Washington 2020: The Calm Before the Drizzle

[RI]

I fully expect Sawant to survive at this point.

[PSOL]

I fully expect Sawant to survive at this point.

One can hope

[RI]

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

[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.

[CultureKing]

Yeah, she's probably fine. Honestly, I thought she'd struggle without an opponent.

Maybe Egan deserves a bit more credit? (Really wish Amazon had not pushed their way into that race).

[CultureKing]

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?

[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.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Keep fighting the good fight against the the unbearing tide of vapid pop communism that is sadly becoming too widespread.

[Continential]

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?

[Not Me, Us]

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.

[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.

[Never Made it to Graceland]

Lol

[StateBoiler]

The Stranger's headline is funny.

"We Don't F#cking Know what's going to Happen, but it wasn't a Blowout"

[RI]

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.

The 2021 mayoral race saw 41,329 votes cast from D3.

[PSOL]

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.

[RI]

Yes's lead down to 50.3-49.7 with 39,274 ballots counted.

[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.

[PSOL]

“We Have Not Backed Down”: Kshama Sawant Speaks At Solidarity Campaign Election Night Party
Kshama on the excellent work of the volunteers and grassroots campaigning

What we do know for certain is that working people and young people have roundly rejected this racist, right-wing, big-business-backed attack. We know that from our tens of thousands of conversations in the last weeks in this district and the voter data we have systematically collected through that. We have the highest support ever based on those discussions.

The massive support of working people and young people for our campaign is also reflected in our record number of volunteers, over 1,500, and our record numbers of donors. We broke multiple records – our own records in fact from past campaigns. We had more donors, by a country mile, than any Seattle election ever, with over 11,500 individual donors. We had more in-district donors than any campaign in Seattle history, with over 5,000 (nearly triple the number from the right-wing Recall campaign). We raised more money, without taking a dime in corporate cash, than any city council campaign in Seattle history, raising over 1 million and 10 thousand dollars.

On the hypocrisy of the Seattle judicial system

This 15-month long mockery of democracy has reminded us the difficulty of having a genuinely democratic society under the billionaire’s system. We saw the utter hypocrisy of how this thoroughly undemocratic recall system in Washington was applied by the capitalist courts. The recall against Amazon’s Mayor, Jenny Durkan, Teargas Jenny, was unanimously thrown out by the state supreme court judges, despite the weapons used by the police under her watch against peaceful protestors, myself included. Despite the 18,000 complaints by peaceful protestors.

Also in utter hypocrisy, the court rejected the recall effort against the covid-denying Sheriff of Thurston County, though he bluntly refused to follow the mask mandate.

It is telling and predictable that only the recall against socialist politics was allowed to go forward. Not only did it go forward but it received the enthusiastic stamp of approval from the supreme court with language on the ballot that dishonestly implied that I had broken the law. Even though I have not and even though the courts do not judge the truth of charges in recall cases.

On the failure of Nikita Oliver and Lorena Gonzalez

Because while corporate PACs backed “law and order” candidates, the progressive Democrats overwhelmingly failed to campaign on working-class issues. Worst was Lorena Gonzalez. But even Nikkita Oliver never campaigned in a real way for rent control. They never campaigned to expand the Amazon Tax for affordable housing. Instead, Oliver actually removed rent control from their website platform, and they backed away from rent control in a high-profile debate.

Why did the other Democrats like Lorena Gonzalez not offer anything to the working class – or fight on any working class demands? Why did they allow the election to be framed and defined by the right-wing backlash against Black Lives matter – by a right-wing “law and order” message? Why did they not call out the big business backing of their opponents, the $2 million in corporate money being used to buy those elections?

The blowout in Gonzalez’s election was because she never brought up any fighting demands – she campaigned on the defensive throughout – unwilling to point out that her opponent was the favored candidate of big business because she herself did not want to antagonize big business.

This is very consistent to a similar opinion article they had critiquing the progressives and DSA for raising the police budget—hypocritical given that they are the major forces in the city calling for the abolishment of the police—and moderating their tone.

An important takeaway from this saga is that Kshama Sawant is over-performing even with all this pressure entirely due to their consistent messaging and actually passing meaningful policies. Taking a stand is worth so much politically, and moderating your voice is in most cases harmful in most divisive elections dependent on turning out the base.

Even if Sawant loses, this was an entirely respectable showing and is a good stepping point to run for the election in her district again if she loses. The opposition will put up a some capitalist like last time or a corporate PAC creature and lose again.

[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.

[PSOL]

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.

Do you have proof that the organizers in the city hall protests were the same people doing CHAZ and threatening to burn stuff down?

Lying over and over again only works on low-information voters, if there’s one thing that can be commemorated here by SAlt is through their propagation of their newsletter in union halls and on the streets informing people of the truth

[StateBoiler]

So reading up on the grassroots voting centers setup ad hoc all around where a person can help you print your ballot that second and submit - alongside Byron Brown's stamps distributed for write-in, pretty innovative political idea - but how do you enforce the state's ban on electioneering at voting centers in such a place?

Seattle Times update tonight:

The effort to recall Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant lost significant ground in Wednesday’s ballot count, with 50.3% of voters agreeing to remove her from office, compared to 53% of the votes counted on Tuesday.

With Wednesday’s count, Sawant has narrowed the difference to only 246 votes, out of the 39,274 counted so far. She received 62% of the votes counted on Wednesday.

King County Elections Chief of Staff Kendall Hodson said Wednesday the county estimates there are about 1,200 ballots left to be counted on Thursday and an additional 656 ballots with signature challenges that could be resolved and added to the count as late as Dec. 16, putting the overall turnout at just over 53%.

So to overturn the 246 vote deficit from just the 1200, would require Sawant winning about 60% of them.

[PSOL]

This is going to be a nail-biter, but the trend going on today makes me hopeful.

[Xing]

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