Tag: campaign contributions

campaign finance, City Council, Elections

Where This Year’s Campaign Money Is Coming From

By Erica C. Barnett

Seven weeks out from the August primary, at least five candidates have raised enough to hit the city’s primary-election spending caps ($400,000 for mayoral candidates, $187,500 for city council) and can’t go over that limit unless a candidate who is not participating in the democracy voucher program (such as Art Langlie in the mayor’s race or Sara Nelson in the race for City Council Position 9) or an independent expenditure campaign (such as Bruce Harrell for Seattle’s Future, in the mayor’s race) exceeds the limit.

Other campaigns, such as the efforts to pass a charter initiative on homelessness and recall city council member Kshama Sawant, aren’t subject to those limits and are free to raise and spend as much money as they want—about half a million so far, respectively, although those numbers are sure to balloon if both measures make it onto the November ballot.

But where is the money coming from? For most of this year’s major citywide campaigns, the answer is simple (and fairly predictable): Contributions are coming in from all over the city, from far North Seattle to Rainier Beach, with a small percentage from outside city limits. But a few campaigns defy this trajectory, in telling ways.

The first, and most striking, category are the campaigns that are funded largely from people  outside the city—people who won’t be directly impacted by who gets elected or the results of the two initiative campaigns.

In the mayoral race, Casey Sixkiller and Art Langlie—a long-shot candidate who has received outsize coverage from the city’s media establishment—have both gotten about half their money from out of town so far: 46 percent and 54 percent, respectively. (Former city council member Bruce Harrell is in a distant third, with 22 percent of his funds coming from out of town).

Most of Langlie’s out-of-town money comes from contributors in Seattle’s suburbs, including Bellevue, Mercer Island, and Mukilteo; a large plurality (87 out of 300) list their occupation as either “retired” or “homemaker.” Many of Sixkiller’s out-of-town contributions come from further afield, including in and around Washington, D.C., where Sixkiller was a longtime lobbyist.

The pro- and anti-Sawant campaigns reverse the predictable progressive-conservative political split, where progressive money comes from the city and conservative campaigns tap out-of-town connections. Instead, most of the pro-Sawant money so far has come from out of town, while the biggest chunk of funds for the Recall Sawant campaign (42 percent) has come from residents of District 3, which Sawant represents. Only 16 percent of the money for the recall campaign came from outside the city.

In contrast, 61 percent of the anti-recall campaign’s funding has come from outside city limits, the majority from far-flung places like Boston, Minneapolis, and Chicago. Just 18 percent of the Kshama Solidarity Campaign’s funding so far is from inside District 3.

If the recall measure makes it onto the November ballot, it could be one of the most expensive campaigns, measured by vote, in the city’s history. In 2019, according to King County elections, 44,043 people voted in the District 3 council election. The two campaigns have raised more than a million dollars so far; if the election were held today with similar turnout, the campaigns would have spent nearly $24 a vote. Continue reading “Where This Year’s Campaign Money Is Coming From” →

Affordability, City Council, City Hall, Election 2017, Elections, homelessness, housing, Morning Crank, Renters

Morning Crank: How About You Just Rent Them the Apartment?


Image result for no vacancy sign

1. The council’s civil rights, utilities, economic development, and arts committee unanimously passed legislation yesterday morning that will bar landlords from considering potential tenants’ criminal records, unless they were convicted of a sex offense as an adult. Council member Mike O’Brien offered two amendments to the legislation, which I wrote about last week: The first removes an exemption to the new rule for landlords of buildings with four units or fewer who live on site, and the second removes the so-called two-year lookback, which would have allowed landlords to consider a tenant’s criminal history going back two years.

Council member Debora Juarez, a former Superior and Municipal Court judge, said both amendments addressed a fundamental problem with the original bill: It created different classes of landlords and renters. The four-unit exemption, she said, gave extra privileges—essentially, the right to discriminate—to landlords who happened to own smaller buildings and live in one of the units, and the two-year lookback put tenants with more recent criminal histories in the position of begging landlords, on a case-by-case basis, to take them despite their criminal record. “It’s pretty clear that people of color and low-income people are being disproportionately denied and discriminated against … based on the fact that they have criminal records,” Juarez said. “I think you should just eliminate [the lookback period]. How about you don’t consider anything [other than a tenant’s ability to pay]—you just rent them the apartment?”

Herbold, who expressed concern last week that some small landlords might get out of the business if they had to rent to people with recent criminal records, said yesterday that she had decided “to vote according to my values and what I feel is best for renters in this city.” The proposal goes to the full council next Monday.

2. Council member Sally Bagshaw’s health and human services committee will take up the recommendations of the Vehicular Living Workgroup, which has been meeting since March to come up with “solutions that meet the needs of vulnerable populations living in vehicles due to inaccessible housing and address neighborhood impacts of vehicular living,” at 2:00 this afternoon. The meeting will be just for discussion; no legislation will be introduced.

The recommendations include a mitigation fund to help RV residents and other people living in their vehicles pay their parking tickets; additional outreach services; and a citywide “safe parking” program that would allow people living in vehicles to park safely in small groups (no more than five or six vehicles at one place) around the city. The recommendations do not, notably, include banning the estimated 1,000 people who live in their vehicles from parking inside city limits, and that has gotten the attention of the folks at Safe Seattle, a group opposed to allowing people to live outdoors or in their vehicles. Commenters on the group’s Facebook page have called Bagshaw “dangerous,” accused the council of “turning our precious city streets into desolate drug & crime ridden RV parks,” included the hashtag “shitforbrains,” and accused council member O’Brien of intentionally unleashing “blight” throughout the city as part of a conspiracy to drive families to the suburbs so the whole city can be redeveloped into apartments.

The public comment period will be 20 minutes.

3. Every year, lefty candidates in Seattle races try to distinguish themselves by pledging “not to accept any money from corporations or developers,” suggesting by implication that their opponent is financed by (and in the pocket of) big corporations. For example, in this year’s mayoral race, Cary Moon, and Nikkita Oliver both pledged that they would not take direct contributions from corporations or developers, and in the race to fill city council Position 8, both Jon Grant and Teresa Mosqueda made a similar vow Moon and Oliver were trying to distinguish themselves from their business-endorsed opponent Jenny Durkan, and Grant and Mosqueda from their business-endorsed opponent Sara Nelson.

It all sounds very principled: “Even if it costs me the election, I will decline all corporate contributions, because my values aren’t corporate values.” But it’s just about the easiest promise any candidate can make—because corporate contributions are basically nonexistent in Seattle.

Obviously, the Seattle Chamber and other business groups support certain candidates (often, in recent years, by funding independent expenditure campaigns), but corporations don’t typically give to individual candidates, making this perennial pledge little more than an empty applause line. I took a look at the contributor lists for the frontrunners in this year’s mayoral and council races, and found that, after Oliver and Moon (who, indeed, took no direct contributions from business), the candidate who took the smallest percentage of contributions from businesses—just 1 percent—was actually … Jenny Durkan. (Jessyn Farrell tied Durkan’s 1 percent.) Three percent of populist state legislator Bob Hasegawa’s contributions came from businesses, as did 2 percent of Mike McGinn’s. Worth noting: 60 percent of Moon’s money came from her own bank account; as Moon herself has said, she was able to self-finance largely because of family money, which came from the family … business.

In Position 8, the pattern is similar. While neither Mosqueda nor Grant received any money from businesses, “business” candidate Nelson got just 4 percent of her money from businesses.

All candidates, including Oliver, Moon, Mosqueda, and Grant, received contributions from people who work for corporations, including Amazon, Microsoft, Vulcan, and Google.

So the next time a candidate points to “refusing corporate contributions” as a point of pride, you might want to point out that businesses don’t really contribute to Seattle campaigns—even to “business” candidates.

* Of course, businesses do fund independent expenditure campaigns, which cannot be coordinated with candidates.

** Part of the reason business contributions make up such a small percentage of campaign war chests in Seattle is that contributions are limited to $500. The limit is designed to reduce the influence any one contributor can have over a candidate, and it serves its purpose.

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