Tag: Katie Wilson

Elections

Seattle Nice: Did Katie Wilson Win or Did Bruce Harrell Lose?

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).

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

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.

Elections

Wilson Wins In a Squeaker (That Should Not Have Been This Close)

By Erica C. Barnett

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.).

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

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.

Elections, Mayor Harrell

Mayor Katie Wilson? It’s Sure Looking That Way!

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayoral candidate Katie Wilson edged above 50 percent of the vote on Tuesday, in the final sizeable batch of ballots King County Elections expects to count. The 6,200 new ballots represent almost all of the 6,400 ballots that were still outstanding as of Monday, and Wilson received just over 60 percent of that batch, boosting her lead over Harrell to 1,346 votes, or 0.49 percent.

Those numbers are still within the margins that trigger an automatic machine recount, which is required when two candidates are less than 2,000 votes and less than half a percentage point apart.

This mayor’s race is the closest in modern history; you’d have to go back to 1906, when William Hickman Moore defeated Jonathan Riplinger by 15 votes, to find a closer race. That election isn’t really comparable, though; among other differences, women couldn’t vote, and the total number of votes was less than 17,000.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

“We want to wait until every vote has been counted, but we believe that we’ve won this race,” campaign manager Alex Gallo-Brown said. “We’re just inside the mandatory recount threshold, but as we continue to cure ballots with our huge turnout of volunteers, we’re hopeful that we can put the campaign behind us soon and focus on governing the city.” Campaigns “cure” ballots by reaching out to voters whose ballots have been challenged and making sure their signatures count.

“While not the direction we were hoping for, this remains a very close race, and we want to ensure every vote is counted,” a spokesperson for the Harrell campaign said. “We are grateful to our volunteers, who continue to reach out to voters, and will see how the final ballots are tallied.”
(Footnote: Today’s count showed fewer write-in ballots than yesterday’s. A spokesperson for King County Elections said this was because some people wrote one of the two candidates in instead of filling in the circle. “Our team actually reviews every write-in vote and if an actual candidate is written-in (on the line), that counts for the candidate’s total,” the spokesperson said. “A lot of that work happened today as part of regular quality control so that’s why you saw the write-ins go down and the candidate totals go up.”

 

Elections, Mayor Harrell

Katie Wilson Leads Incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell by 91 Votes

 

I mean…

 

By Erica C. Barnett

In the latest batch of ballots counted by King County’s elections office, labor organizer Katie Wilson pulled ahead of incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell by 91 votes—a little over 55.6 percent of the 38,000 votes counted on Monday, with about 6,400 ballots outstanding.

While supporters cheered Wilson on social media as the latest results trended in her favor, she hasn’t won the election yet. If the margin between two candidates is less than one half of one percent, and less than 2,000 votes (which it currently is), that triggers a hand recount of all the ballots. If it’s outside either of those margins, the ballots still have to go through a machine recount, a process that can take days.

Recounts don’t generally change the outcome of elections, but it isn’t impossible: In 2004, Democrat Christine Gregoire became governor after a hand recount added about 400 votes to her total, bringing her 129 votes ahead of Republican Dino Rossi. That margin represented a much smaller percentage of the 2.9 million votes cast statewide than Wilson’s current 91-vote margin over Harrell, out of about 280,000 votes cast in Seattle.

Closer to home, in 2015, the City Council District 1 results were so close they triggered a recount, but the recount didn’t end up changing a single vote in the race between Shannon Braddock and Lisa Herbold, who won.

Both campaigns are currently working to “cure” the ballots of supporters whose ballots have been challenged, which often happens when someone’s signature doesn’t match the one King County has on file or they forget to sign their ballot. Currently, there are about 1,700 ballots that have been challenged, according to King County Elections, which leaves a lot of potential votes on the table.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

Although the late ballots have come in about 55 percent in Wilson’s favor, the last few batches of ballots to be counted can be hard to predict. (A spokesperson for King County Elections said they’re definitely from ballot boxes on Election Night, but there’s no way to know where in the city they were from.) In addition, King County generally holds some ballots they weren’t able to tabulate during the regular machine count and adds them to the tally at the end; these ballots don’t mirror late ballots, which generally trend toward progressive candidates, because they’re from the entire voting period, which starts weeks before the election.

Still, Wilson supporters have cause to be optimistic; to paraphrases Bruce Harrell on election night, they’d rather be where they are than where he is. “We’re elated to see the results of the recent drop!” Wilson’s campaign manager said after the results came out. “Our volunteers will be working to make sure that every single ballot is counted over the next few days. We believe that those cured ballots will be critical.”

“We are grateful to our volunteers who are working to ensure that every vote is counted,” the Harrell campaign said in a statement. “This is important work, and essential in a close race.

Voters whose ballots are being challenged (check here if you don’t know) have until November 24 to fix any issues and have their vote counted. According to the King County Elections spokesperson, “the bulk of [the ballots] left should be in tomorrow,” so we’ll know more by around 4:00 tomorrow. Tuesday afternoon around 4pm.

Elections, Mayor Harrell, Police

Friday Fizz: Latest Ballots Trend Toward Wilson, Barnes Moves Controversial Cop Out of East Precinct, Harrell Says Shaming Sex Buyers Works

1. Some quick math on the latest ballot drop from King County Elections, which included another 56,118 votes in the Seattle mayor’s race:

Katie Wilson narrowed the gap with Mayor Bruce Harrell, who’s now leading 50.74 to 48.86 percent, to 4,300 votes, compared to around 10,000 in the previous (Thursday) count.

In this batch, Wilson increased her showing from 51 percent to almost 55 percent of the vote—exactly the percentage she needed of all outstanding ballots as of Thursday. That means that if she can maintain or gain on that percentage in the final rounds of ballot counting, she can win.

Historically, late ballots tend to be very progressive. (They also tend to be in by now, but the count has been delayed slightly this year because two-thirds of King County voters used ballot drop boxes rather than the mail, heeding warnings that the US Postal Service would not guarantee that ballots received on Election Day would be postmarked on time for them to count.)

At the same time, there are a still a few reasons for caution. First, Harrell and the business-backed PAC working on his behalf hit Wilson hard on experience in the final days of the campaign, which appears to have dampened some of Wilson’s support. (She ended the primary above 50 percent with several more people in the race).

Second, late ballots can be somewhat unpredictable. If the ballot boxes that remain uncounted are from more conservative areas, like Magnolia, they’ll move the final tally in Harrell’s direction regardless of the truism that late voters pick progressive candidates.

Bottom line: It’s still anybody’s guess, so try not to think about it until Monday, when the county will announce the next big batch of results.

2. Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes announced yesterday that he’s reassigning Michael Tietjen, the recently promoted captain who became commander of Capitol Hill’s East Precinct in September, and appointing Captain Jim Britt as head of that precinct.

Barnes, previously the police chief in Madison, Wisconsin, reportedly reprimanded SPD staff for not letting him know promoting Tietjen and putting him in the heart of Capitol Hill might cause a backlash. (PubliCola broke the news about Tietjen’s appointment last month). Tietjen has been at the center of several high-profile controversies, going back to 2007, when he and a partner were accused of planting drugs on a man in a wheelchair.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

In 2020, Tietjen was suspended after driving his SUV onto a sidewalk filled with people and mocking them as “cockroaches,” as well as a separate incident in which he threw a protester against a bus stop, injuring them. He also failed to report officers’ alleged harassment of a trans woman during the same period, according to an Office of Police Accountability investigation.

SPD did not respond to detailed questions about Tietjen’s reassignment PubliCola asked on Tuesday. Instead, they announced Britt’s assignment on SPD’s website on Thursday, describing Tietjen’s “recent assignment” in passive voice and saying Barnes took action as soon as he learned about Tietjen’s history. In reality, Barnes announced plans to reassign Tietjen in an internal announcement, also reported exclusively by PubliCola, that blamed our story and “internal leaks” for creating “a crisis of confidence among our LGBTQIA+ community members.” Then he left Tietjen in charge for a month.

Tietjen is reportedly moving to the department’s Internet Crimes Against Children/High-Risk Victims unit.

If the new commander of the East Precinct’s name  name sounds familiar, that’s because Captain Britt has been

of the city’s Real Time Crime Center, a facility at SPD headquarters where police monitor the new CCTV cameras the city is installing in neighborhoods across Seattle. Britt has been the face of the RTCC, so his reassignment after just a few months leaves a void.

Barnes also announced that East Precinct patrol officer Haden Barton will be SPD’s new LGBTQ+ liaison, a position that has gone unfilled for months after the reassignment of the previous liaison, Doran Koreio.

3. If Tietjen is now in charge of the high-risk victims unit, he’ll be overseeing a program SPD announced last week in which detectives stake out and photograph the cars of men paying for sex on Aurora Ave. N, trace their license plates, and send “Dear John” letters to their homes. The idea is that shaming men and provoking fights with their partners will reduce demand for sex work.

Despite the centuries-long history of shaming as a demand reduction strategy, there’s little to no evidence that it works as a deterrent or decreases the demand for sex work (though there is evidence that it pushes some street-based sex workers to move online). Advocates who work against sex trafficking have argued that “john shaming” harms sex workers and destabilizes the families of the men who end up on “john lists” or receive letters from police at home, with little to no impact on sex trafficking, usually the ostensible purpose of such campaigns.

Deputy city attorney Scott Lindsay, a former public safety advisor to ex-mayor Ed Murray, has been trying to get SPD to adopt the “Dear John” program for years, but was rebuffed by previous police chiefs. (Lindsay’s boss, Republican city attorney Ann Davison, just lost her bid for reeelection).

Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office told PubliCola he supports the program. “’John Letter’” programs have been adopted in roughly 100 cities across the United States, including San Francisco last year, and are endorsed by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation as a best practice in addressing commercial sexual exploitation,” a spokesperson for the mayor said. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation, a national Christian fundamentalist group previously known as Morality in Media, campaigns against pornography, sex work, comprehensive sex education, sex shops, same-sex marriage, among other right-wing crusades.

 

 

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.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

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.