Washington state megathread

[GeneralMacArthur]

Lol you're 100% talking out of your ass.  Oh it's only the poor working-class techies supporting Sawant.  Once they reach senior or principal level they become recall supporters.  Come on man.

Go look up her top donors on LinkedIn.  It's not the poor working class proletariat.  It's rich tech workers who came here from California and think having a communist on the city council is quirky and cool.  The ones who actually live in Seattle, that is.  Most of her top donors are people who live thousands of miles away and couldn't find Capitol Hill on a map, like you.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Yes leads in the recall election 53-47. I don't think that's enough.

Yeah it's not.  The results are gonna look pretty similar to her election against Orion.  She'll probably survive by 4-5 points.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Though side note: apparently King County was able to count 32,129 ballots today. Meanwhile, turnout was apparently 34,753 by 6 PM, while the total for the 2019 election was 42,956.. Assuming similar total turnout to 2019 Kshama would need to win about 60% of the remaining vote? Seems both doable/likely to be close either way.

Any idea if we should expect more or fewer ballots than 2019?

Sawant spent the last six months telling us that special elections are a form of voter suppression, so unless she's an utterly shameless liar, you should expect fewer ballots than 2019.

In actuality I would expect basically the same number of ballots as the 2021 general.  Dr. RI Trustbuster would have that number as he seems to have aggregated the precinct-level data by district.  I don't have a map of precinct to district handy to recreate that number accurately.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I think if Sawant wins I'm going to make some posters with actual historical facts and/or quotes about Lenin/Trotsky and put them up around the district.  Maybe I'll even copy the Socialist Alternative branding.  After all they brand themselves as a Marxist/Trotskyist organization (Sawant's victory-ish speech tonight featured "hell yeah I'm a Trotskyist") so they should be proud of their heritage.

We can start with the incident where general Pyotr Wrangel was trying to defend Crimea from the Bolsheviks, lost the battles, and attempted to basically evacuate all of Crimea.  Lenin and Trotsky promised everyone amnesty if they simply surrendered to the Red Army instead of running away or continuing to resist.  The people of Crimea thought that was a pretty good deal.  Afterwards, Sawant's heroes said "lol jk" and massacred tens of thousands of innocent civilians who had committed no crime other than living in an area where counter-revolutionary elements had briefly prevailed.

Maybe I'll also put up some posters of Lenin's famous Hanging Order where he literally just calls for random mass murders for the explicit purpose of spreading terror.

Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed. The interests of the whole revolution require this because 'the last decisive battle' with the kulaks is now underway everywhere. An example must be made.

Hang (absolutely hang, in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, fat cats, bloodsuckers.
Publish their names.
Seize all grain from them.
Designate hostages - in accordance with yesterday's telegram.
Do it in such a fashion, that for hundreds of districts around the people see, tremble, know, shout: "the bloodsucking kulaks are being strangled and will be strangled".

Telegraph receipt and implementation. Yours, Lenin.

P.S. Find tougher people.

These people Sawant proudly worships, and models her ideology after, literally just came up with quotas of how many murders needed to be committed, and if you didn't commit enough murders, it meant you were a kulak or a class traitor and needed to be tortured and murdered yourself.  So people would just murder anyone they could loosely accuse of being a kulak or a cossack or a sympathizer or whatever, and Lenin and Trotsky were like, you're not killing enough innocent people you need to kill even more so we can strike more terror.  This is literally who Sawant constructed her entire identity around.

You want to know why there's such a renter/owner divide in D3?  Maybe it's because Sawant proudly bases her entire ideology on the hero worship of a man whose driving motive was the mass murder of anyone who owned property.

I swear to god, the people in this district think it's cool that she goes after landlords because hell yeah bro rent is too damn high.  Like do people really not know that one of the core attributes of Marxist/Trotskyite ideology was the persecution and murder of people who owned property, finally reaching its logical conclusion with Mao's decision to massacre all the Chinese landlords?  It's not even a "dog whistle", it's just her acting in accordance with a hateful and destructive ideology, with the thinnest possible veneer of non-ideological justification, and people are too ignorant to put two and two together so they just bite on that justification and then go around talking about her "standing up for renter's rights."  Yeah just like Mao stood up for renter's rights by killing 3 million Chinese landlords?  Someone should ask her in a debate whether she's willing to condemn the Land Reform Movement -- $100 says she won't.

It's like if someone proudly identified with Imperial Japan, (but a Showa Imperialist, not one of those Tojo people, please don't put Tojo's words in our mouth) and constantly went after Chinese people, ostensibly for owning too much property or driving rental values up with foreign money, and people were like "hell yeah the rent is too damn high", just too ignorant of history to recognize the ideological drive behind someone who identifies with Showa trying to persecute the Chinese.  And then they'd constantly talk about "subhuman Chinese dogs corrupting our culture and people" and people would say, like, oh yeah I wish she was nicer and wasn't so intense, but at the end of the day she fights for what she believes and I respect that.

[GeneralMacArthur]

So Sawant actually might survive? Great news if that actually comes to pass. And GMac, I get that you hate Sawant, but be reasonable. Nobody is going to be massacring landlords, and war crimes committed by the Soviet red fascists are entirely irrelevant to this race. Also, f**k landlords, they’re the scum of the earth, and I only wish more politicians would take them to task like Sawant.

Right, I'm not saying she's about to start dekulakizing Capitol Hill (as a property owner who vocally hates her, I'd be first to go).  But I think it's utterly disgusting that people continue to vote for someone who has these hateful, violent views, even though she doesn't have the capability to actually act on them.

I'm Jewish, and if D3 elected a Nazi who thinks the Holocaust was a good thing as our representative, I wouldn't be afraid either.  I'd just be completely disgusted.  Not just in the Nazi but in all the people who voted for them.

Also landlords are just people.  Deciding to rent your property doesn't make you an evil monster who deserves persecution.  Sawant has successfully driven a lot of small landlords out of D3 and now all the local apartment buildings are owned by big corporations who can afford to legally defend themselves against her, and that just makes things more expensive and impersonal for renters.  But those same dumb renters keep voting for Sawant because she's "fighting for them" by making things worse for them.  The end goal is rent control, after which nobody will ever be able to rent in D3 ever again.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I think if Sawant wins I'm going to make some posters with actual historical facts and/or quotes about Lenin/Trotsky and put them up around the district.  Maybe I'll even copy the Socialist Alternative branding.  After all they brand themselves as a Marxist/Trotskyist organization (Sawant's victory-ish speech tonight featured "hell yeah I'm a Trotskyist") so they should be proud of their heritage.

Hopefully your effort succeeds as more people should know about how awful Trots are.

Presuming she wins, could she run for the State House or will she be only in Seattle municipal politics?

Her approval rating city-wide is 20%.  She would get destroyed in any race outside of D3.  Even in the most left-wing constituency in the country she's barely clinging on.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Again, a lot of y’all underestimated how entrenched and effective the SAlt machine is in Seattle. It was obvious a blowout was impossible from the start, but I wouldn’t be too sure she’ll get the necessary votes to cling on.

There’s still too much hysteria over a candidate whose tendency became normie social democrats in the 1970s though.

It's not entrenched in Seattle -- SocAlt is non-competitive anywhere else in the city.  It's literally just in D3, and they're a joke 99% of the time, they're only a machine during her own elections, when they fly in a bunch of people from out of state to pretend to be Seattle residents and canvass the block.  It's a pretty small district so it only takes a couple dozen people to have a huge impact.

If she was actually powerful she would've been able to get her allies NTK/Gonzalez/Oliver elected.  Or maybe she would have been able to pass substantial legislation during her tenure.  Neither is true.  She is a do-nothing gadfly whose only talent is being able to get herself re-elected with the aid of a national organization that zeroes in on a very small geographic area once every two years.

[GeneralMacArthur]

lol @ the hypocrisy of the judicial system.  The difference is that she actually did break the law.  Getting 18,000 "peaceful protesters" to complain about tear gas being used against them doesn't make using tear gas illegal.

BTW those are the same peaceful protesters who attacked the police precinct and tried to burn it down, locked the doors with people inside to try and kill them, and then created a violent law-free zone that ended in the deaths of two young black boys and several other assaults and violent crimes.

They weren't peaceful protesters, they were violent dickheads and they should've been tear gassed harder.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Looks like Sawant will survive, probably by about 2 points or so. I guess the argument that recalls are unnecessary really is quite effective.

There's no way it's anywhere close to a 2% victory.  The margin is 250 votes now and that's only 0.6% in the recall's favor.  She would need to win 1,000 of the 1,200 remaining votes to get a 2% margin.

I suspect the "final" number we get tomorrow will be within about 40-50 votes either way.  She could get 58% and lose by 40.  She could get 62% and win by 40.  Even if she wins the remaining vote 2-1 she'll only have a 100 vote margin of victory (winning 50.1% to 49.9% in that very optimistic scenario for her).

The real story here is that there are 600 voters who have signature verification issues, so the next week is going to be a mad sprint by both campaigns to get as many friendly voters to verify their signatures as possible.  Then whoever loses will issue a fat stack of residency challenges to try and disqualify anyone from the opposing camp who didn't live in D3 (far more likely among Sawant voters, who were plucked off the street and handed print-out ballots) and we're going to have the losing campaign paying for a recount as well.

It's so close that we ultimately won't know who won for weeks.  The odds of one side pulling it out may become less and less likely depending on how the margin changes, but we can't be sure.  The only thing that's certain is that if Sawant wins by 40 votes she'll act like she won by 40% and PSOL will absolutely eat it up.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Alternatively, there's a theory going around that most of the Sawant voters put their ballots in drop boxes, while most of the Recall voters mailed in their ballots, and since all the drop box votes were counted today (thus the 62% Sawant skew) the ones tomorrow will be 100% mail-in, and thus much less favorable to Sawant.

In the past, Sawant has won late mail-ins as well.  But there's been a major demographic divide between mail-ins and drop-boxes in this election that could change that.

So it's entirely possible that the ballots tomorrow will simply mirror the mail-ins that have come before, and Sawant will only win 50% or even less of them, resulting in a 3-400 vote loss, which will make the legal challenges mostly futile.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Sawant has successfully driven a lot of small landlords out of D3 and now all the local apartment buildings are owned by big corporations who can afford to legally defend themselves against her, and that just makes things more expensive and impersonal for renters.

I am not a communist and I have no particular issue with the rest of what you posted, but is this really true? When it comes to renting, as with most economic transactions in my life, I'd rather deal with a large corporation that has established legal policies than with a small proprietor for whom things are personal.

I'm well-off and when I rented I always went with a large corporation because they knew what they were doing and had a solid reputation.  Basically, I knew what I was getting, and knew there would be a pretty high floor for the experience, and I was willing to pay a premium for that.

But Sawant isn't representing me, supposedly.  She claims to be representing the poor people (the "working class" -- not including people who make a lot of money working, like me) who are stuck renting more run-down places with fewer amenities and and less-experienced or less-professional management.  Obviously almost all those places are run by local landlords who are going out on their own rather than teaming up with some big megacorporation that will run their property for them.

In practice, here in D3, what this looks like is corporations handling the management of all the fancy new six-story glass "luxury apartments", which are around $2,000 a month for a 1BR.  But there are also still plenty of ancient three-story buildings, built pre-WW2 (and likely pre-WW1).  They're drafty, made of thin wood and plaster, you can hear everything everyone else is doing, the appliances are all decades out of date and break down all the time, and there's certainly no amenities.  No firepit on the roof.  But you can live in one of those for more like $1,300 a month.  So your Amazon employees live in the "luxury" apartments with the rooftop firepits, and your Starbucks baristas and artists live in the 19th-century apartments with matchlight ovens, and that's the way things are.

But when Sawant keeps making things worse and worse for the small landlords who manage those WW1-era buildings, they eventually decide, screw this, I don't have to deal with this.  They sell their WW1-era building to a developer, the developer tears it down and builds a new six-story glass luxury apartment building on the parcel.  Now there's more housing for Amazon employees and less housing for Starbucks baristas.  And with less supply of the WW1-era buildings, but the same demand, prices go up.  So those Starbucks baristas get angry at landlords for raising prices, and vote for Sawant, who promises to fight for them by antagonizing those landlords, thus driving more of them out and further shrinking the supply of housing for her constituency.

It's a vicious cycle, and one that's completely unnecessary.  A competent city councilmember could solve this problem, maybe by creating grants to restore some old properties or make improvements so they're more livable and the landlords don't have to keep raising rent to pay for new boilers and repairs to the centuries-old architecture.  But the only language Sawant understands is animosity, so she just attacks and demonizes them and introduces policies to make their lives harder.  And of course it's only the small landlords she goes after, since she can bully Grandpa Tom renting his old building out to six artists, she can't bully the big corporations with their professional legal outfits.

So how do you solve this problem?  Sawant's solution is rent control.  Just make it impossible for landlords to raise rents.  Of course this will never actually pass (there's a statewide prohibition on rent control ffs) but if it did, supply would immediately shrink to 0 because nobody would want to become a small-time landlord in Seattle anymore, and landlords would immediately search for any loophole available to evict their tenants and bail on their properties.  But the reality of this doesn't matter because Sawant has no intention of actually passing rent control -- it's just a wedge issue she can use to get re-elected again and again, which is her sole motivation.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Both Sawant and the recall figureheads says it’s over, it’s over

Sawant should primary cantwell

SAlt will run as their own. What I suspect is that after 2023 they’ll have her run for state senate/house and then statewide.

Honestly, Sawant would make a good VP for 2028. The question becomes VP for whom.

Obviously, you're a Sawant supporter, but why has she been so controversial and faced so many challenges? I know virtually nothing about her.

She's just a really, really, really bad person in virtually every way a person can be bad.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Dude she lost support between last election and this one.  Her victory margin has shrunk from 3,743 votes (2015) to 1,775 votes (2019) to 232 votes (2021).

I knew you guys were just going to fabricate a bunch of stuff and say this election "proves it" because she survived a recall by 200 votes, but come on.  The carpenters strikers told her to f--- off because she was trying to interfere with their strike to make it about her own personal issues instead of what they wanted.  Plenty of community leaders came out against her and very few came out for her.

If she hadn't found a loophole in the voting laws that she could exploit in the most brazen way possible to stash more votes, she would absolutely have lost.  She lost the fundraising battle in her own district.  She celebrated her victory by giving a speech where she attacked and alienated even more people.

I suppose it's a good thing that the communists hold her up as their national leader, because she's such a repulsive human being and awful politician that her prominence limits the cult's widespread appeal.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Whatever, random dude in Illinois, please tell me more about how I don't know my own neighborhood.

You love to talk about Sawant but I bet you can't name a single thing she's specifically done for the district, or a single local community leader or business that supported her this time but hadn't in the past.

Your arrogance is astounding.  And it's hilarious that you're bragging in your post that you've only grown more arrogant in the wake of your 0.5% victory in a recall election that no other member even had to face, and boasting about how you'll be an even more sore winner next time.  Like you think that's an appealing post?  You think that makes you look good?

You don't know anything about D3.  You don't know anything about Seattle.  You don't know anything about Sawant.  And you need to stop pretending you do.

[GeneralMacArthur]

You love to talk about Sawant but I bet you can't name a single thing she's specifically done for the district, or a single local community leader or business that supported her this time but hadn't in the past.

lol, I’ve quite literally had several pages worth of evidence of things SAlt has done and the nature of their campaign and their supporters in this very thread.

lol I knew it

[GeneralMacArthur]

Only news I have to post is a Crosscut/Elway approval poll of my man Bruce Harrell:

40% approve
19% disapprove
41% no opinion

killing it so far

[GeneralMacArthur]

Only news I have to post is a Crosscut/Elway approval poll of my man Bruce Harrell:

40% approve
19% disapprove
41% no opinion

killing it so far

Anything about Davison? As awful as NTK was, I still can't get over the fact that a Republican actually won in Seattle.

Davison has been struggling with the unholy mess of an office Pete Holmes left her with, including a backlog of 5,000 cases that were just left to gather dust.

Her main priority has been trying to prosecute the most prolific offenders -- the guys who regularly steal from stores and property downtown and have been getting away with funding an entire lifestyle this way for years without any threat of serious prosecution despite getting caught on a near-weekly basis.  Holmes never seemed to think it was worth bothering with these people because no individual crime they committed was very serious, even though stealing $100 in liquor every single week eventually adds up to an enormous amount of criminal damages, plus just generally a substantial degradation of the city for our businesses.

A few weeks ago she decided to announce they weren't going to prosecute 2,000 of those cases, which the left-wing press in this city had a field day with ("lol see there's no difference between Davison and NTK").  Her big battle has been trying to fight the courts for the right to prosecute the prolific offenders.  The courts require the offenders to be sent to community court, where they get put in programs which they then completely ignore, go right back out on the street to steal again, get arrested, and the cycle repeats itself ad infinitum.  Davison wants to break that cycle but the courts won't let her.  So she's been arguing the case.

Just today she won a major victory in the Seattle Municipal Court -- demonstrating that at the very least, the allegation that Davison was some amateurish attorney unfit for the job was untrue.  We'll see how this holds up.  Obviously I support what Davison is trying to do.  But there are years and years of legal brambles she has to wade through just to do something that should be really simple.

https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/frequent-offenders-blocked-seattle-community-court/281-43f810a5-2f09-4adf-b926-29be327ce8f0

[GeneralMacArthur]

Will Kreidler resign or will he stubbornly push through? I'm leaning toward the latter.

Such a shame Washington didn't vote for Kreidler's opponent last time round:

I am an autistic savant who has extensive knowledge and the many of the abilities of the President Reagan and President Jefferson Presidencies that I will incorporate into running the O.I.C. externally like the Reagan Administration and Internally (within WA) as the Jefferson Administration. I am the only candidate who has incorporated Specific Roles for Mr. Kriedler and Mr. Welti in the Office of Insurance Commissioner. I will be the External Insurance Commissioner for 60% of the time. Mr. Kriedler and Mr. Welti would each be External Insurance Commissioner for 20% of the time if I am elected Insurance Commissioner. I would fill the roles of Ronald, Nancy and Nixon, and Mr. Kriedler would be assigned the role of Carter and Mr. Welti would be Gerald Ford.

As for Internally, I have found 168 Honorable Insurance Agents all of whom are more qualified then myself to each serve in 1 hour increments as Internal Insurance Commissioners of Washington state. That is how the Jeffersonian movement to Counterbalance and stabilize the Affordable Care Act.

Additionally, I am fully willing and prepared to work with the either the Trump or Biden Administration.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The capital gains ruling is horrific judicial reasoning, but that's par for the course for the Washington Supreme Court, and the tax as it stands barely impacts anyone so it won't have much political effect. Given their (specious) reasoning in the case, I don't see how a wealth tax stands, but I bet they'd uphold an income tax. Dems should be careful for what they wish for there, though; an income tax is the one thing I could see blowing up in their faces enough to lose power.

I don't see the Governor's race being very interesting on the Dem side. It's Inslee's if he wants it, Ferguson's otherwise. The R side will either be JHB or some Culp acolyte such as Semi Bird (lol). Dammeier could've made it interesting against Ferguson, but likely would've lost; JHB might make it somewhat closer than usual, but she'd lose as well.

The threat of a state income tax would probably be enough to get me to vote against the Dems, especially if they did it not via constitutional amendment but by abusing the far-left state courts to circumvent the state constitution.

I'd have to assume some normal "liberal but no income tax" candidate would run as an alternative in that case, because there would be a massive space in the race for such a candidate.  No way Loren Culp is the only candidate who isn't pro-income-tax.  Have to assume King County businesses and tech millionaires would absolutely drown such a candidate in money.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Everyone's talking about the gubernatorial race, but the Seattle city council elections are likely to be far more interesting and impactful this year.

All 7 districts are up for grabs, the only 2 that are safe are Mosqueda and Nelson in their at-large seats.  There have been no polls thus far.

D1:  Lisa Herbold is not running again, she was part of the progressive bloc on the council but will likely be replaced by a moderate.  The three candidates who've raised the most money are:
Rob Saka, who has really ambiguous positions on everything and refuses to leave his "middle ground", may also secretly be Bruce Harrell's personal recruit in the race.
Preston Anderson, whom The Stranger absolutely hates in their classic super-immature fashion, so probably a moderate?
Stephen Brown, founder of Eltana Bagels, also fairly moderate.

D2:  Moron and definitely-not-a-member-of-Socialist-Alternative liar Tammy Morales is standing for re-election, presumably minus NTK's "Kill Joe Biden" campaign manager she was hanging out with at CHOP (only because she is an also-ran candidate herself, in D5).  Morales is getting outraised by Tanya Woo, and progressives are worried enough about Woo that they've all lined up to endorse Morales already, and The Stranger is already publishing hit pieces on Woo.  A big issue in this race will be the so-called "homeless megaplex" that the city wanted to build in the International District, which was scrapped after tons of protests.  The ID already suffers from a deluge of filth, crime, and drug use, and the stolen goods and fentanyl bazaar at 12th+Jackson was a big battleground for mayor Harrell's efforts to clear out criminal homeless junkies from the neighborhood.  Morales supported the megaplex and opposed Harrell's sweeps and police presence.  Woo feels differently.  That's the race right there.

D3:  After barely surviving recall by 310 votes, Kshama Sawant read the writing on the wall and decided to retire.  There are three main candidates running to replace her.  Joy Hollingsworth is probably the favorite, checking all the right identity boxes and saying all the right progressive bromides while steadfastly avoiding taking any strong stances on anything, just "re-evaluate, re-evaluate, re-evaluate".  Andrew Ashiofu also ticks all the right identity boxes, but unlike Hollingsworth, he's openly taking a position against encampment sweeps.  Alex Hudson is just a walking talking mouthpiece for The Urbanist and sounds like one of those annoying #BanCars Urbanism Twitter feeds.

D4:  Alex Pedersen was particularly upset and incensed about the protestors who attacked his house and threatened his family during the George Floyd protests in 2020, and he seemed shook ever since, so it's no surprise he's not running again.  Pedersen was one of the most moderate council members, and is likely to be replaced by another moderate, Ken Wilson, who made a good run of it against the invincible Teresa Mosqueda in 2021 and is now running on his engineering background.  Wilson's main opposition is Ron Davis, who is competing with Hudson to be the most annoying urbanist imaginable.  We had a hilarious clownshow candidate in UW student Matthew Mitnick who ran as a socialist, and like so many socialists, was a horrible and abusive asshole behind the scenes, except this is weirder because his campaign staff was a bunch of high schoolers.  He got a bunch of Green Party endorsements, and the DSA offered him its endorsement, but when he refused to pay any of his campaign staff, they unionized, and rejected the endorsement on his behalf.  Sadly, he has since withdrawn so the fun is over and it's on to what will surely be a boring race.

D5:  Moderate and council stalwart Debora Juarez also resigned, and likely has her eye on higher office.  The top fundraiser are Nilu Jenks, Cathy Moore and Shane Macomber.  All the candidates say kinda the same things, but in a recent Seattle Times questionnaire, Jenks took leftie stances on everything, Cathy supported the mayor but wanted to keep drugs legal, and Macomber just refused to take any stance on anything.  Not a great crop of candidates.

D6:  Dan Strauss got lucky in 2019 by drawing the notoriously corrupt exiled former councilmember Heidi Wills as an opponent.  He isn't so lucky this time, as he gets local businessman Pete Hanning.  Now I know anecdotally that Hanning is an asshole, since he used to own The Red Door, which I frequented when I lived in Fremont.  But I would vote for him anyway if I still lived there, because Strauss is also a condescending, lying sack of s--t.  The big issue in this race is that Strauss supported CHOP and, after running on increasing police funding, decided he wanted to defund the police in 2020.  Now that defunding the police is the most politically toxic position in America, Strauss is trying to gaslight everyone that he never wanted to defund the police and always wanted to increase police funding.  It's an obvious lie, but voters are dumb.  After all they voted for Heidi Wills four years ago.  Strauss also promised to clean up Ballard, but it's still infested with crime, and he votes with progressives on the council on homelessness issues.  He's positioned well to hold his seat, but it will be an interesting race.

D7:  Andrew Lewis is one of the most pathetic councilmembers I've ever seen, flip-flopping all over the place and lying constantly.  Most recently he made a big show of supporting the measure to re-criminalize smoking fentanyl in public, but then a bunch of activists yelled at him, and he surprised everyone by casting the deciding vote against the measure.  Our local socialist activists have always known that they can easily bully him into doing whatever they want.  Annoyingly, though, he doesn't really have any serious competition yet.


My intuition is that the council ends up being:

1) Moderate (any of Saka/Anderson/Brown)
2) Far-left (Morales)
3) Progressive (Hollingsworth)
4) Moderate (Wilson)
5) Progressive (Jenks)
6) Moderate (Hanning)
7) Far-left (Lewis -- has no principles personally, but is bullied into being a puppet for far-left activists)
AL1) Mosqueda (progressive)
AL2) Nelson (moderate)

Woo has a real shot in D2 at flipping the seat to create a 5-4 moderate majority, which would be amazing and a huge boost for Bruce Harrell's ambitions to clean up this city.  Otherwise, most likely whoever wins in D5 would end up being the swing vote.  I don't think Strauss survives.

[GeneralMacArthur]

We have election results for Seattle city council.  I'll quote my old post for context on each race and provide the results.

D1:  Lisa Herbold is not running again, she was part of the progressive bloc on the council but will likely be replaced by a moderate.  The three candidates who've raised the most money are:
Rob Saka, who has really ambiguous positions on everything and refuses to leave his "middle ground", may also secretly be Bruce Harrell's personal recruit in the race.
Preston Anderson, whom The Stranger absolutely hates in their classic super-immature fashion, so probably a moderate?
Stephen Brown, founder of Eltana Bagels, also fairly moderate.

Rob Saka made it through with 24% but the primary winner was Maren Costa, who got 33%.  Maren is a pretty generic progressive urbanist.  Phil Tavel, a more conservative candidate who was Herbold's opponent in 2019, got 20%, so the big question is where his supporters will go.  If Saka skews more moderate he probably picks them up and gets to 44%.  I'd say that's more likely than Costa getting them, so I'd label Saka the favorite despite his lower numbers.

D2:  Moron and definitely-not-a-member-of-Socialist-Alternative liar Tammy Morales is standing for re-election, presumably minus NTK's "Kill Joe Biden" campaign manager she was hanging out with at CHOP (only because she is an also-ran candidate herself, in D5).  Morales is getting outraised by Tanya Woo, and progressives are worried enough about Woo that they've all lined up to endorse Morales already, and The Stranger is already publishing hit pieces on Woo.  A big issue in this race will be the so-called "homeless megaplex" that the city wanted to build in the International District, which was scrapped after tons of protests.  The ID already suffers from a deluge of filth, crime, and drug use, and the stolen goods and fentanyl bazaar at 12th+Jackson was a big battleground for mayor Harrell's efforts to clear out criminal homeless junkies from the neighborhood.  Morales supported the megaplex and opposed Harrell's sweeps and police presence.  Woo feels differently.  That's the race right there.

Tammy Morales got 52%, and Green Party idiot Margaret Elisabeth got an additional 5%.  Tammy Woo got 43% but she has a big hill to climb.  Morales probably gets re-elected.

D3:  After barely surviving recall by 310 votes, Kshama Sawant read the writing on the wall and decided to retire.  There are three main candidates running to replace her.  Joy Hollingsworth is probably the favorite, checking all the right identity boxes and saying all the right progressive bromides while steadfastly avoiding taking any strong stances on anything, just "re-evaluate, re-evaluate, re-evaluate".  Andrew Ashiofu also ticks all the right identity boxes, but unlike Hollingsworth, he's openly taking a position against encampment sweeps.  Alex Hudson is just a walking talking mouthpiece for The Urbanist and sounds like one of those annoying #BanCars Urbanism Twitter feeds.

Hollingsworth and Hudson both got 37%.  Pretty generic race without much in the way of stakes.  Both will be idealistic progressives who vote to raise taxes every year and let homeless junkies ruin our city.  Neither will be anywhere close to as bad as Kshama Sawant.

D4:  Alex Pedersen was particularly upset and incensed about the protestors who attacked his house and threatened his family during the George Floyd protests in 2020, and he seemed shook ever since, so it's no surprise he's not running again.  Pedersen was one of the most moderate council members, and is likely to be replaced by another moderate, Ken Wilson, who made a good run of it against the invincible Teresa Mosqueda in 2021 and is now running on his engineering background.  Wilson's main opposition is Ron Davis, who is competing with Hudson to be the most annoying urbanist imaginable.  We had a hilarious clownshow candidate in UW student Matthew Mitnick who ran as a socialist, and like so many socialists, was a horrible and abusive asshole behind the scenes, except this is weirder because his campaign staff was a bunch of high schoolers.  He got a bunch of Green Party endorsements, and the DSA offered him its endorsement, but when he refused to pay any of his campaign staff, they unionized, and rejected the endorsement on his behalf.  Sadly, he has since withdrawn so the fun is over and it's on to what will surely be a boring race.

I thought Ken Wilson was going to make it through, but he only got 21%.  Instead, Maritza Rivera, who is very pro-Harrell, got 32%.  Ron Davis got 45% but you have to think almost all the Wilson voters will move to Rivera's camp, getting her to 53%.

D5:  Moderate and council stalwart Debora Juarez also resigned, and likely has her eye on higher office.  The top fundraiser are Nilu Jenks, Cathy Moore and Shane Macomber.  All the candidates say kinda the same things, but in a recent Seattle Times questionnaire, Jenks took leftie stances on everything, Cathy supported the mayor but wanted to keep drugs legal, and Macomber just refused to take any stance on anything.  Not a great crop of candidates.

Cathy Moore got 30% and The Stranger's candidate ChrisTiana ObeySumner got 24%.  Jenks only got 18%.  Feel pretty good about Moore's chances here.  ObeySumner is a generic activist who says we can't stop homeless people from committing crimes or killing themselves with fentanyl until we address the root causes of whatever.

D6:  Dan Strauss got lucky in 2019 by drawing the notoriously corrupt exiled former councilmember Heidi Wills as an opponent.  He isn't so lucky this time, as he gets local businessman Pete Hanning.  Now I know anecdotally that Hanning is an asshole, since he used to own The Red Door, which I frequented when I lived in Fremont.  But I would vote for him anyway if I still lived there, because Strauss is also a condescending, lying sack of s--t.  The big issue in this race is that Strauss supported CHOP and, after running on increasing police funding, decided he wanted to defund the police in 2020.  Now that defunding the police is the most politically toxic position in America, Strauss is trying to gaslight everyone that he never wanted to defund the police and always wanted to increase police funding.  It's an obvious lie, but voters are dumb.  After all they voted for Heidi Wills four years ago.  Strauss also promised to clean up Ballard, but it's still infested with crime, and he votes with progressives on the council on homelessness issues.  He's positioned well to hold his seat, but it will be an interesting race.

Strauss got 52% and Hanning only got 30%, this race is over.

D7:  Andrew Lewis is one of the most pathetic councilmembers I've ever seen, flip-flopping all over the place and lying constantly.  Most recently he made a big show of supporting the measure to re-criminalize smoking fentanyl in public, but then a bunch of activists yelled at him, and he surprised everyone by casting the deciding vote against the measure.  Our local socialist activists have always known that they can easily bully him into doing whatever they want.  Annoyingly, though, he doesn't really have any serious competition yet.

Lewis only got 43%.  His opponent is Bob Kettle, whom I've never heard of.  But Lewis seems weak.


So the potential council would be:
D1) 55% Saka, 45% Costa
D2) 90% Morales, 10% Woo
D3) 50% Hollingsworth, 50% Hudson
D4) 65% Rivera, 35% Davis
D5) 65% Moore, 35% ObeySumner
D6) 95% Strauss, 5% Hanning
D7) 60% Kettle, 40% Lewis

Overall pretty bad results IMO.  Morales and Strauss are both going to make it through to re-election, and along with the D3 rep and Teresa Mosqueda that's a 4-person voting bloc in favor of turning this city into Portland.  We'd need to run the table with Saka/Rivera/Moore/Kettle winning, and get lucky that all 4 stick with the mayor, to avoid another two years of gridlock.

The only other chance we have is the special election for Teresa Mosqueda's seat after she moves up to King County Council.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I haven't actually been following this that closely as I have been pretty satisfied with the results of the Harrell administration even with the progressive city council getting in his way, so it doesn't feel as critical as 2019 (plus Sawant resigned).  That said does anyone have any estimate of what % of the vote is in and when we would expect the rest to be counted?

My baseline read of this is that:

D1 = flip to Harrell ally (moderate?)
D2 = HP hold
D3 = not really a flip but a much more sane person than Sawant, plus seemingly another Harrell ally
D4 = only potential progressive gain?
D5 = moderate hold
D6 = Strauss survives, but he had to flip-flop on his entire ideology and pretend to be a staunch Harrell ally to do it
D7 = potential flip to moderate?

Then there's another story here which is that with Mosqueda resigning to join the King County Council, her replacement in the AL seat will be voted on by the rest of the council.  Which based on these results probably means we get another moderate or at least a Harrell ally.

All in all this almost certainly means Bruce Harrell now has the city council majority he needs to fully enact his agenda.  Or at least get it started before he has to face re-election in 2025 -- but Harrell's polling numbers were banana republic dictator high last time I checked -- high 60s or low 70s -- so I don't see him being in any real danger of losing re-election.

Good times are here in Seattle folks

[GeneralMacArthur]

Long-term care tax might survive if enough people have forgotten what a debacle it is.

Washington voters like to vote for things that sound good.  "Long-term care" sounds good.  The fact that the actual implementation is one of the worst things ever concocted doesn't really matter.