Orion was a lame candidate, literally a nobody who proudly called himself "Flash Mob King" and had no history of success.
Unfortunately, there were no real qualified challengers to Sawant in the primary. Logan Bowers was a nobody. Pat Murakami was an activist perennial candidate. Ami Nguyen was clueless. Zac DeWolf was a loathed school board member trying to fail up.
Orion's lameness carried over into the general election, where he had zero presence, zero personality and zero GOTV effort. He held even in his public appearances but had no campaign strategy. CASE, the Super PAC Amazon donated to, spent a bunch of money sending out flyers and pamphlets on his behalf. But that did more harm than good as it allowed Sawant to aggressively spam "STOP AMAZON CORPORATE CASH" posters and t-shirts all over town. This brought in new voters who had no idea who the candidates were but were eager to cast a "Screw Bezos" vote.
One of these days Sawant will get a real challenger. Until then, Seattle gets four more years of dysfunctional government.
Lame or not, he still lost
