Tag: Election 2024

Maybe Metropolis, Trump

Three Things I’m Worried About: Trickle-Down Bullying; Martial Law; and Acquiescence
The grim electoral map, via NYT.

By Josh Feit

1. Trickle-down Bullying

Trump’s progenitor, Ronald Reagan, gave us trickle-down economics. Donald Trump is going to give us trickle-down bullying.

Trump’s recurring temper tantrums—often misogynistic or racist, but at their core, always about intimidation rather than discourse—have empowered his MAGA faithful. Aggrieved bros are now free to scoff at longstanding civic standards that have traditionally helped many Americans (though, admittedly, by no means all) go about their daily lives with a sense of safety and belonging.

It’s already begun in the immediate wake of Trump’s election victory with an anonymous racist text message campaign aimed at African Americans. And soon enough, you’re going to see widespread, flippant and aggressive unchecked macho hysterics out in the open—at the grocery store; on the bus; at the bank; on airplanes; in the park; at restaurants; at the workplace; on college campuses; and in high-school hallways (teen boys this week are already taunting: “your body, my choice.”)

This represents one of the true nightmares about Trump’s looming return to power, and also one of the glaring ironies: Under Trump, “law and order” will actually mean lawlessness. Trumpism will officially remove the legal guardrails against abusive social behavior.

In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, a civil rights and civil liberties agenda bloomed in America. After Congress enshrined a series of universal protections into law, this humanist expansion of rights defined late 20th-century and early 21st-century jurisprudence. (You can read about my own father’s Supreme Court-level contribution here.) The resulting civil rights infrastructure, such as workplace safety and consumer protection, is about to be ignored, gutted, and reversed.

From police brutality to your kid getting bullied at school; from gender discrimination in the workplace to corruption in the marketplace; from hate crimes to casual mistreatment during everyday interactions, there will be no avenue for recourse or accountability.

Now that Trumpism has made it socially acceptable to bully, gaslight, and hate your neighbor, the courts will follow the zeitgeist. Longstanding legal protections will soon be cast aside by Trump-appointed judges. Right-wing legal firms are certainly already lining up cases aimed at officially striking down much of the mid-to-late 20th century’s civil rights legacy. We’ve already witnessed the end of national abortion rights, affirmative action, and much of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

In the meantime, now that voters have signed off on an anti-democratic backlash against egalitarianism, the world of bullying with impunity is upon us.

A small personal example that certainly pales in comparison to what’s about to crash down on immigrants and trans people, but in the Summer of 2022, XDX and I stopped at a diner on Interstate 84 on our way back from a wedding in Boise, Idaho. We were an interracial couple; she’s Chinese, I’m white and look (and am) Jewish. Bad vibe in there, and we hustled out pretty quickly after lunch under some unfriendly glares. Again, hardly comparable to what’s in store for other targeted groups, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable sitting down in that Idaho diner today.

2. Military Rule Coming to a City Near You

Take no comfort in the fact that you live in a blue state—or, more specifically, in a city. America’s metro islands of pluralism are about to become the beachheads of our tragic future.

Trump’s mass deportation agenda will begin in cities. Federal troops will sync with local police (and with Proud Boys vigilante “patriots” rushing in to help), immediately weakening local autonomy and setting the stage for standoffs between citizens and law enforcement. The ensuing civil unrest will give Trump the “Reichstag fire” excuse he needs to cue general clampdowns and martial law in the “crime-ridden” cities he already demonized on the campaign trail.

This is 1939 Nazi playbook stuff.

In 2025, Hitler’s Jews are Trump’s immigrants– “poisoning the blood of the nation.”

3. Acquiescence

I learned about the Holocaust in middle school in Ms. Clemmer’s class. Stunned to find out that Adolf Hitler came to power through legitimate means rather than through some violent takeover, we asked “How could this happen?” Ms. Clemmer told us about Germany’s staggering inflation and taught us about scapegoating (Jews and Berlin elites). Eighth-grade reading level and all, this was hardly difficult to comprehend.

The top reasons Trump won? Persistent inflation, scapegoating immigrants, and pointing at cultural elites. Yet, rather than continuing to ring alarm bells about the terrifying historic parallel at hand as they did during the election (calling out how Trump’s language directly sampled Hitler’s, for example), the news media are suddenly treating Tuesday’s results as a basic election postmortem story. They are pretending we still live in a normal electoral setting as they obliviously do traditional election analysis pieces.

Worse, the analysis itself is playing into Trump’s hands by parroting the MAGA POV: Liberal media elites are now blaming the liberal elites for not listening to “real” Americans, and … Hey, stop condescending to MAGA voters, maybe their complaints about immigrants have merit. I mean, you know, immigrants may not actually have been eating dogs, but Trump was just joking, and there’s a larger point here …

Never mind that MAGA voters have consistently condescended to “libtards” too, liberals are now solicitously adopting a politicized version of the facile Hallmark Channel narrative of America, where the hard-charging city girl returns to her small hometown and realizes she’s lost touch with what’s important in the world as she falls in love with a “regular” guy. In short: People who choose to live in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle (as well as in Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta) are the bad guys. We aren’t real Americans, we’re Trump’s “enemy within.”

I’m not saying there isn’t (a lot of) truth in the notion that the establishment has hurt the working class. That’s 100 percent correct, though it’s GOP policies like tax cuts for the wealthy, anti-union laws, and eviscerating corporate regulations that have helped capitalism run amok.

And there’s a big difference between condescension and calling out racism and bigotry; denouncing misogyny and transphobia; exposing corporate fraud; fact-checking and correcting conspiracy theories; and defending science and the rule of law.

I’d add that plenty of “regular” folks, not just liberal snobs, have called BS when their neighbors lean into bigotry—fighting against transphobia for one inspiring example, here.

People who voted for Trump are grownups. Treating people as grownups means not giving them a pass on supporting a shoddy demagogue who has been found guilty of fraud and sexual abuse, who issues racist statement after racist statement, who shamelessly lies. Sorry New York Times, I’m not interested in putting the MAGA voter under a microscope as if they’re some magical species that I fail to understand.

I understood them in 2016, and, having listened to Trump’s grievances about pet-eating immigrants, I understand them in 2024.

Ceding the post-election narrative to the Trumpist talking point that liberals have somehow deeply offended “authentic” Americans is the first step of acquiescence that allows the winners (MAGA, in this case) to write the history.

When you write the history, you control the future. The notion of a MAGA future is a grim one.

Flash back to November 8, 2016: Late in the night after Trump won the election, angry and emotional crowds gathered for impromptu and noisy protests in Seattle’s urban epicenter, Capitol Hill.

Fast forward to this past Tuesday night in the same neighborhood. Acceptance and fatigue have apparently set in. After it was clear Trump was going to win the election, Capitol Hill was relatively empty and totally subdued. I left an election night event at 8:45 and sat at a bar drinking a whiskey in morose silence while a smattering of folks, including a couple who seemed to be on a successful first date, chatted amiably.

josh@publicola.com

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City Council, Elections

Alexis Mercedes Rinck Wins Decisively Over Appointed City Council Incumbent Tanya Woo

By Erica C. Barnett

While the national election results slowly rolled in on a small TV screen oriented toward in the back bar, the crowd at St. John’s Bar & Eatery was incongruously jubilant as they celebrated first-time candidate Alexis Mercedes Rinck’s overwhelming victory—57 to 42 percent!—over appointed city council incumbent Tanya Woo.

(Shaun Scott, who previously ran against now-former council member Alex Pedersen, won the open 43rd District state House even more decisively over We Heart Seattle founder Andrea Suarez, with 68 percent of the election-night ballot drop, and 46th District Rep. Darya Farivar won reelection with 88 percent; it was their party too, but we’re focusing on the local council race.)

“YEEEEEEEEEEEEAHH!!” someone yelled as the 8:15 results rolled in, and it was easy to harbor a brief hope that Pennsylvania had somehow, against all odds, swung for Harris. But no—the results were in for local races. And despite the insistence of some local politicos that Presidential election years have a more conservative voter base, Rinck was much further ahead than she was at this time in the August primary, when she led Woo 47 to 41. (Rinck ultimately won the primary by 50-38).

“We didn’t just win an election,” Rinck said last night. “We turned a new page. We wrote a new chapter, one that says this city belongs to everyone.”

Rinck, at 29 the youngest person ever elected to the Seattle City Council, won decisively despite a late-breaking spend by a business and real-estate-funded PAC that tried to paint her as a radical leftist who would eliminate funding for police, encourage encampments everywhere, and “bankrupt the city” by pouring money into corrupt anti-homelessness schemes.

They also misspelled her name, in a touch of extra sloppiness that accentuated the plug-and-play laziness of the last-minute hit job.

Rinck’s election doubles the number of progressives on the nine-member council to two, including District 2 Councilmember Tammy Morales, who defeated Woo last year and was in the celebratory crowd last night, along with former council members Lisa Herbold and Andrew Lewis, who quipped: “Tell Sandeep the NPI poll WAS wrong—it totally underestimated Alexis’ win!”)

Woo did not have a public election-night party.

Rinck and Morales won’t be able to counterbalance the council’s recent rightward tip on their own; with five new council members still in their first years, the council majority will remain centrist-to-conservative for several years to come. But her margin of victory in this citywide race could be a cause of concern for Council President Sara Nelson, who defeated Nikkita Oliver in 2021 in the same backlash election that put Republican Ann Davison in charge of the city attorney’s office. (Nelson and Davison both lost their previous races for city council, in 2017 and 2019, respectively).

Davison is up for reelection next year, too, as is Mayor Bruce Harrell. And while there’s no way to know yet if this year’s council election results will resonate in next year’s lower-turnout, odd-year election, it’s clear that this year at least, local voters weren’t interested in more of the same. Because Woo is serving out the remainder of former councilmember Teresa Mosqueda’s 2021-2025 term, Rinck will take office immediately after the election is certified on November 26 and will have to run again next year.

 

City Council, Elections

Seattle Nice: Is the Seattle City Council Race Over?

By Erica C. Barnett

The dreaded presidential election is finally upon us, and to distract ourselves, we spent most of this week’s podcast talking about the most interesting local election—the race between appointed city council incumbent Tanya Woo and her challenger, Alexis Mercedes Rinck. Woo, appointed to her citywide seat after losing to Tammy Morales in District 2, has never won an election, and Rinck shellacked her in the low-turnout August primary, winning by a nearly 12-point margin.

Still, Sandeep says we shouldn’t count Woo out, arguing that in Seattle, the electorate skews more conservative than in primary elections. In high-turnout elections like this one, he argued, a lot of voters are “blank slates” with no real awareness of local issues. Fair enough, but I don’t see how this will directly benefit Woo over Rinck (despite her 10 months on the council, she’s little-known, and it’s not like the ballot says which candidate is the incumbent). In any case, we’ll know soon enough whether Sandeep’s preferred candidate pulled an upset, or if Rinck will continue her winning streak.

We also discussed the latest twist in the ongoing saga of ex-police chief Adrian Diaz, who, despite being the former chief, remains on SPD’s payroll at a salary of almost $340,000 a year. Last week, interim Police Chief Sue Rahr put Diaz on leave, along with his former chief of staff, Jamie Tompkins, accusing both of lying during an investigation.

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The Office of Police Accountability launched an investigation into Diaz after several people filed complaints alleging that he and Tompkins had a romantic relationship and that he hired the former FOX 13 reporter into a high-level position without disclosing that relationship. Overall, there more than 50 complaints have been filed against Diaz, including allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination. Mayor Bruce Harrell removed Diaz from his position in May.

Diaz has denied all the allegations and filed a $10 million tort claim against the city immediately after his suspension, alleging discrimination. Shortly after Harrell removed him, he went on a conservative talk show to announce that he is gay and suggest that this was a defense against the allegations against him, including sexual harassment and the allegations of an inappropriate relationship with Tompkins. Diaz is married to a woman.

Finally, we took a minute to talk about Councilmember Rob Saka’s dogged efforts to dismantle a traffic safety barrier that prevented him from making a left turn into the parking lot of his kids’ preschool, which has has framed as a matter of racial justice and public safety for people in the Delridge neighborhood.

City Council, Elections, Morning Fizz

Lived Experience Coalition Says KCRHA Owes Them $365,000; Tanya Woo Proposes No-Protest Zones Around Politicians’ Houses

1. In a Q&A with a North Seattle neighborhood group, Seattle City Councilmember Tanya Woo said that if she’s elected in November, she’ll propose legislation to create “buffer zones” in the public space around local elected officials’ houses where people will not be allowed to protest.

The legislation Woo contemplates would establish “a set distance or buffer zone to protect personal safety while ensuring protests take place in appropriate public spaces where free speech can be exercised without infringing on the well-being of individuals.” Police would be on hand to make sure protesters stay inside officially sanctioned protest areas—which, practically speaking, would be in front of other people’s homes.

“I fully support the right to protest,” she told Neighborhoods for Smart Streets, which originally formed to oppose bike lanes in Northeast Seattle, but “I also believe there are limits when it comes to personal safety and privacy. Protesting at the homes of elected officials crosses that line.”

Woo is not, strictly speaking, an elected official—the council, which took a more conservative turn in the last election, appointed her to a citywide position after she lost to District 2 incumbent Tammy Morales, who is now the lone left on the council.

Seattle has a long history of protests on the public streets and sidewalks outside elected officials’ homes, and of enforcing existing laws against harassment and violence when people cross legal lines. In 2012, police investigated when protesters through rocks through the window of then-mayor Mike McGinn’s home in Greenwood. In contrast,  no arrests were made when activists with the group SHARE camped in public areas outside council members’ houses, starting with now-Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess, to demand funding for bus tickets.

The most famous “no-protest zone” in Seattle’s history occurred during the WTO protests in 1999, and led to years of lawsuits, costing the city millions of dollars in payouts and legal fees.

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2. Members of the Lived Experience Coalition, an organization that was once closely linked with the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, say the KCRHA owes them more than $365,000.

Coalition members and advocates, including several who sit on the KCRHA’s implementation board, said it was imperative that the KCRHA pay the Lived Experience Coalition what they say they are owed. “I don’t understand how a organization can be stood up to support or center lived experience voices, use lived experience to do work, and then dismiss them and not pay them,” said implementation board and LEC member Zsa Zsa Floyd. “It saddens me that we become so political and so money-hungry that we step on, step over, and dismiss folks … who have done work.”

“It’s not just about the money that’s owed to us, it’s about respect and recognition for the invaluable contributions we make,” LEC member Courtney Love told the board. “When we don’t receive the support we are owed, it undermines not only our efforts, but also the trust we strive to build within our community.

The dispute stems from work the LEC did in 2022 and 2023, for which the KCRHA contends they did not have a formal contract. The work included standing up a Youth Action Board—a requirement for the KCRHA to apply for a new federal youth homelessness pilot program—as well as efforts to get unsheltered people indoors in the winter of 2022-2023 and work to create a new ombuds office for the agency.

During last week’s meeting, KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison said the LEC had no written contract with KCRHA to do the work for which they’re now demanding payment. The LEC disputes this, saying that an email from former KCRHA staffer Meg Barclay, in which Barclay assured the LEC they would commit to paying them for the work they did in 2023, constituted an informal, but official, contract.

KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge said agency officials have repeatedly told the LEC that the group “didn’t have a contract with KCRHA and are not owed for the submitted reimbursements. We’ve meticulously reviewed the documentation and determined they were reimbursed by Building Changes [a separate nonprofit that served as the LEC’s fiscal sponsor] with the exception of a small amount that individuals would need to submit documentation for.”

Building Changes, which is no longer the LEC’s fiscal sponsor, declined to comment on its payments to the LEC.

But a representative for the LEC told PubliCola the LEC never received outside compensation for their work, saying the payment from Building Changes came out of the LEC’s own reserves. The LEC and Building Changes parted ways in 2023 amid a dispute over who was to blame when the LEC ran out of money to run an emergency hotel-based shelter program, which the KCRHA took over in April of that year.

“Building Changes was our fiscal sponsor at the time and utilized LEC’s reserves to pay folks,” the LEC representative said. “It is absolutely an outrageous claim and a deflection that Building Changes utilized their funds to pay LEC. …During the 2022 contract year, before LEC had any reserves, Building Changes halted payments instead of allowing LEC to utilize their reserves. LEC learned from this and ensured that we had funds to cover expenses given KCRHA’s not being timely with contracts.”

The implementation board agreed last week to discuss the payment dispute at its next meeting, on November 13. The board is under a time crunch: Under a new interlocal agreement adopted by Seattle and King County, the board will dissolve at the end of the year and be replaced by the agency’s governing board, which is made up of current elected officials from around the region.

City Council, Elections

Seattle Nice: Listen to the City Council Debate Before You Vote!

By Erica C. Barnett

If you weren’t able to make it out to our live Seattle City Council Position 8 debate at Town Hall on Tuesday, don’t worry—you can listen to an edited version of that debate (minus the part where I did an impression of the Seattle City Council and yelled, ‘Police!!’ when people started getting rowdy) on this week’s Seattle Nice podcast.

For more than an hour an hour, appointed incumbent Tanya Woo and challenger Alexis Mercedes Rinck battled it out over the most important local issues, including taxes, homelessness, police recruitment, and density.

Asked about her approach to homelessness, Woo said she supported Mayor Bruce Harrell’s encampment removal policy, in which an advance team of city workers tells people living in encampments about available shelter beds prior to a sweep, because it “involves sending out outreach workers to make contact and offer shelter to every single person.”

Rinck, who previously worked as a subregional planner for the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, said she preferred a strategy the state Department of Transportation has been using for encampments on state right-of-way, which involves longer-term, intensive outreach and placement in stable shelter and housing. “We actually found that 73 percent of folks who went through that program remained housed a year later,” Rinck said.

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While Rinck said she would support a local capital gains tax to raise revenue instead of raiding funds from the JumpStart payroll tax, Woo said that if progressive taxes were possible, “it would have been done”; she argued that the mayor’s budget plan, which uses $287 million in payroll tax funding to backfill a general-fund deficit, is “not different than what we have been doing in previous years,” when the council adopted law allowing future councils to use a limited amount of revenues this way.

Neither candidate really answered a question about the city’s practice of vastly over-funding the police department by paying for vacant “ghost” positions—so called because they are not inhabited by human bodies, and will not, according to SPD’s own projections, be filled during this budget year. SPD argues that they need this extra spending authority to pay for overtime and unexpected costs during the year.

Woo said police were “demoralized” during the “defund the police” movement so it’s important to “hold positions” for people to apply now that the political atmosphere has shifted; she also said, incorrectly, that the police have been impacted by a citywide hiring freeze. (Police, fire, and the 911 department were all exempt from the freeze.) Rinck said she wanted to get the response times for the highest-priority calls down to seven minutes, while scaling up other types of emergency response like behavioral health crisis response teams.

We also got into congestion pricing, drug policy, tree protections, and much more. If you’re unsure who to vote for in this race, or just want to learn more about the candidates, this debate—moderated by me, David Hyde, and Sandeep Kaushik—is a great place to start.

City Council, Elections

Seattle Nice Debate Night!

Cringe through the VP debate, then watch your Seattle Nice hosts grill the city council candidates live at Town Hall Seattle

By Erica C. Barnett

Join the hosts of Seattle Nice—that’s me, Sandeep Kaushik, and David Hyde, for a debate watch party at Town Hall Seattle at 6 pm on Tuesday, October 1!

We’ll livestream the vice presidential debate on stage (with beer and wine available for all your J.D. Vance “childless women” drinking games), followed by an in-person debate between the candidates for Seattle City Council Position 8, Tanya Woo and Alexis Mercedes Rinck.

Woo, a Chinatown-International advocate who led the fight against the expansion of a Salvation Army shelter near the neighborhood, was appointed by the Seattle City Council to a citywide position after she narrowly lost her race against District 2 incumbent Tammy Morales. Rinck, who works as a fiscal policy analyst at the University of Washington, led subregional planning for the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, an agency Woo recently said had “failed” in its mission.

We’ll talk about the candidates’ records, along with issues like police funding, homeless encampment sweeps, and the council’s recent crackdowns on drug users and sex workers, at this lively debate next week. We hope to see you there!

Seattle City Council Debate and VP Debate Livestream

The Great Hall, Town Hall Seattle
1119 Eighth Avenue (enter on Eighth Avenue)
Tuesday, October 1, 6:00 pm