-I'm Alex Hudson,
and I am a board member here at The Block Table.
I'm joined by others here from The Block Table,
which is a group of every month here at The Rabbit Box.
You can come for an event just like this
that's about what's important, what's going on in our city,
the things that we care about,
the things that you're talking about,
and you get to hear from super smart people,
like the three people to my left,
and then we get to hear from you,
and we get to have conversations about the things
that matter to us in our city right now and in the future.
So I'm Alex Hudson, I'm the moderator.
To my left, Sandeep Kaushik, political consultant.
-Political. -Hot take trader.
[ Laughter ]
Podcast host,
"Seattle Nice" and "Blue City Blues."
Cool guy. Cat owner. -Depends on who you ask.
Right?
[ Laughter ]
-To his left, we have Scott Greenstone.
Scott is a reporter and the co-host of
"Sound Politics" on KUOW, our NPR station
that I hope every single person here is a contributor to,
because if you like this,
you're going to love what they got on 94.9.
And to his left is Tiffani McCoy,
an unsung hero of Seattle politics
who is behind some of the most groundbreaking leaps forward
in our city's policy making a long time
and is the Co-Executive Director of House Our Neighbors,
which is the collective powerhouse
behind the social housing initiative,
which many, most Seattleites voted for last year.
So we are here,
this group got together after our panel in August.
Oh, I got one more.
I want to say thank you to our host, The Rabbit Box.
[ Applause ]
This place is cool, it's cool here.
The Rabbit Box is a really special place,
and they're doing something really special,
which is they're keeping our culture alive here
in Seattle and beyond.
They're making a space for people to come together
and to enjoy arts and music, and civics.
And one thing I'm --
so you should keep coming back here for this and beyond.
One thing I'm looking forward to is on December 14th,
they're having the "Holiday Magic Cabaret."
Scott, you were asking me holiday things.
It's a magic and mind-reading
show with "lots of audience participation."
So if you like that and you like this place,
come back here and support them and keep our city cool.
So this group of people
came together after the primary election in August
and we had a really amazing conversation about our politics,
our results, our analysis,
where we think things are going and because it went so great,
we're bringing the band back together now
that we're on the other side of the general election
and the results are in, they're done.
There's no recounting by hand or machine.
Thank God for the stress is over.
And we're ready to talk about what it all means.
So Question Number 1, let's start with the big picture.
So as I said, the ballots are counted,
the tweets have cooled down. Stephen Paolini, in this room,
knows that my spreadsheet has been retired,
and everybody thinks that they know what happened.
So I'd like to hear it from you folks and Sandeep,
I'll start with you.
What's the clearest message
that voters sent in the election this year?
-Can you hear me? Yeah.
So it was kind of a repudiation or rejection
of the status quo ante in Seattle, right?
And what that means is, I mean, kind of obviously,
it was a kind of sharp rebuke of the kind of business Downtown,
sort of the moderates
who had sort of taken control in the last couple
of election cycles at the Council and stuff like that,
that's pretty self-evident, right?
About when you saw not just Katie Wilson's win,
but Dionne Foster, Erika Evans in the city attorney's race.
I will say this, though,
I also think there are really two establishments in Seattle.
There is a kind of moderate sort of pro-businessy establishment.
There's also a kind of largely progressive labor-backed
progressive establishment in the city.
And to a pretty significant extent,
I think it was a repudiation of that establishment as well,
in the sense that, you know,
progressive labor didn't really get on board
with Katie Wilson at the beginning.
They were there with the mayor, the labor council, those folks,
and it's because they're also pretty,
I think, entrenched into a kind of cozy status quo
or sort of way that things happen in Seattle.
Really quick thing I'll say, a typical politician in Seattle,
and let's take Bruce Harrell, for example,
like sees their job as doing what?
Like, look at how Bruce Harrell did his job.
He's like,
"Okay, I got to conciliate the series of sort of nodes
of power or interests," right, "in the city,
so I got to throw progressive labor a bone over here,
I got to give the business community something over there,
and I'm going to give the social service people
this thing or that thing.
And then, you know, at the end of the day,
I've checked all these boxes,
and I've conciliated all these groups, my job is done," right?
And when he started this campaign,
he had done a pretty good job of that, right?
Everybody was kind of on board
the Bruce train in the power structure of Seattle,
didn't look like Katie had any sort of pathway.
The problem was, there are a lot of voters out there
that are frustrated with the status quo
and weren't seeing problems getting solved
and didn't really care that you threw a bone to this
or that for a player in the establishment,
whether on the progressive side or the moderate side.
And Katie saw that opening, right, and was able to kind of,
you know, drive a wedge and kind of talk to those voters
in a way that I think the Harrell folks were like,
"What did we do wrong?
We did what politicians do in Seattle,"
which is conciliate the existing sort of status quo
ante power structure, right?
And that's, I think, what was being repudiated here,
so anyway, I'll shut up.
Yeah.
-Tiffani, was everybody on board the Bruce train,
to quote Sandeep from 90 seconds ago?
-I'd say, yeah, unfortunately, they were,
and fortunately, unfortunately for Bruce,
probably something that bothers him when he goes to sleep
at night,
is he decided to be the face of the opposition campaign
to Proposition 1A,
which would fund the social housing developer
with an excess compensation tax.
If you all remember the four mailers
that you got in your mailbox, all of them for Proposition 1B,
they all featured the mayor front and center,
saying to vote for Prop 1B over 1A.
So from that point forward,
it was really clear to us at House Our Neighbors,
it was really clear to Katie,
because she called me the next day saying what
she was going to do,
that Bruce Harrell was on the wrong side of history.
He wasn't in touch with voters, he wasn't in touch with
how much people are struggling with housing,
with child care, with food costs.
And I do agree with Sandeep's analysis
overall in the premise of Bruce Harrell
was focusing on the two powerhouses,
but what that fails to notice
is people being driven out of the city,
is people having to take on another roommate,
is people wanting to vote for hope.
So for me, the biggest message for the election
this year was people have hope,
even in the time of the Trump regime,
and they had the ability to actually vote for that
at the ballot box,
and that is what we saw those resounding victories.
And we'll get into like the closeness of the mayoral race
in a little bit, but I think that this was a message of hope.
It was a belief that government can deliver
beyond what the City Council and this mayor
has delivered in the past couple of years,
which public safety is really important,
please don't get me wrong.
But if that is like your be-all
and end-all as a position of power
where you're not at all addressing all
of these dual crises, these triple crises,
then voters are going to start looking to other things.
And thankfully, we had candidates
that wanted to step through that door,
that wanted to run,
even if they didn't get the backing
of also progressive labor.
I'll say too, for the D9 position,
also progressive labor,
the building trades did not also get behind Dionne Foster,
so there were splits even in labor
over some of those citywide races.
But now we're going to coalesce, we're going to go forward,
and now we need to make sure
that we actually deliver that government can provide
for people with a left agenda,
and I look forward to getting into that in a little bit.
-Scott, you represent looking beyond just the City of Seattle,
and we'll get into that later,
but like so that's a sharp analysis
of what the Seattle voters are sending,
is you're thinking about the county
or even the nine special legislative races this year,
what are voters saying here and elsewhere?
-Yeah, yeah. Zooming out,
we called our -- you gave "Sound Politics," my podcast,
such a nice shout out,
so thank you, so I feel really bad, you know,
doing more self-promotion,
but we called our podcast a couple of days
after the election,
the first analysis episode which Sandeep was on,
we titled it like "All Politics is National."
And that was just a title that like, I think,
you know, jumped into someone's head,
and then it seemed to fit okay.
We usually decide titles at the end,
which is obviously a stupid way to do podcast episodes.
But it has stuck in my head,
because definitely as I look around Western Washington
in general,
you look to even places like Bellevue City Council,
where a, you know, pillar of Bellevue, Conrad Lee,
after 30 years got kicked out
because he donated to Trump's inauguration fund.
And you know, Democrats are flipping districts
that they haven't been able to flip,
or I should say seats in areas
that they haven't been able to flip,
down in Southwest Washington,
like since Trump was first elected,
those like Longview and Grays Harbor County type districts.
But I do think it ties into that affordability question
that both of you brought up,
because it definitely is this sort of, I think,
voters, especially swing voters, are really desperate,
they want someone to do something about
how expensive everything is.
And you know, a lot of them turned to Trump last year,
not so much around here,
but in other parts of the country,
and I think now they're turning to whoever is
not running City Hall in a lot of cities.
Obviously, there's like Seattle,
obviously there's, you know, exceptions like Everett,
the mayor hung on there by thread, Cassie Franklin.
But yeah, so I definitely think that all politics is national,
is what the voters -- what I'm taking away from this election,
even local politics.
-Yeah, I mean, they certainly have nothing
but nonstop conversations about national politics,
and it's the vibe.
-Can I make one really quick point?
You know, I'm on the record saying this,
I do think there was a big Trump effect in this election, right?
I think maybe the outcome of the mayor's race
would have been different
if Trump hadn't been elected last November.
I do think it changed the sort of psychological complexion
of the progressive electorate,
particularly in the City of Seattle,
but really across King County
and maybe all of Western Washington, to Scott's point.
That said, it is really important to acknowledge here
that the frustration around the sort of state of things
in Seattle that your, like,
typical normie voter has, like has nothing to do with Trump.
I mean, predates like Trump coming into office, right?
And we haven't elected a mayor in Seattle since 2005,
right, there's a reason for that like --
-Reelected. -Reelected. Sorry, sorry.
We have elected, but we have reelected a mayor.
Yeah, yeah, we've cycled through a number of mayors,
right, you know. And you know,
I actually, thinking of plugging podcasts on
"Blue City Blues," one of my podcasts,
we had Danny Westneat on after we wrote a column
about sort of the fickleness of Seattle voters,
and we kind of unpacked that in a conversation with Danny.
And I think, you know,
why do our voters sort of yo-yo back
and forth between these two polls
that feel subjectively center left and kind of movement left,
feel really, really far apart subjectively?
Though, as Danny points out,
objectively they're kind of not that far apart in a lot of ways,
but it doesn't play out that way in Seattle politics.
So anyway, yes, it's national,
but there is a kind of core reservoir
of local frustration with the state of things in Seattle
that I think has been going on for a while now
and is sort of driving a lot of our politics.
And it bit the left in 2021 and 2023,
and it bit the moderates this time.
-Yeah.
It's kind of amazing
how our one-term mayor streak really coincides
with the massive,
rapid escalation of the cost of housing.
So elections always come with some plot twists,
something happens that nobody --
and we did predictions the last time,
we didn't do predictions this time.
But you know,
sometimes something comes that you don't see happening.
So what about this cycle, either,
you know, the results are the vibe,
or Sandeep,
you talked already about kind of the alignment of the groups,
what about this surprised you, and what's your theory about it?
Scott, you want to start?
-Sure, yeah. What surprised me?
I had something written out for this, and now it's jumping.
-You're surprised she asked that.
-Somehow, this question, yeah, surprised me.
Oh, you know, this is maybe a little bit more primary thing,
but I'm surprised --
I was surprised that the Democrat-on-Democrat
contests didn't shift more to the middle.
I wondered -- I thought
that maybe dissatisfaction with taxes, you know,
people said Bob Ferguson,
you know, did the biggest tax hike in history
after saying he wasn't going to do any of that
or didn't want to do very much of it.
You know, I thought maybe that would show up in some of these,
like there was a special election on the east side
between Vandana Slatter and Amy Walen.
Vandana Slatter, who voted for the taxes, did great,
Amy Walen did not.
Same thing in Burien with the race
that Sandeep worked on a little bit,
there was a more moderate Democrat losing
to a slightly more progressive Edwin Obras,
chosen by the Democratic Party. So I was kind of surprised
that that didn't show up a little bit more.
And I think it's that people are really, yeah, it is that --
I don't think people are necessarily feeling a lot
of the little tax tweaks that Democrats did in Olympia
as much as they're feeling real fear and frustration over,
you know, Donald Trump
and wanting to hear candidates talk about that.
-Yeah, true.
-Tiffani, you want to -- something
that took you by surprise?
-Nothing necessarily took me by surprise
with the election results.
I expected Katie to win. I knew the ground game.
I knew that Bruce was vulnerable.
I also know that the reason,
and I didn't get into this in the first question,
that like some people in labor stuck with Bruce
for so long is because we know
that Bruce is a very vindictive person.
I have been called into the principal's office
myself personally a couple of years ago,
for something I said in the media
that made him not feel so good. So we know from reporting,
we know from what happened with Monisha Harrell,
we know from his past history like how he has acted
and how he has utilized his power for his own gain.
The one thing that did surprise me
is him even giving the faintest notion
that there was something
that was amiss with our King County election results
when he did his announcement speech saying that he was --
like that he accepted the election results,
but he couldn't help it to dangle a little bit
of like a misnomer of fear like, oh there were anomalies,
there were concerns.
And I was really surprised by that,
that the effect of Trump is even getting into like local politics
to the level where we have the mayor of Seattle
casting aspersions or doubts in King County elections.
So that was really surprising to me.
What was not surprising to me,
too, was though that he brought out a stage
and made sure that it was a choreographed way
that he stepped down from office.
So that was unfortunate, but for the election results,
it was, we've been talking to voters about housing,
like regular voters out at farmers markets,
knocking on doors with low propensity, medium propensity,
high propensity voters.
We know the affordability crisis is hurting everyone,
even people who are making six figures.
So it really wasn't a surprise these results,
is just glad that we had candidates
that were willing to run on that fear
and that hurt that people are feeling on their pocketbooks.
-So my big surprise, obviously Katie Wilson's win.
At the beginning of this race,
right, it seemed like it was an impossible race,
but by the end it felt inevitable, right, you know?
So I don't know that was a surprise at the end.
The thing that really surprised me
was the King County Executive's race, right,
which I think I'm on the record saying this,
maybe in this panel after the primary,
that like I still don't freaking know what that race was about.
Right? Like, it was a race about nothing.
It never took off.
Like I kept -- after the primary,
I finally thought, okay, they were doing
their little warm-up dance during the primary,
but now we'll get to like a race
where they're going to try to differentiate from each other
or point out some kind of different, you know,
and it never happened, right?
And I think to Claudia Balducci's detriment,
right, she never tried to really draw a distinction
between Girmay and I.
And so it became a race about vibes,
right, and in a vibes race like Girmay is a young,
charismatic, you know, up and coming,
you know, exciting candidate against somebody --
Claudia is a great person, great politician, very experienced,
but she's not going to win that race on vibes, right?
And so I'm still sort of mystified about what happened.
I think there was maybe a kind of subtext about race in that
and a sort of fear of, like, you know,
drawing a contrast that might lead to accusations that you,
the White candidate, are going after a person of color.
I do think that was part of it, but I still don't.
So anyway, I'm surprised.
I'm surprised that that race never turned into a race,
like I said.
-We thought it was a race for a second,
because five days or a week before,
maybe a week and a half before the election,
there was a poll out that showed Claudia ahead,
and that poll was wrong.
Yeah. -Yeah, it wasn't believable.
-Yeah, I know.
You figure out a way to make a poll that's never wrong,
and you can buy The Rabbit Box.
-I mean, one thing about that poll,
I was on a panel with a pollster,
Andrew Thibault, this morning.
He pointed out, even in that poll,
when you asked people who had already voted,
how they had voted, Girmay was leading 54-46 among the --
and that's basically where the race ended up, right?
So it's just telling you like
as people started to pay attention and do their votes,
they were coalescing, right, around Girmay.
And so even in that poll, you kind of see that.
-Yeah.
Well, one thing that will be a race
is there's a race going for the next 44 days,
which is between now and when Katie Wilson gets sworn in.
So clock starts ticking real fast as soon
as she raises her hand.
What is her first political landmine to navigate?
You know, we're not starting with the low-hanging fruit here,
we're starting with the spiciest fruit you can pick.
-Who do you want to start? -Sandeep, why don't you start?
-All right.
Well, so I think Katie put down a lot of markers
in this campaign, right?
I mean, she's going to fix the cost of a slice of pizza.
You know, we're going to see how that works out.
But I do think, you know, as I was saying before,
I think we've got a kind of too cozy kind of ossified status quo
in Seattle that needs some disruption.
And I think she has the potential to be a disruptor.
I'm kind of very intrigued by that.
One of the markers,
one of the most specific markers she put down during the race,
was, she said,
"I am going to very quickly get 4,000
unsheltered homeless people either into shelter
or some kind of housing," right?
And there's not a lot of detail
to what she wants to do about that.
I'm very curious about it.
I think she's coming out on my other podcast,
"Seattle Nice," tomorrow morning.
It's a question I'm obviously going to kind of want to ask her
about what her play is on that.
And I'm sorry, we were -- sorry --
-Political landmine.
-Oh, the political.
Oh, here's the political landmine on that, right?
First of all, there's a lot of concern, with good reason,
that the Trump administration is about to cut off all
of this funding
that goes to the homeless service providers in Seattle
right now,
much of it to permanent supportive housing providers
like DESC, I'm on the board there.
If Katie really wants to make a big move on shelter,
right, as a kind of interim way
to get people off the streets and out of encampments
and into some better, safer place to go,
I think there are real potential fights brewing.
In fact, I think we saw an initial skirmish in that
in the City Council over some funding
that people aren't really paying attention to right now,
but it's telling you what's coming is that
Katie may have a fight with her left
and some of the folks on the left
about who want to see funding,
every dollar needs to go to shore
up the existing system rather than taking dollars
and putting it into a different place rather than
permanent supportive housing,
all of a sudden money's going to shelters.
So that is disruptive,
right, that's disrupting the status quo in a way
that if she does that, I'm going to be pretty supportive of it,
I think, depending on how she does it,
but oxes are going to get gored, right?
And that's why it's hard to make change in Seattle,
like people get mad, and so we'll see.
So that's, I think, a potential landmine.
-People do get mad.
[ Laughter ]
Tiffani?
-I mean, I really want to like pull off
of what Sandeep was talking about just
because we do have so many existential crises
that the Trump regime is creating,
you know, with the Continuum of Care funds,
with potentially getting rid of project-based vouchers,
Section 8 now wanting to change public housing away
from something that you can be in for a long time
and only something that you can be in for two years.
So there's not a lack of things
that the new administration at the city level
is going to have to, you know, navigate,
but at the local level,
where I just deviate from Sandeep,
is that we're actually going to see from this council
who is starting to proviso funds
right now in the city budget
against the incoming administration.
So just on the 14th, Rob Saka, Kettle,
and I think it was also Rivera,
but don't quote me on that last one,
provisoed funds for the CARE team,
that none of that money could be used for anything else.
I think I would read between the lines to say
that they think Katie is going to stop cleaning up encampments
or stop getting people from being outside to being inside.
And I think that that will be a fight
because there is this Continuum of Care money
that is bottoming out from the federal government.
And how are we going to, with the scarce resources we have,
make sure that we are housing people,
that we're maintaining housing for people,
and people are not entering homelessness
that have been homeless,
but also that we are actually providing new shelter beds
for people that are currently outside,
which we have not done under the Harrell administration.
I think we've actually lost shelter beds in the four years.
And he promised, remember at the very beginning
to create 2,000 new shelter beds.
But what we see from mayoral administration
since I've moved here like 11 years ago,
they're always funny with the numbers.
Like, "Oh, we created this,"
but you look back, and it's like, no,
those were actually already in the pipeline.
Those were not additive.
So I think it's not actually necessarily going to come from
like the left from folks who are worried about sweeps,
I think it's going to come from the Council
wanting to make sure that sweeps continue
and are sustained in the way that they are,
but not going to be willing to put up more money
for the 4,000 new shelter beds
that the Wilson administration has promised.
I know we're going to hold her to that.
Other people are because we need people to have a place to go.
But I also think that the fight is going to be
with neighborhood groups
who don't want tiny houses and shelters
to be sited in their neighborhoods.
So it's going to be a land use landmine,
it's going to be a funding landmine,
and it's going to be about having neighborhoods
who have historically read between the lines,
historically White neighborhoods,
not taking on their share of like shelter
or transitional housing, tiny house villages.
We have the space, we do have the resources,
we can make this happen,
but I think the fight is actually going to be
with local groups.
That's going to be important for folks
who want this to happen
and who do want to see like unsheltered homelessness
actually reduce on our streets,
to get into that fight against neighborhood areas
that might really weaponize the SEPA,
the State Environmental Protection, whatever thing.
-Act. -Yeah, thanks. That.
As we have seen them do in the past.
-One really quick point of clarification,
just in support of what you were saying,
because you were saying it's funding for the CARE team,
but there's the CARE Department, right?
But this is the $30 million going for the Unified Care.
It's the Encampment Resolution Funding, the Unified Care Team,
which is different from the CARE Department, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
-I'm just going to say yes to everything
both of them just said and add in.
The landmine is the World Cup.
Because she's already telegraphed or signaled
that she is hoping to ramp up this stuff before the World Cup.
She's probably, I assume,
feeling the pressure from, you know, the President,
I guess, who has talked about it or had been asked about it.
And it's really hard to do everything
that Sandeep and Tiffani are talking about.
It's going to take years. It may never even happen.
Past mayors have tried.
Jenny Durkan came in on a promise
to build a thousand tiny house villages in one year,
and we know that that didn't happen.
-Bruce had 2,000, right?
-Not tiny house villages.
He said he was -- use the ARPA money for shelter,
which the ARPA money was already going to that.
Yeah, it's going to be really hard to do that in six months.
The World Cup is in June. That's the landmine.
It's going to be really, really tough
if she wants to do something before the World Cup.
And I think that a lot of people will be really sensitive
if it looks like she is or her administration
or the Unified Care Team
or whatever is sweeping folks to get rid of,
you know, a visible homelessness before the World Cup.
In the '90s,
when the Goodwill Games happened,
that was where a lot of like our modern,
well, decades of homelessness activism were born out of
how the city reacted to the Goodwill Games,
if I can do a callback that long ago.
Yeah. -Yeah.
And Tiffani, to your point as you were talking about,
you know, where do people go?
Scott, maybe we have a new title for your next podcast,
and it should be "All Politics is Siting."
-Oh. That sounds so exciting.
[ Laughter ] Like S-I-T-I-N-G.
-Yeah, like where does this stuff go?
Where does it go?
Over 70% of the people in my precinct
voted for the crisis care clinic,
and dozens of them showed up to say they didn't want it
in their neighborhood.
Luckily, we won that, and our community has that asset,
but like it's just not as simple as that.
Speaking of things that are really simple,
we've got a city council that is kind of in a three-way split,
a three-way balance.
We've got three folks kind of holding it down for the left,
we've got three folks, Sandeep, you're going to hate this,
who are on the right side of this,
and three who are in the middle, in the center.
So no easy majorities, no natural coalitions.
So how does power work at City Council now?
And I'm going to start with you, Tiffani.
-I think if adopting your buckets
that the folks on the left and those in the center
that, you know, sway
or feel more emboldened to sway to your left
will really need to rely on the mayor's seat,
but also outside interests, nonprofits, advocacy groups,
campaigns, in order to push through what they want to do.
If you have that public support behind you
and you're not afraid to call in, and please, you know,
Sandeep, I'm not talking about the red shirts or, you know,
packing city hall and yelling people down, not that.
I'm talking about getting out and talking to regular people
and getting them civically engaged, educated.
Like, we still need to pass our comprehensive plan update.
Like, going out and getting regular people
and having them show up,
having them get civically engaged,
having them show up for these priorities
that the new mayoral administration have,
and the three new, well, Alexis isn't new,
but the two new leftist electeds come in.
Being able to support them,
I think that's going to be really, really critical
in getting people engaged using these podcasts.
I don't have a podcast on my own to prioritize here or to uplift,
but I think that those are going to be really important.
And then I think it is just going to be
a need to also introduce like a different agenda and narrative.
And it'll be really interesting
to see who the Council president is,
the shakeup with the committee structures.
Does Councilmember Hollingsworth still hold on
to the Land Use Committee?
We'll just have to wait and see.
I know we're going to be involved in land use
and the comprehensive plan to make sure
that social housing can be sited all over the city,
which it cannot be right now.
But I think that we just need to look at that
and then adopting a narrative and pushing a narrative
that isn't just about giving more power to the police
to then have the police then be able to pass
that power and surveillance on to the national government.
So I think it depends on how much the left is mobilized
and folks care and are civically engaged.
Otherwise, I think it's really going to be the center
that holds a lot of power,
and I don't know that a whole lot will be done.
-I feel like I'm also bucking the buckets, so.
But I mean, I feel like I do have issues
with the buckets here
because I'm not really sure right-wing to Seattle.
I also just think like, you know, people are so shocked
when Cathy Moore suggested a capital gains tax.
And this is why. Sorry, Alex, I --
-No. No, I'm good. -Like, I don't know.
I just don't see it.
I don't know if voters see it that way,
and I don't fully see it that way,
but if I accept that the center would be Dan Strauss,
what, Bob Kettle, and -- no, Dan Strauss --
Yeah, I don't even -- Joy Hollingsworth.
See, I can't even -- I don't even know who's in the buckets.
-Okay. So my theory is that it's Eddie Lin,
it's Dionne Foster,
and it's Alexis Mercedes Rinck on the left,
and you've got Joy Hollingsworth and Dan Strauss,
and Debora Juarez in the center,
and Maritza Rivera and Rob Saka and Bob Kettle
on the other side of the center.
-If I'm accepting those buckets.
-That feels real, that feels real.
-Feels real.
-I just don't really -- it's like, I don't know.
Anyway, I think Dan Strauss and Debora Juarez, certainly,
and I'm sorry, Joy Hollingsworth.
So especially, Dan Strauss and Debora Juarez,
they have the most experience.
I assume they have the biggest, you know,
leg up simply because they have experience,
you know, followed closely by Alexis.
So I would assume that that is where the power goes,
but I do think on these different issues,
people fall in different ways.
I don't know if you can --
I don't even know what Dan Strauss is.
He voted for a defund, right, when he was spending was like,
"That was a mistake."
And so.
-So I mean, to build on what Scott was just saying,
so there was this narrative
that took really deep root right after the 2023 elections
two years ago that really said,
oh my God, we've got a moderate mayor now,
we've got a moderate super majority on the City Council
and they're totally unified, they're going to drive all,
you know, the moderate train to moderate nirvana, right,
or whatever was going to happen, right?
Like -- -Moderate nirvana.
-I'm not quite sure what that looks like, but yeah.
-That sounds lovely. That sounds amazing.
-Yeah, yeah.
It's a sort of nice house in a bougie neighborhood
and with a high property value, and like, yeah.
Single family, you know, like -- [ Laughter ]
-Oh my God, there's a lot of kombucha on tap.
-We are unpacking.
-But that assumption, which I shared at the time,
turned out not at all to mirror reality of what happened
with this last council.
I do think there was a moderate consensus
or super majority around public safety issues.
If you look at the last two years of this council,
they passed a whole bunch of public safety legislation.
But even on that front,
there was a real divide between the folks on the Council
and the mayor's office on a lot of this stuff.
And they passed a bunch of legislation that didn't
really get implemented all that much, right?
Because the mayor,
contrary to like some of the assumptions about his politics,
wasn't really on board with some of that,
or like had qualms about it,
or like thought it was not lefty enough.
You know, you can talk about what his motives were
on some of that stuff, but it didn't end up happening.
And then outside of public safety issues,
this council was all over the freaking map.
Like, issue by issue was like a kaleidoscope
of like they would divide up in different ways.
So I don't know that it's all that different now.
I mean, it's different because the power balance
between your buckets is a little different.
That's going to have some impacts.
But like I still think issue by issue,
they're going to have to figure out how to count to five,
right, and that's going to vary on stuff.
But that's the way it was with this council on most stuff.
So anyway.
-I'm going to let it slide that it's not going to be --
that it'll be the same.
And I'm not going to name any names.
I'm not going to name any names.
-I forgot Debra Juarez was back until you said it,
and I was like, well -- -Dude, never forget Aunty DJ.
She is really --
-You're going to call if you remember that, yeah.
-Right.
-Yeah, exactly, you're going to get called.
So in Seattle, power isn't just behind the dais.
And Tiffani, you already alluded to this,
so I'm going to start with you.
It's in the streets, it's in your inbox,
it's in rooms where people are coming up with ideas
and making stuff happen.
So we've got obviously electeds,
we've got political players who are the insiders.
We've got groups,
you know, the "groups" who are somewhere kind of in
between the streets and the dais.
And so where do you see advocacy power shifting
in this new kind of political dynamic?
-I'd say,
whereas like Mayor Harrell really depended on
like his constituency
that he built up during his city council time,
Katie is going to need to rely on her outside constituencies
in order to get a lot of her agenda over the finish line.
She doesn't, unlike Harrell in the last two years,
doesn't have,
I'll call it a super majority on the Council
to help prop up their agenda.
It is a lot more split.
So I think it is just,
this is going to be very much mirroring my last answer,
so I'll keep it short.
But it's going to be depending on those groups
to do the education, to do the advocacy,
to do the door knocking,
to do the tabling, to talk to regular voters,
to remind them that this is what was promised
and this is what we're trying to fulfill and land on.
And then if those things can't happen,
making sure also to communicate that back to the voters.
So I think it is about Transit Riders Union,
House Our Neighbors,
Share the Cities, all of these other groups getting out there
and supporting these changes, supporting bus lanes,
supporting more housing,
supporting a comprehensive plan
that allows for multi-family housing
to go all across our city, which it doesn't right now.
It is prohibited from being so to make sure
that if we need progressive revenue to do X, Y, and Z,
that we're out there supporting that.
It's not just going to be able to rely on the City Council
and the mayor having this bond and whipping the votes that way.
It is going to be dependent.
And I think also it is going to be incumbent
upon those groups that help get Katie into office
to also hold her accountable and not to allow for like,
you know, the seat of power
and this desire to like meet in the middle
to cloud judgment or to overtake to
where actually a lot of the agenda is abandoned
because there's a desire to meet in the middle.
And let's just keep this a very amorphous middle.
But that's the thing that's always of the concern is
when folks think it's going to be the same
with Mamdani and others,
like this desire to reach out across the aisle,
to be seen as experienced, to be seen as rational and reasonable.
But actually, when you do that so much,
you actually forget about who got you into office,
what you were elected to do,
and you're so focused on meeting
that middle ground of stakeholders
where sometimes you're not going to be able to do that
and you need to push it through with the voters
that you have and then stand it up, make sure it's successful,
and then go out and, you know, parade those wins in the future.
So I think there needs to be a desire to like be bold,
find the alliances where you can,
and then using outside groups to help push that forward.
And labor will play a part of that,
but I think like community-based organizations will play
a big one in that for going forward.
And that's always been the way with the Council.
But I think with the mayor,
we have an opportunity on the left
that we haven't had for so long.
So it's about utilizing that and bringing voters along with you
so that they stay engaged for years to come.
-Tiffani, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
It seems to me
because the left hasn't had the mayor's office in so long,
there's an enormous amount of pent-up demand on the left
for stuff, right?
So you know, how is that going to get sorted out, right?
Because you can't do everything, right?
You know, everybody's got something
they want from Katie, you know? So do you have any thoughts?
I'm myself super curious about like what's --
-We have a committee. No, we don't actually.
[ Laughter ]
We have a committee, and we're going to,
you know, find consensus where we can.
You know, I'm making fun of the left here.
That's me making fun of the left.
I think it is just about having that accountability,
reminding, pulling in some elements of the left
that think that the first thing that you do
when you have a disagreement with someone
who's in power is to go vocalize it in the news,
not doing that, talking about it internally.
So I don't really know.
It's just I know that there are groups --
folks that have like agenda items.
We're putting those together,
we're setting up meetings with Katie.
You're going to hear about the transition committee
and everything going forward,
but also making sure that we're pushing our stuff forward
and always remembering that we have, you know,
the initiative process.
We also have council members
that want to push the city forward.
So that's my best answer,
but it is just about us staying engaged
and making sure to pull back
if there's too much of that waffling in the middle or,
you know, whatever other area of the city we have.
Yeah.
-That's what I'm kind of curious about is,
is what does the committee decide?
No, but I mean like, you know, in general,
in a very grassroots movement,
sometimes an idea that a politician has sold out
can take hold and spread quickly.
And you know, there's this saying that I hate,
but I think it can be true, is the left,
you know, eats their own.
You know, you have that people are already talking about,
you know, with Zohran Mamdani,
or like locally, there's, you know,
Girmay had Brad Smith standing up next to him
in a photo in his transition team, right?
And people are taking that,
a lot of folks who do not like Microsoft
and the contracts they've had in the past
with Israel are taking that and running with it.
I don't think it's a problem right now for Girmay.
But those kinds of things,
if they spread, right, and they get big,
like you can have the kind of -- yeah,
you can have the roiling kind of tide can turn over on you.
And I wonder if that happens.
Because I do think,
actually, Katie will be -- I'm going to just assume
that she's going to be pretty smart about how she,
you know, builds coalitions and works on, you know,
policy, and so it will be interesting.
And I assume I think Girmay as well at the county level,
so it'll be interesting to see, you know, if that happens.
Like, it matters more on the Seattle level,
I think, for Katie than it does on a county level
or even a state level.
But yeah, I'm curious about that.
-Yeah.
I mean, it's going to be super interesting
to watch this go down.
You know, the old saw is that campaigns are done in poetry,
but, you know, governing is prose, right?
And governing is often a series of tradeoffs.
It's like trying to understand like the --
but it's not just the bumper sticker positive benefits,
but like what are the unintended consequences
or downstream impacts?
Yes, we'll get some good over here,
but we're going to lose something over here.
How do you balance all that equation, right?
And so that makes it hard,
and the purity politics sometimes on the left,
like Katie may run into that.
I do think that's kind of the issue here.
But when I think about outside advocacy here,
the thing I'm most curious about
is what is the business community going to do, right?
Like, how are they going to respond
to a Katie Wilson administration?
I was speaking on a panel like this
to the Chamber of Commerce this morning,
and I said to them like, you know,
I kind of think if they go kind of full adversarial, you know,
with her or try to fight,
obviously we're going to see progressive taxation, right?
That's one of the things that Katie Wilson is known for.
We're going to see that happen.
Municap gains, probably, do we turn the dials on jump start?
You know, there's any number of different progressive taxes
that we can see Katie advocating.
I think where the business community has gotten
most sort of crossways with the public,
the progressive voter public in Seattle
is over issues of taxation
and their reflexive opposition to taxes.
Sometimes I think
that opposition might have been merited, like you know,
if we're raising taxes and not getting anything out of it.
I'm not quite sure why we did this $80 million, you know,
B&O thing, because I'm not sure what we're getting out of that,
or if anything,
other than we're spreading some peanut butter around and like,
you know -- but anyway.
But that question is, are they going to come to the table
and play ball with the new mayor and say,
"Okay, we'll work with you on a municap gains tax,
but here are our priorities
about what we want to get funded,"
or are they going to go into full-scale opposition mode?
You know, is it going to be some mix of both?
Is it going to start out one way,
but maybe if things go too far?
You know, that relationship
and dynamic is going to be fascinating to watch.
-Okay. So Scott,
you mentioned a roiling boil of things that are to come.
So I'm going to ask you this question.
It'll make sense.
We've been talking about Seattle a lot.
It's where, you know, people pay a lot of attention,
but we're going to zoom out.
We talked about this.
Progressives held ground in Olympia,
and we even picked up some city council seats in city halls.
There are city halls that are not here in the City of Seattle,
and they have seats in them,
and those people make important decisions.
-Delivering this country, right?
[ Laughter ]
-Scott, what do you make
of how the regional politics are shifting?
You spoke to this a little bit,
but what do you think this means for the midterms next year?
-Yeah.
I'm not saying anything
that the New York Times is probably not already saying.
But the midterms, I think, are definitely going to be,
especially in a place as blue as this,
about what's the future of the party.
Is it Zohran Mamdani, you know,
or is it, I don't know, Adam Smith for a local congressman?
Or you know, something like,
you know, is it Abigail Spanberger, right?
That'd be a better one.
Or can it hold -- you know, does it have room for both?
And I know that, you know, Adam, you know,
here in Seattle, is hoping to make it about like,
let's not go for -- you know,
Kshama Sawant is running against him.
He wants to make it all
about like this big sort of referendum on the problems
of going too far left
and veering too much to what city voters like,
you know, the folks around here care about.
You know, I think it'll be really interesting
to see what happens with that. And of course,
what they're going to do in Olympia
next year with probably an even bigger budget deficit
than they were staring at this year,
you know, a governor who is really,
really, really hard to read on taxes,
and just a question of do we,
you know, try and do the thing of taxing the rich
even though the governor doesn't like that idea
or hasn't said that, so yeah, I don't know.
That's probably too broad, but --
-Stay tuned. No, it's all good.
I'm going to move us into the next one.
Let everybody have a chance, then we'll close it out,
and then we're going to turn it out to you.
So this is your chance.
If you want to refresh your drink,
you can go up there and go get another one and
start thinking about what your question is for these folks.
And maybe you don't like the conceit of this setup
for this question either, in which case --
-Maybe we'll go have a drink. [ Laughter ]
-And I'll just cook.
-Can I just be on mute?
-So Seattle's politics has been kind of stuck
in a cycle of sort of vibes, backlash, burnout,
we can't get a mayor reelected.
There was the whole --
you heard there was a backlash election in 2023.
Some progressives didn't make it through.
So let's dream a little. What would it look like
for Seattle politics to feel healthy again?
[ Laughter ]
Scott, you are lifting the mic, so you're ready to go.
-It's going to be the like most surface level.
Because I haven't -- so I love to go first.
Because I have not lived here. I moved here in 2017.
And does anybody remember how many mayors we --
I almost put up the number.
-Oh, yeah?
-Does anybody remember how many mayors we had in 2017?
-Three. -Bruce Harrell was one.
No, we had four. -Four.
-Four mayors, right? -Burgess --
-Because we got Durkan at the end.
-And Durkan. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
-So I mean,
I guess my thing is just a think of like --
I actually do love this question.
And to you, you're like saying,
"Maybe you don't like the conceit of the question,"
but I actually do really like it.
-Thank you.
-So just with that said, I do think that, you know,
when you look at, I mean, even New York,
I mean, you know, we all saw the story about Eric Adams.
You look at many other cities around the nation,
even on the West Coast,
and the politics are also very messed up.
So I hope that we keep in mind
that I think part of the struggle with feeling
like Seattle politics are not healthy
is our national politics are not healthy,
but also just the fact of like we're still really reeling
and trying to deal with the fact that we are a big city
and we have big city politics now.
And I don't think that we ever really have,
like, actually dealt with that.
I think Seattle is still kind of in its head,
like half of the time, like a small town,
or trying to regain the small-town-like
mindset or something.
And on the other hand, like,
"Oh, we're hosting the World Cup next year."
So I don't want to be too zen about it,
but I feel like sometimes it's kind of like, okay,
well, remember where you sit in the context of this entire,
you know, nation and moment.
-You can go, Sandeep. -So remind me, what do we --
-Well, what would it look for Seattle politics
to feel healthy -- Seattle nice?
-Settle healthy again? -What does success look like?
Right? So I think it's two things.
First of all, like there's I can't like, you know,
overestimate or -- so overestimate/underestimate,
that the importance of effective,
supple, strong political leadership,
right, in making things work, right?
Let me give you a tale of two cities.
Chicago, a couple of years ago, elected a very,
very progressive mayor named Brandon Johnson,
who ran on like publicly owned grocery stores,
a lot of the stuff you're hearing from, like, you know,
Katie is gesturing at or Mamdani in New York City.
He has a total progressive city council,
progressive-dominated city council in Chicago.
Last time I checked,
Brandon Johnson had a 14% approval rating.
He's probably the most unpopular big city mayor
in America, right?
And I remember after the primary,
Katie texted me about something.
And we had just done an episode on my
"Blue City Blues" podcast called
"What's the Matter with Chicago,"
where we were talking with a very prominent Chicago person
about what went wrong in Chicago.
And I sent that to her, and I said, "Boy, if you win,
Katie, you don't want to end up like this," right?
And she texted me right back and said,
"I'm going to be Michelle Wu," right?
And Michelle Wu is a counterexample
of a very progressive mayor in the City of Boston
who just got reelected.
Basically, her opponent quit the race of the primary
because she killed him, right?
You know, and he's a son of the Patriots owner,
and he spent all this money and it didn't matter
because she's been a very, very effective,
smart politician who's been able in part to triangulate against,
you know, her state house stuff,
but in part to like work her progressive groups
and kind of figure that out.
And just the quality of leader -- she ran for reelection
as a progressive with the support of the police union
this year, right?
So that's pretty interesting
how she was able to kind of so effectively work
her politics that way.
So that's a huge thing that contributes to success.
The other thing I will say, and I take Tiffani's point
that like there is this total do nothing mushy middle
where you can end up if you sort of kind of compromise too much
or in the wrong stuff, and nothing happens.
Obviously, that's not a market success,
but I've said this for years.
This election, this mayor's race showed us not only
that we're kind of at least subjectively deeply divided,
right, between center left and left,
but we're pretty evenly divided, right?
This is a close freaking race, right?
And so it seems to me the only way
you can make durable big-ticket progress in the city
is if you can speak across that divide
and get enough buy-in for whatever agenda you're doing.
This is something we used to do in the City of Seattle,
even 10, 12, 15.
You know, when we did a $15 minimum wage,
it wasn't Kshama Sawant jamming a $15 Now initiative.
It was, you know, I recruited more than half
of that $15 minimum wage task force back in 2014.
And the ultimate compromise was proposed by the head
of the Chamber of Commerce working with like UFCW,
you know,
like very progressive labor folks in the business community
got to a deal about how we're going to do a $15 minimum wage.
First big city in the country to do it.
It set, you know, a wave of other big cities
and following in that track.
And if we just jam $15 Now,
it would have been -- I can tell you,
you cannot raise the minimum wage $6 an hour
overnight without having a huge discrediting,
you know, kind of demand side shock that would have occurred.
And so to me, it's got to be smart compromise,
but there has to be ways to talk across that divide,
or none of it's going to last.
We will keep yo-yoing back and forth,
and there'll be a kind of really kind of ugly toxic politics
that leads to division,
and then people will get frustrated,
and they'll vote out these folks
and bring in the rest of the folks.
So those are the two things I would say.
-I would just say this is very idealistic,
but a healthy politics would be focusing on the policy
or the way to try to achieve the policy as opposed to the person,
as opposed to focusing on them as an individual,
their background, like getting away from that homonym
and focusing on I don't like this individual
or I don't agree with their policies because of X, Y, and Z.
I think also a way to get to a healthy politics
is where we are actually making significant gains,
significant changes in all of our crises
that we're facing as a city.
And I think over the like time that I've lived here since 2013,
we've just had this actual leadership vacuum for so long to
where this is where like ideology can come in
and take over to where like on the 14th of just this month,
you had actually Council President Sara Nelson holding up
like a King County health bag
like from what Andrea Suarez did
when she was running for the state house,
actually critiquing like drug intervention, harm reduction.
Like, we are creating vacuums to where like the very ultra-left,
very ultra-right can go in and then push their stuff,
and then we don't even have cohesiveness.
And we're seeing this across the region
with the King County Regional Homelessness Authority.
We can't even agree on
whether or not Housing First is a good thing,
and then you get into a cycle
where if you don't have a strong base,
you don't have strong support with electeds,
you just have a vacuum.
You can get nothing done, and then it swings back and forth,
back and forth, and nothing ever happens.
So I would like to see the smart compromise where that is,
but also not being so wedded to compromise
that you aren't actually fulfilling anything.
So that's when you go back out to the outside groups,
to labor, to community organizations,
or just to voting rights groups,
and you get them involved, and you do it at the ballot box
through a voter initiative, and you show.
Because there are pockets
that want to put forward ideas and policies,
and we saw that with the two initiatives
I was lucky to be part of.
If you put these forward to the voters, they do vote for them.
So I think like, yes, compromise,
please do bring people together, get them on board with a vision,
but also recognize that we are deeply divided,
we don't agree on a whole lot,
and the best way to start getting agreement and buy-in
is through actual concrete results
that don't just last for a year or two years or three years.
-Amen to that.
You talked about there's great ideas out there
in the community, and there's people who want things,
so we're going to do a quick final question,
and then we're going to turn it over to the audience questions.
So let's close by lifting other people up.
People in this room care a lot about the good ideas
that are out there and want to be part of a Seattle
that's moving forward.
So there's always people out there doing the work in
the shadows, organizing, building, imagining.
What is a big idea or a person doing work in Seattle
that more policymakers need to be paying attention to?
What's the best idea, person,
or group that you know of out there doing this work
and who's getting it right, even if nobody's watching?
-I'll go.
This is my time for self-promotion.
-Yeah. -Yes.
She doesn't have a podcast, but she does have a non-profit.
[ Laughter ]
-Well, it's not even my non-profit, but it's a parallel.
-My podcast is a non-profit.
-Yeah, yeah, there you go.
I would say just because of the existential crisis
that the Trump regime poses, the fact that we, you know,
we can't just like tax things forever.
Yes, I'm saying that.
There is an organization that I am the board president of
and it's called Washingtonians for Public Banking.
And what we are seeing
because of the existential crisis with the Trump regime
is we are starting to see states,
we're starting to see more lawmakers here getting
interested in the idea of public financing,
public banking,
public capitalization to
where we then are able to capitalize on our own funds,
create more money through bonding or through debt
to actually do public infrastructure,
to do more housing,
to make child care needs, potentially student debt.
I don't know who's got student debt in here.
I do.
I was hoping to have that erased in two years,
but Trump is effing that all up, too.
So I think like this idea of public banking,
public financing is something also
the Wilson administration has looked into,
but we are having a lot more lawmakers call in.
We're looking at even potentially giving
the treasurer the ability to capitalize on public funds
to have more public debt to be able to go out
and have projects happen.
So I would just lift that up.
I think overall nationally there is a resurgence
of public sector excitement,
whether that's bringing our power grids
into public ownership, whether that's public banking,
whether that's public housing, or whether that's, you know,
just energy sectors in general moving over to public ownership.
And I think that there's a lot of opportunity there,
and I just want to uplift that work
and a bit of self-promotion.
-Sure. You said idea, so I'm going to jump on that.
That wasn't in the original list of questions we were sent,
so I was thinking about people.
But I'm glad ideas are in there.
I was looking through Katie's website again,
and I forgot that she had mentioned
that she wants to explore a regional housing bond.
That has been on the table as a potential fix for our housing,
you know, problem for years.
I remember the last -- in 2021 that was something
that Casey Sixkiller was talking about in his run for mayor,
and he was like the only person talking about it,
and I was like, "This is not going to get anywhere."
But it seems like the only thing that can do
and it's not a quick fix,
but it does seem like one of the only real things
that can make a difference.
And so I hope that gets more discussion,
I guess I should say,
as a reporter who can't put my -- you know,
can't say I endorse it,
but I hope it gets more discussion.
-There are some ideas percolating out there
around housing finance
that could be kind of creative and interesting.
But for me,
I think everybody cast their minds back
to the beginning of this year,
right, there was Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson wrote a book,
you know, "Abundance," that is a huge bestseller,
and certainly for a lot of left-of-center folks
that are interested in policy and good governance
and the functionality of government.
Like that book created quite a stir.
And sort of downstream from that,
there have been a number of different blue cities,
sort of abundance-focused organizations
kind of coming together to do work about
how can we do better on building more housing.
I was just having a meeting. Including in Seattle,
there's a small group of people
that have started to come together,
Ben in the audience here,
and I have been talking to some of those folks,
maybe some of the other,
you know, folks that are part of that conversation.
We'll see where that all goes,
but I think that has a lot of potential opportunity
to really fix some of the things that have the bottlenecks
that we've sort of created with the best
of intentions in governance.
We can blow some of that stuff up,
we might be able to start delivering more,
whether it's on housing or transit or transportation,
or stuff like that.
I'd love to see that go into a really --
turn into something bigger and more productive,
and I think that potential is there.
-I just want to say I was on the train a couple of months ago
and I heard two very young,
like college-age guys talking about "Abundance,"
and I was like,
"This is either the most Seattle moment in my life
or maybe I'm on the train to moderate nirvana."
-Yeah, moderate nirvana. Right, right, right.
We'll put you in a single-family home, yeah.
Yeah.
[ Laughter ] -My goodness gracious.
What questions are out there in the room?
Right here.
-So I'm curious about what Katie is going to do
about the bureaucratic fiefdoms in the City of Seattle.
-The question is, what is Katie Wilson
and the Wilson administration
going to do about the bureaucratic fiefdoms
that exist in the City of Seattle?
-And Fred, can you elaborate a little bit?
What do you mean by fiefdoms exactly?
-Everything's in a silo.
They don't work across the silos,
they don't realize
that results-based processes require collaboration
across organizational boundaries.
They're very functionally oriented, not product-oriented.
It was a really great thing that I was at King County
because we could point to them as an example of
how not to do it.
-Repeat.
-The indomitable Fred Jarrett.
-You're not talking about Fred Jarrett.
-Fred Jarrett, former Deputy County Executive.
-Amazing good governance champion.
Everything in Seattle is in silos,
and folks are not able to produce results
because they're not collaborating across to outcomes
as opposed to downwards into scope.
-And I think you're talking not just
about the city departments but also the non-profit
and community-based organizations as well,
sounds like, yeah.
Yeah.
-I mean, this is where leadership matters, right,
about, you know,
if you want to create a culture of collaboration
across departments,
right, across the complexities of Seattle municipal government,
it's not easy, but it's possible to do.
Fred, I know you guys at the county when you were there
really put an emphasis on trying to do that.
And this is where, you know,
personnel is policy in some ways, right?
It's going to really matter.
I know people like me
are going to be really looking at who Katie brings in with her
into the mayor's office and into the department
to run the departments.
And then, you know, there's a cabinet, right,
of all the department heads who come together.
And if you work that right,
you can figure out how do you get the departments
to kind of work together across --
-Actually, that's not all true.
-Okay. Okay, why not?
-It's all about what you measure.
Get your results if you measure output
and get people working together.
If you bring together functional managers,
you get functional management.
-I think that at the city,
what I've seen is, you know,
there's a real fear of creating a negative headline,
especially around -- I mean, I used to cover homelessness,
so obviously that's jumping into my head.
I remember it when Catherine Lester was running
the Human Services Department at the City of Seattle
and trying to do a big overhaul to streamline.
And you know, I'm sure people have opinions
about what she was trying to do
and how successful she was at it.
But one of the things they were trying to do is take money from,
like Urban Rest Stops at LIHI
that LIHI was running, and put them into 24/7 hygiene centers.
So essentially, you could stay at a shelter,
get up in the morning, and take a shower at that shelter.
The problem was that the money was sitting
across town in LIHI's Urban Rest Stops.
And when they tried to take that
and defund the Urban Rest Stops
and put them in Compass Housing and things like that, LIHI,
and, you know, to be honest, Sharon Lee,
who's the first person I think of
when you talk about fiefdoms, sorry.
You know, she went to the media,
and it was a whole big thing, you know?
And she went to, you know, Sawant,
and it was a whole big thing.
And you probably have more insight into all that than I do.
But you're going to have to be willing to, one,
take a couple of bad headlines
and two, go and explain that because the problem was it took,
you know,
reporters all day to figure out what was even happening.
And it wasn't that LIHI was getting
its Urban Rest Stops defunded,
or at least that wasn't the entire story.
It was there was a bigger story
that the city and Catherine Lester,
to be honest, couldn't tell,
didn't do a good job from my remembrance of telling.
Of course, this was 2018, so I don't know,
I could remember it totally wrong, but yeah.
-I don't disagree, Fred,
about performance measurement or anything.
I do think we were doing more of that at one point
and have kind of gotten away from it,
both at the city and the county.
And I remember, what is it called, like King Stat back,
you know, in my county day?
And look, you know, I'm going to get into a touchy area here
but like I think whatever you want to call that period
but the sort of "peak woke period,"
we decided like, you know,
that actually measuring outcomes and stuff like that was,
I don't know, racist somehow
and we weren't going to do that anymore
and therefore like we were just going to hand out, you know.
So a lot of that shit I think did get kind of dug into,
like sort of the bureaucratic sinews of local government,
and I think we're kind of unwinding some of that stuff now
and saying, well,
if we actually want results,
we kind of do have to do more stuff
like measure performance and stuff like that.
So I don't disagree.
Yeah. -Steven?
-I'm curious what you guys think about --
I feel like we haven't sat with the fact
that Dionne Foster and Eddie Lin,
and Alexis Mercedes Rinck have won with almost 70% of the vote.
Like, what do you guys think they are getting right?
Setting aside the mayor's race for a second,
which was more contentious but I can't remember,
I've lived here for 10 years,
I can't remember a time that
both open seat and incumbent and challengers
to incumbents are winning with,
you know, more than two-thirds of the vote.
Like, what are they getting right that says...
-Good question. -...about what Seattle wants?
And I almost wanted this diagonal lane
that I've been -- it's like the Holy Grail
as a political consultant,
I'm always speaking that diagonal lane that's not left
or right, but it's across both.
Like, what are they getting right
that almost two-thirds of voters are saying,
"I want that person,"
whether it's an incumbent or an open seat or whatever?
-I didn't get the question.
-Yeah, the question is -- yes, congratulations,
a recently elected person in our audience, reelected.
The question is, the three city council races
that were up this year, those people won by landslides, right?
-Challengers won.
-Challengers, incumbents, new folks.
And I think I read that like Alexis' was like one
of the top margins ever in the history of the City of Seattle,
and our mayor's race was one of the tightest margins
in the history of the City of Seattle.
So what are these city council candidates or campaigns
doing so amazingly well?
Tiffani, you want to start?
-I'm going to just put Alexis over here
because she was also running against, like, you know, insert.
I'm going to --
-Something Erika, I don't know.
-Let's just put that over there, like running against,
like an outward Trump Republican,
like good on Rachel Savage for, you know, flying her flag.
But let's just put Alexis over there.
Alexis is also where I think really great has gotten
a lot done as being the outsider,
like the most left on the Council in a not left council,
and like was responsible
for the Shield Initiative with the mayor.
So Alexis is out here. So for the others,
I would say just
like Council President Sara Nelson has just
not gotten a lot done,
and she's actually made a lot more headlines
and had people do her dirty work.
And I think that she's just so vehemently unpopular
and has not just concretely done a lot,
she'd wanted to pull back a lot of things.
And I'm not trying to like ruffle feathers,
but I just think like overall she went in there just
to like give more money to the police,
to criminalize poverty,
to criminalize folks who have addictions,
and like that was her thing and that worked for a little while.
But then all of these crises are continuing to bubble up,
and there wasn't any attention on child care,
there wasn't any attention on housing affordability.
She rushed through this SoDo Stadium District,
and regardless of what you think about that,
I think we need more housing.
The way that it was done was just so opportunistic,
and so fumbly,
and now it was completely overruled,
and that like burned a lot of bridges.
That burnt a lot of bridges between the city
and the Port of Seattle.
So I think she alone was just like quite unpopular,
and Dionne came in with a lot of progressive cred,
a lot of support right out the gate
from Democratic establishment, from progressives.
She was part of the Progressive Alliance.
She also came in running strongly on progressive revenue
and more housing.
I mean, she helped lead up the capital gains tax
at the state level.
And then I think just like at the end of the day
in District 2,
Adonis Ducksworth didn't really put forward a whole lot.
It was vibey,
it was like a really cool guy
you want to go like skateboard with.
I can't skateboard, but I would want to skateboard with him.
But other than that,
I didn't know concretely what they were going to bring in,
where Eddie Lin, you know, very,
I'll say, pivoted for social housing.
He saw how overwhelmingly popular it was in his district,
but he's also going in there wanting to change
that bottleneck that Sandeep talked earlier.
Like, he came in with concrete policies.
He's worked in the Office of Housing,
he's worked in the Attorney's Office.
He comes in with all of that,
and he was actually running on something
as opposed to just running as a person.
So I'm sorry, Steven,
it's not like here's the sweeping generalizations.
I think it's just looking at those race by race,
but I think that it was just such an unpopular elements
of the Council
that weren't making deep change in all
of the like fundamental issues that folks are feeling.
I mean, yes, police hiring has increased,
there's been a lot of movement on there.
But we're also like obfuscating a lot
of our responsibility and surveillance
to the federal government in a time
when we know that the Trump administration is using
like camera surveillance to seek out folks
that they think shouldn't be in this country.
So I think when you tie yourself to that,
it's going to be a losing message in strategy
during this time.
-Yeah, you want to?
-No, you go.
-It's a good question, right, of what happened there.
I think fundamentally the biggest driver
of the success of the Council progressive candidates,
obviously running against Republicans,
you know, is part of the factor here.
But the left really changed its message from four years ago.
It's very, very different.
Like you compare whether it was Katie's campaign,
but the Council, you know,
Erika Evans compared to Nicole Thomas-Kennedy,
who was running for city attorney four years ago,
or whether it's Dionne Foster, you know,
compared to Nikkita Oliver running four years ago, right?
So this is a progressive city, but it's also,
it's a very educated, affluent economic,
you know, we are a capitalist success story, right, you know,
and we have all the problems
that come with this kind of success, right?
To borrow a phrase from Danny Westneat,
we had a prosperity bomb dropped on us,
and it's created all this inequality
and all these other kinds of issues
that are coming back to
kind of drive the kind of reservoir of unhappiness
that we were talking about earlier.
So these are voters that are looking for --
they want progressive active governance.
You know what they don't want is the radical raising
of core municipal institutions.
They don't want radical chic performative BS,
which is, I think,
what we got from the left for a long time here.
And so I credit to Dionne and to Katie and to Erika,
like, they kind of figured out.
Katie wrote that she doesn't --
she won't call it a mea culpa piece.
I asked her about this on "Seattle Nice" at one point.
She won't accept that phrase,
but she wrote a very interesting,
thoughtful piece back in January in The Stranger
before she ran saying,
"Hey, the left got some things wrong about homelessness,
we need to rethink and about public safety,
and we need to rethink about, you know,
how, not just how we talk,
but hopefully how we address some of those issues."
And I think she took that to heart,
so did the other candidates,
and it played huge benefits for them in this race.
-Can I say, sorry, just one other thing?
And I kind of hope we do this more, and Sandeep,
I'd like to hear if you disagree, now or later.
But groups that cared about this election and were, like,
door-knocking and whatnot,
ran these candidates also as a slate.
These candidates didn't all themselves run as a slate,
but when you looked at videos of door knocking,
they were all five together.
So they were -- like, these outside organizations,
like Tech 4 Housing and others
that were doing a lot of door knocking,
were running them as a slate and turning out their people,
the LDs were turning out them as a slate.
So even though they didn't -- I mean,
minus, like, the cool kids vibe of, like,
Dionne and Alexis and Erika Evans,
they ran as kind of a slate at the end.
But I think that if we start doing that a lot more
and we have everyone turning out for a slate of candidates
that are cutting behind the same vision,
we're going to start seeing a lot more wins in the way
that we want to see,
as long as they also deliver at the end of the day.
-One small area I'll just --
there was real ticket splitting in this race, right?
There were a bunch of candidates
that voted for Dionne and Erika and Bruce, right, you know?
So that said,
I think Tiffani's putting her finger on something
that's pretty significant
and also is another answer to this question,
which is that those candidates were really effective
at using tools like social media, some of the slate stuff,
some of the video stuff that they did.
I mean, Katie's campaign's video game is like,
you know, A plus, right?
The thing she did today, even about the kind of trolling,
that stuff about her getting money from her parents,
and now I have a job,
and I don't need any more money from my parents.
You know, it's funny, right, and good.
And that really,
they effectively really mobilized a constituency
of younger renter kind of voters
and got them to turn out, you know,
in an off-year, odd year election,
right, which doesn't always happen.
And that really drove their margins, right?
I said this,
I did an interview with Governing Magazine a week ago
or whenever it was, and I said -- they're asking,
"What happened in this race?" And I was like,
"It's not really like the, you know, the rebellion
or the revolution of the proletariat here," right?
The underclass in America,
in Seattle, has already mostly moved out of the city
because it's too expensive to live there, right?
But it was like the kind of, you know,
educated but underemployed,
like this is like the baristas
and the bike messengers at the barricades, right?
It was a conflict of the haves versus the have lesses, right?
And in a city that has so much wealth
and had this prosperity bomb,
if you're young and educated
and, you know, have these sort of life prospects
but are feeling like you're not sharing in the prosperity
that others are enjoying and it's -- you know,
the precariat is, I think, the Megan Burbank,
you know, is a term that -- there was an article in Nation
we were talking about earlier. -Jobs, I think.
-You know, I think that -- so I think
that also played into it, right?
But it was this kind of getting these younger kind of voters
that are feeling kind of left out to turn out that
really did play into the scale and the size of these wins
and into Katie's victory outright, right?
-Yeah.
-And it was the only council candidate for anyone
in city government to endorse Katie.
So that was interesting.
-Yeah, was Alexis?
-Yeah.
-Just Eddie. -Oh, Eddie. Oh, yeah, yeah.
-Yeah.
We'll have time for one more question.
And I mean -- but I'll just say to your point,
Sandeep, like millennials are the first generation
to be doing worse than their parents,
and so, like, it is actually, hey.
-I would push that a little.
If you dig further in the data on this stuff,
I will -- because I got to stand up for Gen X
here, so I got to --
-Oh, always, always.
-You push... -Marcia, Marcia, Marcia.
-...harder than data.
Overall, that's true,
but college-educated millennials are actually doing better
than college-educated Gen X people were, right?
It's because of income inequality,
like, non-college-educated millennials are doing way worse
than their counterparts were 25 years ago,
but college-educated folks are continuing
to kind of climb the ladder, right?
So there's a nuance to that.
-You're right. Good point. [ Laughter ]
-The Gen X crowd is pleased.
-No, no, Gen X there -- -All right, last question.
Dr. Page?
-We had it hard, let me tell you.
-Oh, there it is. -I'm Steve Page
from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance
at the University of Washington
and proud member of The Block Table Executive Committee.
This has been great. Thank you all.
I want to -- if the panel would be so gracious
as to crystallize what they think the sort of
workable theory of politics is that was embedded
in kind of the last go-round before we broke for the Q&A.
What I mean by that is we heard sort of two theories of politics
across the course of the discussion.
First, we had Harrell the Great Conciliator,
right, from Sandeep,
and then we had Katie the Mobilizer-in-Chief from Tiffani,
right, when you were talking about sort of Katie's
got these different constituencies
that have really backed her
and are big fans of her policy ideas.
And, you know, sort of in some sense,
I was thinking of that as kind of like,
okay, you do politics, so you get policy,
and then the Katie theory was you have these policy ideas,
so you can get politics out of it.
And then all of a sudden,
we had this discussion about the $15 minimum wage,
and all of a sudden,
there was this interesting kind of meeting of the minds
between McCoy theory and the Patrick theory of politics.
Well, actually, maybe there's like we get some --
we get a bunch of smart people
in a room representing different interests,
and we kind of hash something out,
and then there's some political leadership
that happens somewhere. Anyway.
So that sounds a little bit like conciliation to me,
maybe, but it's not.
So I want you to draw out what is this thing
that happened for the $15 minimum wage,
and that we hope might happen
if we are to heal the body politic here.
-Yeah, it's not the same thing.
I'll just quickly my two cents on this.
Like the kind of transactional politics
of appeasing interest groups is sort of the, I think,
the kind of standard default politics in Seattle right now.
That's very different from saying,
"Let's set a big progressive goal."
Like I two years ago was trying to get people to get together
and like let's actually do a ballot measure,
raise a bunch of money
to fund an effort to address what was then turning into
the kind of disaster of fentanyl in terms of the kinds of,
you know, massive increase in overdose deaths
we were seeing on the streets, which goes on.
It's a little bit less,
but it's still like at a terrible, terrible toll.
And so that's really different.
That's getting people who disagree with each other
in a room around a common goal
and kind of figuring out how do we make that work
and how do we fund it,
and, you know,
what is the give and take behind a kind of strong policy,
you know, progressive policy.
That's sort of the opposite of like going around and saying,
"No politics is about just throwing a bone to you
and you and you on your thing.
I'm going to give you like some money
for your whatever labor thing, and I'm going to give you some,
you know, this or that."
It's kind of -- you know,
that's the small ball politics of like transaction as opposed
to a kind of bigger politics of progressive change, right?
Yeah, I don't know. So that's my take.
-Stephen, will you just -- I think I've got you,
but can you just sum up your question overall?
It's like what is our theory of change going into this next?
Yeah.
-Yeah, what is -- Alex's last question.
Sorry, I'm trying to articulate the grand unified theory
of the entire family.
-So you want to take your class.
-Alex's last question to you all
before she unleashed the lines on the panel
was what will it look like
if we can have a healthier politics in Seattle?
And so my question to you all is, what does that look like?
Does it look like this conciliation,
or does it look like mobilizing your constituents
who have backed you toward a broad vision?
And so, or is it something a little in between,
which Sandeep just articulated,
which is inviting both your constituents and others
into a room to sort out how do we achieve a broad --
a big, hairy, ambitious goal or three?
-I'll just say, for me, at the end of the day,
I want government to work.
I believe that government can do a lot better than it is now.
I want government to stop casting
off its responsibilities and duties
just simply to the private sector
or to the public-private sector,
and I believe that we can get back to a government
that works for everyone
and provides folks the things that they need.
Not everything, it's not a utopia.
I'm not a utopian, but that's my like grounding principle.
So if there's a way to get into a room
and then come up with this grand unified theory therefore,
and you can go forward and push it,
but I also know that if we had done that
for social housing we would have a shell of what it is
and we would probably get $5 million
and nothing would happen, nothing would change.
We do this in Seattle. We make pilots.
We pilot RV safe lots, and we're like here's for 12 spots,
we have 2,000, 3,000,
4,000 people that are living in their vehicle
and then we're like, "Oh, but doesn't work."
And it's like you mean the 10 vehicles
that were able to have a safe lot
is now saying all of these people can't get in
and get a safe lot.
No, we set ourselves up for failure.
So if Katie can do that,
if this new administration can do that get people in a room
but I also think at the end of the day
we don't always have the same interests
and we shouldn't be afraid to say
that we don't have the same interests and we'll go out
and do those and push those forward
because that is what I campaigned on.
I want elected officials to not give up all
of their campaign promises once they get into office,
once they get cozier to power,
once they get cozier to money.
And that's where I think it's incumbent on,
regardless of your political leanings,
if you get someone into office that you believe in,
you have to hold them accountable in whatever ways
that you can.
And if you can't get things done behind closed doors,
you bring it out into the public arena and do that.
So not a concise answer but I think
that at the end of the day
it is really incumbent especially on the left
especially when so much is stacked up against them
when you have police unions putting out press releases
against who's going to be taking over the Executive,
you have to know where power is
and you can't get -- you can't have this like shadow
come over you or like blinders go on once you get into office
and get into the halls of power.
So I say it's both, and it's just wherever you can,
but at the end of the day,
you need to be delivering for your constituents,
otherwise you really need to get the hell out of there.
-All right.
We have to close it because after this is a band.
You can stay here and listen to the band.
You can drink more drinks at The Rabbit Box.
You can mark your calendars for the next Block Table.
Where?
We're finalizing right now,
but maybe, maybe some of the people you've heard
be discussed right up here on the stage
might be on this stage.
Kenan?
[ Laughter ]
But thank you for coming.
Congratulate yourselves, congratulate this panel.
You care about Seattle, and the future is ours.
-Great panel! Whoo!