On To The General Election
The latest round of King County ballot drops in the District 4 Seattle City Council race indicate that my campaign is headed to the general election, where we will be joined by corporate darling Alex Pedersen. Securing an opportunity to represent the people of my district in a contest of starkly differing directions for the city of Seattle would not have happened without the tremendous efforts of my campaign staff, volunteers, donors and supporters.
As the results of Tuesday’s election night results matriculated through the room — finally reaching me as I stood in line for a beer at Burke-Gilman Brewing — I let out a howl of relief and excitement that was probably audible in all four corners of District 4. Finally, if for a moment, we could relax. Collectively, my campaign knocked on 19,040 doors in the primary election and talked to thousands of voters during more than three dozen tabling sessions at District 4 grocery stores. We reached another 5,000 voters via phone. Our volunteer base is as dedicated (and downright fun to be around) as any I have been around in the last four years of working in and around Seattle political campaigns.
In an incredibly competitive race with a crowded left lane of talented progressive candidates, we took Tuesday’s results to be a validation of months of hard work that included at least five field activities a week since the May 17th filing deadline. In the final two weeks of the election, I set myself the goal of knocking on 2000 doors in 14 days, very nearly reaching that tally before a bum ankle reduced me to meekly tabling and text banking in the days and hours leading up to election night.
To see the power of grassroots organizing, we do not need to look so far as New York democratic socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Julia Salazar. Washington’s own U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, for whom I was a field staffer in 2018, has repeatedly shown us what it means to bring an organizer’s mentality to electoral politics. My campaign owed much of its proficiency with the tools and mindset required to stage a ferocious field operation from experience I gleaned helping Congresswoman Jayapal deal Republican Craig Keller a decisive defeat in her 2018 primary. In facing the November general election, my team and I stand on the shoulders of so many great organizers, community leaders, and activists who have come before us.
My compassion and respect goes out to the eight campaigns that did not qualify for the general election. As a Seattle DSA organizer for Position 8 City Council candidate Jon Grant, I vividly recall being humbled on election night 2017, as now-councilmember Teresa Mosqueda sailed to victory with a 20-point win on election night. Not exactly what we had in mind after a grueling campaign with an extensive ground game that knocked over 42,000 doors in eight months of campaigning.
In the years since administering that butt-kicking, Councilmember Mosqueda has been a champion of worker rights, housing justice, and issues impacting care laborers and women that had hitherto gone largely unaddressed by city policy. Part of Councilmember Mosqueda’s long track record of lifting up the women behind and around her included her support of District 4 candidate Emily Myers, a labor organizer and scientist who ran a good campaign despite being the target of nonsense attacks from corporate PACs that delegitimized her experience and sought to marginalize her data-driven, scientifically-backed, common sense policy positions.
Emily Myers and I were the subjects of an incredibly condescending Seattle Times endorsement interview that eventually culminated in an absurd endorsement of one of our opponents that compared Myers and I to Donald Trump because we (…wait for it…) want to tax the rich to build affordable housing. I don’t think it was a mistake that the two youngest frontrunners in this race — both of us from historically marginalized backgrounds — bore the brunt of criticism from Seattle’s conservatives, all while advancing what I think were clearly the two most comprehensively progressive policy directions for our District, and our city.
With her focus on childcare, climate justice, and bolstering our city’s social safety net for renters, working families, and targeted communities, Myers’ presence in this race motivated my team and I to be the best campaign we could be. I have also learned a lot from Cathy Tuttle and Joshua Newman, fellow District 4 urbanists whose dedication to climate justice was a constant source of inspiration. I appreciated the competitive spirit that young Ethan Hunter brought to candidate forums that have a tendency to devolve into bland recitations of well-rehearsed talking points. Heidi Stuber is one of the best public speakers I have ever seen in person, and I’m envious of Sasha Anderson’s ability to boil complex policy considerations down to human-centered stories. Frank Kreuger is a democratic socialist whose ideas were rooted in a real moral conviction that came through every time he spoke at candidate forums. And I respect that Beth Mountsier’s wealth of experience has not closed her off to listening to new perspectives and changing course on the fly; she was one of the few District 4 candidates to reverse her support of a Seattle Police Officer’s Guild contract that two dozen community groups, including the ACLU, have recognized as a disaster for police accountability.
Why my campaign was able to advance speaks somewhat to what Barack Obama once called the “randomness of politics.” If a negative mailer or the coveted first slot on the District 4 ballot had gone in a different direction, perhaps we would be waiting for more ballots to drop before announcing that we’d be moving onto the general election. At the same time, my campaign team — the first in the history of Seattle politics to unionize — has put in a breathtaking amount of work. We have earned the support of thousands of District 4 voters because we have outlined a compelling vision for an inclusive city, and then organized to actualize that vision.
Whether we are labor organizers, urbanists, social justice or housing activists, students, tenants, people of color or LGBTQIA+ Seattleites, we all have a shared desire to house the homeless and fix our broken tax structure sot that the city does not continue to balance its budget on the backs of poor people and working-class homeowners. Seattleites have a long history of electing to tax ourselves to pay for libraries, transit, and social services. We do so because we are cosmopolitan city with a savvy electorate that understands that we’re all better off when we’re all better off. But in an age where mega-corporations exist alongside people sleeping in the streets, the city could do more if it had more.
Seattle politicians who tell us that they would support a statewide income tax but oppose additional progressive revenue at the local level contradict themselves. Why would a state need additional revenue and economic parity where cities do not? In this election, we will test what Seattle comedian and political commentator Brett Hamil once called the “Proximity Law of Seattle Politics” — the idea that, the further and further away a given political issue is, the more “progressive” Seattle progressives appear. In Seattle, we oppose Trump but tolerate divisive and cruel rhetoric about our houseless neighbors. We oppose putting kids in cages on American soil, but support youth carceral facilities. We decry Republican tax cuts on billionaires, then leap to repeal taxes that inconvenience the mega corporations we’ve incubated.
The long slog of local elections has a way of exposing certain seams in Seattle’s purportedly progressive electorate. I am a proud member of the 43rdLD Democrats and the Seattle Democratic Socialists of America because of our shared commitment to building an inclusive, affordable city. Not every candidate in the District 4 race shares this commitment. But now is not the time to run an “anti-“ campaign. Having emerged from a hard-fought primary, now is the time to unite Seattle around a vision for a city that leads on climate justice, public housing, and economic fairness. Now is the time to build the city we say we are.
