for updates.

Elections, Mayor Harrell

As Mayor, Harrell Paid for Luxury Upgrades on City Trips, Including a $12,000 Flight and $1,000-a-Night Hotels
Screenshot from Mayor Bruce Harrell’s budget speech.

Now he wants voters to believe he represents the working class—and that his opponent, renter Katie Wilson, is an out-of touch-elite.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell has attacked his opponent Katie Wilson for being insufficiently “working-class,” casting himself as a man of the people running against an out-of-touch elitist who “has never had to struggle because her parents are still paying her bills at age 43,” as a campaign spokesperson put it last month.

Harrell, 67, has been wealthy for decades, and his travel while in office reflects his access to a personal expense account most ordinary travelers would envy. While traveling on city business, the mayor has spent tens of thousands of dollars of his own money to upgrade his accommodations from the economy flights and midrange hotel paid for by the city to purchase first-class flights and luxury accommodations for himself and his wife, Joanne.

Over a two-year period, according to documents obtained through a records request, Harrell spent at least $55,000 on 16 first-class flights to attend conferences, tours, training sessions, and ceremonial events on behalf of the city, among at least 24 out-of-town trips he took during that period.

Hotels for 14 of those trips—the only ones for which the mayor’s office provided hotel expense information—cost at least another $24,000.

Only a small portion of this sum, which represents part of the mayor’s travel between February 2023 and February 2025, was reimbursed by the city; the mayor paid for upgrades, and all of the first lady’s travel, on his own dime.

Generally, the Harrells paid for their travel by credit card (often accumulating Alaska airline points), and received partial reimbursement from the city, reflecting what the same trip would cost for the mayor alone if he was traveling on the city’s middlebrow dime. Harrell was often accompanied by mayoral staff and his security detail on his travels, but the records we received do not include travel costs for the mayor’s retinue.

The records reveal the extent to which Harrell has been out of town while on the job—at least 11 weeks in 2023, seven in 2024, and four weeks in the first six months of 2025. This almost certainly underrepresents the mayor’s travel, since it does not include vacation and may not include every city-sponsored trip; for instance, the documents show almost no travel between August and December 2024, indicating either that the mayor did not leave town for five straight months or that the mayor’s office did not provide complete records for that year.

We chose to look at February 2023 through February 2025 because that was the longest period for which the mayor’s office provided a relatively complete set of records.

The pricey flights and luxe hotels reflect the dramatic wealth gap between of Seattle’s 57th mayor, who reported his family’s net worth at around $15 million in 2021, and most of his constituents, to whom lie-flat airplane beds and $1,000-a-night hotels are far out of reach.

The records, which consist mostly of emails between mayoral staff and Joanne Harrell about travel details and reimbursements, don’t include all hotel and flight expenses. For example, they exclude the cost of hotels and flights for at least seven trips, making a total tally of expenses impossible.

Still, the expense records we did receive show that the Harrells travel in style. Here are a few examples of the expenses the Harrells incurred while traveling on the city’s behalf. In most cases, the city paid only for the estimated cost of an economy class flight and the price for a mid-range hotel, typically between $250 and $300 a night, with the Harrells paying the difference. In some cases, such as the Bloomberg trip, conference organizers were the ones paying the cost of economy fares.

• $2,600 for one first-class ticket for Harrell to attend the Bloomberg City Data Alliance in Baltimore in May 2023;

• $7,800 for two first-class tickets for the Harrells to attend the Seattle Chamber’s annual International Leadership Mission in Bergen, Norway, where—according to the program—attendees discussed “Regional Promotion on the Global Stage Through Tourism,” learned about advancements maritime and airline industry sustainability, and participated in “Sister City Engagements” in Bergen and Reykjavik, Iceland.

• $13,000 for two first-class tickets to Tokyo and Seoul, South Korea in June 2023, for a nine-day trip billed as “G7 trip” in emails between Harrell’s staff and Joanne Harrell. Incomplete travel records for this trip suggest the Harrells’ hotels cost $1,000 for one night in Tokyo and $2,200 for three nights in Seoul.

• $5,500 for two first-class flights and $2,600 for three nights in a hotel in Washington, D.C. in 2024 for a trip that included a state dinner at the White House.

• $3,500 for two first-class tickets to Columbus, Ohio for a two-night trip to attend the US Conference of Mayors’ annual event. According to the mayoral staffer who calculated the city’s reimbursement, an economy-class ticket for the same trip was about $550.

The mayor is obviously free to spend his wealth however he chooses. But Harrell has repeatedly claimed the “working class” mantle in order attack his opponent, who shares a one-bedroom apartment with her husband and young child, as comparatively privileged and out of touch. It’s unclear whether voters who struggle to pay their own bills will buy into Harrell’s claim that he’s just like them.

Elections, Mayor Harrell, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Closing Arguments in the Mayoral Election, and a $5,000-a-Week “Outreach” Consultant

By Erica C. Barnett

On the final Seattle Nice episode before Tuesday’s election (look for our post-election show in your feed later this week!), the guys and I debated the two mayoral candidates’ closing arguments. Bruce Harrell, the incumbent, has argued that his opponent Katie Wilson lacks his experience in government and is a privileged brat because she dropped out of college and her parents have helped her pay for child care as she campaigns. Katie Wilson has argued that Harrell’s policies cater to his corporate backers and leave working and poor people behind; also, “he’s bad at the budget.”

David said no one he knows is enthusiastic about either Wilson or Harrell; I said he probably isn’t talking to younger people, or not-so-younger renters, who can’t afford Seattle’s ever-rising rent. Sandeep said Wilson’s supporters are part of the “movement Left.” That’s not how I’d describe Wilson’s base, which seems motivated by a candidate whose chief focus has been making Seattle more affordable, rather than maintaining the status quo.

We also discussed a story I wrote last week about Abdul Yusuf, the Eastside for Hire owner who’s getting $5,000 a week from the Harrell campaign for unspecified “outreach” in the Somali community. David and Sandeep both said it didn’t seem that unusual to them (Sandeep compared it to “walking-around money” distributed before elections in the 20th century South; David wanted to know how a campaign giving an individual $25,000 for “outreach” is any different than the way labor unions and business PACs spend money supporting candidates.

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As the author of the story, I argued that the two things have little in common. Unlike PACs, which put out campaign materials like ads and mailers, the nature of Yusuf’s work is unclear (although rumors abound). According to the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, he isn’t registered to collect democracy vouchers (worth up to $100 per voter) on behalf of any campaign, which anyone gathering vouchers is required to do. Nor has he ever done any consulting work for any campaign in the state prior to Harrell’s; his main lobbying work has been on behalf of rideshare drivers as the vice president of Drive Forward, the Uber-backed group that recently advocated against higher minimum wages for delivery drivers.

As I noted in my story, Yusuf’s weekly pay is the same amount his campaign consultant, Christian Sinderman, makes in a month. It’s also more than any full-time Harrell campaign staffer earns in a month, according to campaign finance reports.

Elections, homelessness, Mayor Harrell, Police, Seattle Nice, Trump

This Week on PubliCola: November 2, 2025

Exclusive election reporting, a Seattle City Attorney debate, SPD participates in Trump’s “Operation Take Back America,” and more.

Monday, October 27

Seattle’s Nicest City Attorney Debate

Seattle Nice moderated a debate between incumbent Ann Davison and challenger Erika Evans, and you can still listen to it before Election Day! The candidates debated the uses of Davison’s “high utilizers” list of frequent misdemeanor offenders, the elimination of community court (a therapeutic alternative to prosecution), and banishment zones for drug users and sex work.

City Official Used Internal Teams Chat to Solicit Department Directors’ Contact Info on Behalf of Harrell Campaign

PubliCola reported exclusively that the Office of Economic Development director under Mayor Bruce Harrell, Markham McIntyre, used an internal city of Seattle system to solicit department heads’ contact information on behalf of Harrell’s campaign; department heads who provided their information through the city Teams chat got emails from the campaign asking to help get Harrell reeelected.

Tuesday, October 28

A Closer Look at Mayor Harrell’s Rickety 2026 City Budget Proposal

We took a deep dive into Mayor Bruce Harrell’s 2026 budget, which uses a series of short-term budget tricks to pay for a ton of new spending next year while creating massive budget shortfalls for the future mayor and city council. The council’s proposed budget amendments only make this structural problem worse by piling on still more new spending.

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Harrell Campaign Paid a Consultant $5,000 a Week for “Outreach and Engagement,” Won’t Say Why

Another PubliCola exclusive: The Harrell campaign paid Abdul Yusuf, a rideshare company owner active in the Somali community, $5,000 a week—the same amount Harrell’s consultant Christian Sinderman gets from the campaign in a month—to do unspecified “outreach and engagement” to the Somali community. The nature of this outreach is unclear; Yusuf is not authorized by the city to collect vouchers for the campaign.

With Their Jobs on the Line, Half the City’s Department Heads Gave to Harrell’s Campaign

It’s not unusual for some city employees to give money to the incumbent. What is highly unusual is for more than half the city’s department heads and director-level employees to donate to their boss, as they have to Harrell. The donations suggest less a spontaneous outpouring of support for the mayor than an expectation that donating to Harrell’s campaign is a good form of job security.

Friday, October 31

UPDATED: Homelessness Authority Cuts 28 Positions, Including Deputy CEO, Finance Director, and General Counsel

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority laid off 13 staff and cut 15 vacant positions, citing a need to save nearly $5 million in administrative costs the city has declined to fund. These jobs include several top executive roles, including the deputy CEO with whom CEO Kelly Kinnison clashed over Kinnison’s hiring decisions. In an internal email announcing the layoffs, Kinnison also said she was hiring five new positions, including three executive-level staff.

SPD Drug Arrests Were Part of Trump’s Anti-Immigrant “Operation Take Back America”

In a press release from the Trump Department of Justice, SPD Chief Shon Barnes thanked “federal partners” for aiding in the arrests of 10 people accused of participating in a drug-trafficking ring earlier this week. The arrests were part of an anti-immigration effort by the Trump Administration called “Operation Take Back America,” whose top goal is to “repel the invasion of illegal immigration.”

Elections, Mayor Harrell

With Their Jobs on the Line, Half the City’s Department Heads Gave to Harrell’s Campaign

By Erica C. Barnett

The directors of 20 Seattle departments have donated money to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s campaign effort—about half the city’s department directors, almost all of whom were appointed by Harrell. Most have given between $500 and $650, which is the maximum amount the campaign can accept under city campaign finance law. Deputy directors, mayoral staff, and the directors of various ad hoc initiatives, including Harrell’s One Seattle Graffiti Plan and FIFA World Cup planning, have also pitched in to help their boss’ election chances.

It’s likely that not all the contributions represent a spontaneous outpouring of support for the incumbent. According to multiple City Hall sources with direct knowledge of the situation, Harrell has not-no-subtly encouraged his appointees to back his campaign, leaving some with the impression they’ll have more job security in a second Harrell term if they help him defeat his challenger, Katie Wilson. As head of the city’s executive branch, the mayor has the authority to hire and fire department heads at will. He also negotiates pay and working conditions with the unions that represent city employees.

Because Harrell is the first mayor to both run for reelection and make it out of the primary since Greg Nickels, there is no precisely comparable data showing campaign contributions from city department heads for a mayor seeking reelection. The closest recent comparison is former mayor Jenny Durkan, the establishment choice against lefty activist Cary Moon in 2017. Durkan received a single contribution from one city department director,  and pulled in $8,750 from all city employees.

The city of Seattle department heads who have given at least $500 to Harrell include: City Budget Office director Dan Eder; Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs Director Hamdi Mohamed; Human Services Department Director Tanya Kim; Seattle Parks Director A.P. Diaz; Office of Police Accountability Director Bonnie Glenn; Office for Civil Rights Director Derrick Wheeler-Smith; Seattle Department of Transportation Director Adiam Emery; Seattle Office of Planning and Development Director Rico Quirindongo; and Information Technology Director Rob Lloyd.

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Staffers for the mayor himself—including communications director Jamie Housen, chief of staff Andrew Myerberg, deputy chief of staff Dan Nolte, and deputy mayors Greg Wong and Tim Burgess (who also contributed $2,500 to the Bruce Harrell for Seattle’s Future PAC and is one of its leaders)— have also contributed thousands of dollars, collectively, to their boss’ campaign. Paul Jackson, Harrell’s Graffiti Policy and Initiatives director, has also maxed out to Harrell.

As we reported Monday, Seattle Office of Economic Development director Markham McIntyre—one of the directors who maxed out to Harrell—used the city’s official Teams platform to ask department directors for their contact information on behalf of the Harrell campaign, whose campaign manager a solicitation to help Harrell get reelected to every department director on the list. This week, the city council will discuss OED’s 2026 budget, which Harrell proposed increasing next year by a startling 30 percent—a larger increase, on a percentage basis, than any other department.

City council staff highlighted this discrepancy in a budget memo, noting that almost all of the new business programs Harrell is proposing are billed as “one-time additions,” despite being the kinds of programs that are likely to “create expectations in community for ongoing support beyond 2026.” Like many other “one-time” adds in Harrell’s budget, this new spending provides a burst of funding for key constituencies (small businesses, retail stores, and business groups in specific neighborhoods, like Lake City and Little Saigon) while creating a fiscal cliff that the next mayor and city council will have to address next year.

Wilson, who was endorsed by a union that represents thousands of city workers, PROTEC17, has received a little over $5,000 in contributions from city employees—about a quarter of the $20,000 city employees have given to their current boss.

erica@publicola.com