Canfield has only ever maxed out to exactly two legislative candidates.

One is a Republican. Republican Ashley Togai - also got a maximum donation (then $1,000) from Canfield in 2022 in her bid for the State House.

The other is Will Dreher.

Her other two (non-maximum) donations went to famously right-wing Democrats -

• Rep. Amy Walen, one of the only Democrats to vote against the Millionaire’s Tax ($250).

• Former Burien Mayor Kevin Schilling, who feuded with King County’s Sheriff’s department because he thought they were too woke/law abiding ($250). Schilling also works with Canfield.

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As to the Rental Housing Association she helps run? It . ..

Loves conservatives

• Frequently donates the maximum to Republican Lawmakers

• Celebrates seat flips and chamber flips to Republicans

• Gave money to former Seattle Attorney Ann Davison, an open Republican

• Gave money to Seattle’s arch-conservative Democrat Sara Nelson.

Loves right-wing rhetoric

• On Tacoma’s Safe Homes For All initiative;“This is the goal of socialism, Schilling said, “Of, ‘I want to ensure that even though I don’t own this property, you, the property owner, don’t get to do what you want with it.’”

• “Housing provider rights are threatened by endless regulation.”

• Rent stabilization is a “toxic cocktail, and “a catastrophe.”

Hates any sort of renter protections

• Wants to preempt local tenant protections.

• Sued to overturn Seattle’s winter eviction ban, and lost.

• Sued to stop Seattle’s cap on move-in fees

• Opposed Seattle’s ban on junk fees for rentals.

• Opposed Spokane’s tenant safety plan for maximum bedroom temperatures of 80 degrees after a 2021 heat dome had killed 19 people in Spokane County.

• Is currently spending big money to stop the “Safe Homes for All” initiative in Tacoma, per the Burner.

Sadly, a few progressives - some gullible, some with an axe to grind - have given Dreher cover by pretending he shares progressive values.

This is the same guy who:

• Told the Seattle Times his answer to a $3.5B budget gap: 100% cuts. (Said progressive taxes need to be offset by other tax cuts, the budget needs to be fixed with audits and cuts).

• In the same interview said he is open to making it a felony to solicit sex (the misdemeanor is disproportionately enforced against men of color).

• Signed a letter urging Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court and refuses to apologize for it

• As of this Summer, took more money in donations from the AI industry than he raised in total from people in the State of Washington.

The landlord lobby knows exactly who he is.

Now you do too.

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Tell your friends and neighbors before his big-AI money backed campaign bamboozles them with his fake progressive rhetoric.

Seattle’s chronically marginalized Community Crisis Responders are at the margins no more. Reporter Guy Oron quoted CARE Chief Amy Barden saying that her department’s utilization has doubled from about 40% under former Mayor Bruce Harrell to 80% under Mayor Katie Wilson.

That means some combination of faster 911 responses, more 911 calls answered, better de-escalation and access to resources for people in crisis, and more armed officers available for dealing with violent emergencies.

In other words, it means we are safer and we have Mayor Wilson to thank for it.

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WTF kept the Conservative Dems from using CARE?

A quick review of how we got here:

For years, Seattle residents demanded an alternative civilian response for nonviolent emergencies, while powerful “moderates” like Bruce Harrell drug their feet. Cities all over the country, including here in King County, leapt ahead while Seattle sat on its hands. Finally the pressure got so strong that the moderates relented and started building “CARE,” the Community Assistance Response Department.

But even though we spent millions staffing up the department, the moderates who claim they love “government efficiency” did next to nothing to actually use it.

A little less than a year ago, Bruce Harrell and Seattle City Councilmember Bob Kettle (who heads the Public Safety Committee) were “negotiating” with the Seattle Police Officers Guild — the same negotiation that ended in a corrupt deal shutting Crisis Care Responders out of most 911 call types. This was despite the city’s own study, commissioned in 2019 under moderate Mayor Jenny Durkan, showing alternate responders could handle nearly half of all 911 calls.

The Guild had already gotten its members the highest pay in the state in the previous negotiation, on top of huge bonuses. Police recruiting had already revved up. While a shortage still existed, there was little likelihood of a real return on more money per police officer. To top it off, we were already spending twice as much per officer fielded as Boston.

So what did Kettle and Harrell “negotiate”? Another giant raise, barely after the ink had dried on the last one.

What did the city get in return?

Accountability for rogue cops? Nope.

Unshackled civilian responders? Nope — CARE’s scope was narrowed and cops got to decide whether they were allowed to do their jobs.

In other words: SPOG got its $50 million, and in “exchange” got everything else it wanted too.

(And now police pay is so high that SPOG can wait out Katie Wilson’s mayoralty and never really have to bargain with her. Which was almost certainly the goal)

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Mayor Wilson makes key changes

Now, Mayor Wilson has been in office less than a year. This summer, she asked the Police Chief to resign, and the corporate crowd did everything they could to turn this into a story about her somehow doing a bad job.

This was despite the fact that Chief Barnes had:

1. Never moved to Seattle and was out of town a lot, including during multiple crises

2. Put an anti-trans bigot in charge of the East Precinct (in the City’s “gayborhood”)

3. Couldn’t handle difficult questions from the press

   1. Botched the response to the bite of Seattle shooting

And what are the results?

We’ve got an interim Chief that is actually responding to the Mayor’s wishes, and in doing so we’ve doubled CARE utilization in a matter of weeks.

Responders are available 18 hours a day, up from 10. It’s not a new program or line item in the budget. It’s the same professionals, finally allowed to do the job we already paid for.

Katie Wilson: keeping us safe instead of throwing blue glitter in the air.

Conservatives love to scare you and to play dress up like they are tough and that this will make you safe. But they aren’t tough and they aren’t making you safe.

But you know who is?

Katie Wilson

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Rather than drop the usual abstract “homicides per 100,000” statistic, I tried to think of something a little more concrete. I went with the (average) number of years you can live in a city before getting murdered, which is a little grotesque, but alas, it’s something you can hang your hat on.

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You’d make it 27,000 years in Seattle, almost eight times as long as your 4000 in Kansas City. I also rendered these into “lifetimes,” (I just divided by 80 years, I didn’t adjust by life expectancy per city or anything).

Seattle, it turns out, is much safer than many comparable cities. The only big, dense city that is safer is the other city run by a socialist Mayor*.

Something to think about this weekend while you are safely playing in Seattle’s beautiful parks.

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(Yeah, obviously they are both newer Mayors. But we’re constantly being sold the lie that lefty governance creates urban hellscapes and it’s just plain false).

Mainstream Democrats around the country were shocked to see John Fetterman’s face on the jumbotron at the Republican National Convention. In his video speech, he described socialism as “anti-American,” and talked about his wonderful friend Dave McCormick, who is a dependable MAGA vote in the Senate.

Fetterman may call himself a Democrat, but he puts the insurrectionist, blood-and-soil MAGA party agenda above the progressive side of his own party.

Democrats around the country recognize that this makes him the most conservative Democrat in the Senate - the new Joe Manchin, and puts him far to the right of the Democratic Party mainstream. Dan Pfeiffer (Senior Advisor to President Obama for Strategy and Communications, Pod Save America Host) put it well:

Image and quote from Crooked Media

Unfortunately, most of Seattle’s press would never point something like this out when a MAGA-coddling local politician says they are just a “moderate,” “mainstream” Democrat, or a “pragmatic progressive.”

So I’ll do it.

Bob Kettle is easily just as far from the Democratic mainstream as John Fetterman.

(Photo Credits - Facebook, Seattle Times)

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He does exactly the same thing Fetterman did.

The same day Fetterman appeared at the Republican National Convention, recent candidate and local MAGA gadfly Andrea Suarez went on Fox News with Laura Ingraham to talk about how now-Mayor Katie Wilson using the phrase “anti-social-behavior” somehow causes homelessness and murder.

Suarez has forever been an obvious, odious, MAGA fraud, something the dullards on the Seattle Times editorial board didn’t bother to mention when they claimed she was mainstream and picked her over Socialist Shaun Scott.

Guess who thought the Socialism of Suarez’s opponent was a bigger threat than her obvious MAGA-leanings?

Bob Kettle. Bob Kettle gave repeatedly to the Suarez campaign, endorsed her, and can be seen below at a Suarez fundraiser alongside some other “moderate” Democrats from Seattle politics.

He endorsed and repeatedly donated to MAGA Ann Davison, who became a Republican under Trump. She filmed a promo-video to bring people into the party in June 2020 (during the first Trump campaign against Biden). The filmmaker she worked with would go on to be prosecuted for his actions in the January 6th insurrection.

Image credit KUOW

Davison wasn’t even running against a socialist! She was running against a prosecutor with fairly mainstream Democratic party positions on public safety. The same record shows him donating to Ken Wilson, a Republican who ran against Teresa Mosqueda, a progressive Democrat whose actual positions can pretty much all be found in the Democratic Party platform.

Kettle’s self identification as a “moderate” is a hoax, and it’s sad that so few journalists have been willing to call a spade a spade. (Thank you Hannah Krieg and Guy Oron for being the exception to the rule!)

The truth is, Fetterman is sitting at the rightmost edge of the party, and behaving like a traitor in a time when MAGA’s fascist agenda is a threat to the very existence of our republic and freedoms, our civil and human rights. He thinks the rise of socialists in our party (keep in mind, most of them are just the social democrats of European-ilk, like Bernie Sanders) is a much bigger threat than this blood and soil nationalist shit.

But Bob Kettle takes it a step farther than Fetterman. He embraces MAGA over Socialists like Shaun Scott. But he also embraces MAGA candidates over mainstream progressive Democrats.

Too Credulous to Notice

Fetterman only had to say the quiet part once, and the national press picked up that he was way to the right of the party. Bob Kettle has been showing it for years, with his actions, and with his checkbook, but Seattle's press has been too credulous to do anything but mainstream-wash him.

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The Seattle Times joined Fox News in an effort to discredit Mayor Wilson by pretending a letter about public safety written by some rich people who hate taxes is “news.”

The letter, signed by a bunch of regional CEOs, demands a “plan” for public safety, as if there was none, and then offered a bunch of specific micromanaging demands about what to do.

But as it turns out, Seattle’s murder rate is one of the lowest for big cities in the country, has dropped below the exemplar cities they reference in their letter, and is dropping so fast we are almost to a record low.

Imagine if a 35 random-ass citizens wrote a letter demanding that Amazon develop a “plan” to grow their revenues, and then told them how to do it! You’d never know about it, because news organizations would have zero interest in publishing the crackpots.

But our local news loves a crackpot that hates our Mayor so much that they think it is news when it happens.

That’s why when we have rapidly dropping crime rates and unimaginably more safety than in the past, they

1. constantly publish crime stories and

2. give people who are worried about safety (or worse, don’t care, but want to hurt the Mayor) a big platform.

3. That hurts the public’s perception of the Mayor on safety. So when a poll shows that, they make it news too (a reality they created!).

4. And now when some CEOs say - “hey, your public perception on safety isn’t great” they amplify that as well.

5. which is a reliable strategy to lower people’s perception of the Mayor on crime, which they’ll surely write more stories about.

And they didn’t do this with Bruce Harrell, when crime was higher and going up.

It’s almost like the CEOs and the media have an agenda that has nothing to do with public safety!

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Perhaps we should have 35 politicians who know nothing about what is actually going on at Amazon or what Amazon’s plans are or how to run a company release a letter demanding that Amazon publish a 100 day on plan on how it is going to “grow,” and then let’s make some demands about how they “grow” and point to companies that are largely doing worse than Amazon to make the point.

And then I’m sure the Seattle Times and Fox News would love to write how under fire Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy is. Right? Run up to him and ask when he is going to respond?

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So I’ve always left that option blocked for rondezvous. But I’ve decided that it’s an easy way to get feedback, hear questions, and for this community of thousands of regular readers to engage with one another.

Thus, I’m trying an experiment—I’ve enabled comments for rondezvous subscribers (subscription is free) on my most recent six posts and posts going forward.

I hope you will engage (respectfully) with on another, and use it as an opportunity restack posts and engage with the larger community online discussing such posts.

If you haven’t had a chance to look at these recent posts, feel free to do so!

9/9: Mayor Wilson Mobilizes Every Seattle Department to Build Homes Faster
Not just the permit office — City Light, SDOT, SPU, and Fire.

9/9: Rivera Multiplied Seattle’s Gun Deaths By Ten
Because her political agenda cannot survive unless you are unrealistically afraid.

9/2: I wholeheartedly endorse Rep. Gerry Pollet’s reelection
and urge my supporters to vote for Gerry in the general election.

9/2: Every Seattle student eats free starting today: Thank Mayor Wilson.
The City Council voted to defund it. Twenty-four hours later they folded.

9/1: The Media Just Humiliated Itself with the Fake Wilson Recall.
Instead of reporting on major events affecting the city or its residents, the media continuously featured a side-show by two random cranks.

8/28: Katie Wilson just fixed commuting for seven thousand people a day.
Nine blocks of paint. $4M dollars. Transformation for thousands of people.

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Mayor Wilson’s recent executive order launched an all-of-government-effort* to speed up housing production in Seattle. Right now, permitting delays add a lot of cost and risk and cause homebuilders to choose elsewhere.

So Mayor Wilson’s executive order is a BFD.

(Image credit, KOMO)

Instead of the usual virtue signaling about permitting, Mayor Wilson broke down the walls that separate the “permitting department” to include the other bottlenecks - Seattle City Light, Seattle Department of Transportation, Seattle Public Utilities, and Seattle Fire Department, whose work impacts what we can build and how fast.

The executive order does three big things.

1. Forces these departments to work together to make timelines shorter and more predictable across all the departments. This is huge!

2. In the meantime, each department has to identify its point person who owns the problem of interdepartmental coordination. No more getting passed around!

3. To help with affordable housing specifically, the main permitting department will provide extra support to move affordable housing projects across the departments faster. The Mayor also will make a budget request to the council for a future designated interdepartmental lead who can move projects and resolve disputes.

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*^{It’s not literally all of government, but it is all-of-the-relevant-parts-of government. Good enough for me!}

Another big housing win under Wilson

This comes on the heels of many other parallel efforts underway, including Mayor Wilson’s “Taller, Denser, Faster” housing plan, or her collaboration with the council to recently raise the bar for appeals to broad zoning changes to be more in line with the region and less in hock to anti-housing groups.

What Mayor Wilson’s teed up next

Mayor Wilson has also put together a task force to identify other ways of accelerating housing production, with a specific eye toward preventing displacement, and supporting affordable housing, among other things.

This task force represents many of the relevant centers of power in the housing movement, as well as some of its inner tensions.

Some have criticized the Mayor for “another task force,” as a form of delay.

My own view is that the task force is clearly not meant to punt uncomfortable topics away from the foreseeable future. It is stacked with too many key power players for that to be the case, including its co-leader Eddie Lin, the council’s strong YIMBY housing leader. It was instead created to hammer out the key political compromises that are needed inside the Mayor’s governing coalition in order to get additional major wins for housing production.

In an upcoming piece, I will suggest a policy tool that could unlock housing production while unsticking the most difficult area of disagreement inside our housing coalition - related to fees that fund affordable housing. I hope this will help the work of the committee!

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At Tuesday morning’s council discussion of her own gun violence resolution, Maritza Rivera told her colleagues:

“I’ll say that fatal shootings in 2012 were 211, and in 2024 there were 541. And post-pandemic, it increased exponentially.”

The peak number was in 2023, and it was 65. The 2024 number was 55. Rivera overstated the number of gun deaths in our city by roughly 10x.

10x.

So first, just a big fat no. As with so much that comes out of this person’s mouth, it is just straight up bullshit.

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What Rivera doesn’t want you to know

Rivera also didn’t mention that homicides are down almost 20% compared to last year at this time. And they are down 63% compared to August of 2023. And given that September of 2023 was exceptionally bad, we are likely to end this year with an even bigger drop compared to the peak.

But you’d never know that from Rivera, or her Republican allies like Andrea Suarez or KOMO.

That’s because their agendas depend on you being afraid.

Murder in Seattle is dropping fast, to record lows.

Homicides did go up everywhere during the pandemic, a lot.

They started dropping nationally in 2021, the year Bruce Harrell won. But under Harrell, murders kept going up in Seattle for two more years. Call it the “Harrell crime wave.” (Imagine how the media would have treated Wilson if that had happened? When did they ever hold him accountable for it?)

The tide turned in 2024, when the national trend finally swamped local governance failures. But it was only in 2025 that the drop really got going, and now in 2026 we’re finally getting back to some of our all-time lows.

In fact, we had our first no-homicide June in 50 years!

So how we do we compare some of the better years of the past?

• Looking back at the year Rivera invoked—2012—we had 616,500 people living in Seattle and 23 homicides, or 3.73 homicides per 100,000 people.

• At our current pace, we’re likely to see about 26 homicides this year. With our current population of 823,400 or 3.16 homicides per 100,000 people. A modest improvement over 2012.

• In fact, we’re near the all-time low in 2010. (There were 19 homicides, 608,660,which is about 3.12 per 100,000.)
  

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26 murders is way, way too many. Every life lost to murder is a tragedy, a crushing loss for a family and friends, a destruction of a thread in the fabric of our community, and a stain on our social and political system. And we know we can do better – Western European homicide rates are often below 1 per 100,000. We should acknowledge that and fight to fix it.

But we don’t need to make up shit to make people live in fear just to push some conservative social agenda.

What is Rivera really up to?

Some have speculated online about what Rivera is really up to—perhaps accidentally misquoting the shots fired data, or something to that effect.

I’ll repeat what I said when the NAACP said her legislation was a “slap in the face of the black community. “Whether she is maleficent, or just maladroit, or some combination therein–is up for the reader to decide. Either way, she sure is proving malignant.

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I am writing to you to let you know that I wholeheartedly endorse Rep. Gerry Pollet’s reelection and urge my supporters to vote for Gerry in the general election.

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When you run for office against an incumbent, you don’t imagine writing an endorsement of them later. But while I am disappointed that I didn’t advance, I am glad that there is still a genuine progressive like Gerry in the race and I write this endorsement with a full heart.

We desperately need someone who will tax the rich to fund the services our communities and neighbors need. Representative Pollet’s record on taxing the rich is sterling. Even this last year, he was a key part of the progressive uprising that stopped a big corporate tax cut. He worked with many of the same people to try to stop the estate tax cut for the extremely rich, and he, of course, was a stalwart supporter for the millionaire tax. In contrast, in our Seattle Times interview, his opponent offered only “audits” and cuts to solve our budgetary woes. His opponent also sought the favor of the Chamber of Commerce earlier this year.

It’s clear that Gerry is the only progressive in the race.

Even while I was campaigning to replace Representative Pollet, I said at a public forum for the 46th District Democrats that it was an honor to stand next to one of the state’s greatest champions for public education. I meant it then and I mean it now. I have great respect for his work in the Legislature as a champion for our public schools, working to fully fund education and improve special education. He’s also been a strong ally to higher education, a field that is under increasing threat with an administration that is hostile to education, science, and immigrants.

The fact that we have so few school advocates in the legislature is one of the main reasons Seattle Public Schools (and Bellevue, and Sedro-Wooley, and Vancouver, and others) keeps finding itself in fiscal crises like the one we face now. Representative Pollet has been one of the few voices who has consistently showed up, fought for more funding, stopped cuts, and won hundreds of millions of dollars in increases for our kids.

(Here is Gerry showing up for teachers in 2022 at Eckstein Middle School. I was out with teachers that year two. You can bet his opponent was not.)

He’s got an opponent who has, to my knowledge, never advocated for our schools, and who has been so tuned out of school issues that his platform that mostly mirrors changes Gerry has already fought for or passed. As a dad to two Seattle Public School boys, and someone who cares about this community, I want someone who I can trust to reliably show up for our kids, not just use them as a stepping stone.

Gerry and I agree on most things and I feel strongly that his progressive voice is needed in Olympia. Especially given the alternative - an attorney who has worked for big corporations who supported Donald Trump putting Brett Kavanaugh on the US Supreme Court.

When Gerry graduated from law school, he became a public interest attorney and spent decades fighting to protect our environment. That’s the major difference in this race now, between a progressive activist who’s committed his career to serve our community and taxing the rich, versus a candidate who has not shown any involvement in our community and who has betrayed our Democratic values to advance his career.

While we and I have had our differences, Gerry and I share a vision for improving availability of affordable housing. Gerry helped pass some of the housing-related legislation that I worked passionately on in Olympia, like transit-oriented development, parking reform and elevator legislation. These are some of the most pro-housing bills to pass in the country! When we’ve disagreed on strategies for legislation, we’ve talked. Gerry’s reputation for being accessible is well-earned.

Please join me and some of our most inspiring progressive leaders like Darya Farivar, Shaun Scott, and Pramilla Jayapal in voting for for Gerry Pollet this fall to make sure that the 46th District keeps progressive representation.

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PS. I will write a future post to my many urbanist friends and allies on the specifics of why I chose Pollet as it relates to urbanist issues. He and I have been having fruitful conversations that I think will interest folks.

Happy First Day of School!

Starting today, every one of the 49,000 students in Seattle Public Schools gets breakfast and lunch for free, every single day of school. No one has to qualify. No dividing line between the kiddos whose families pay and those whose don’t.

That matters most at a specific set of schools. SPS already served free meals at 51 schools through existing federal and state programs — the ones in neighborhoods with higher concentrations of poverty. But 53 schools didn’t, and the city estimates more than 6,800 food insecure kids attend those schools.

Those are the children that fall through the cracks. But no more.

You might remember that last fall, Seattle voters approved the $1.3 billion Families, Education, Preschool and Promise levy. (The “FEPP” levy.) Mayor Wilson’s spending plan made universal school meals a signature item.

Universal > Means-Tested

I’ve written before about why universal programs are better than the “efficient” means-tested approach; school meals make a clean case for why.

Means testing requires paperwork, and paperwork is a filter that screens out exactly the families we want to reach — immigrant parents wary of handing their information to the government, hourly workers who don’t have time to spend on forms, and families whose income might mean they qualify in October and fail to do so in February. It draws a line in the cafeteria between the kids who pay and the kids who don’t, which most teachers can tell you is its own kind of punishment.

From a budgeting perspective, means testing costs much more to administer - money that should be going into feeding kids, not figuring out who to feed. And politics are much more favorable for universal programming. A program everybody uses is a program everybody defends. That’s why Social Security, and Medicare are much better funded and less likely to get cut than Medicaid, Food Stamps, and Rental Assistance. Means-tested benefits get whittled away in lean budget years precisely because most voters have no stake in them.

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The Council Fought the People

On July 22nd, Council President Joy Hollingsworth and Councilmember Dionne Foster brought an amendment to delay universal meals a full year and redirect the money to a means-tested food assistance program.

Do the arithmetic on the swap. The vouchers ran $500,000 a year for up to 5,000 families. That’s about a hundred dollars per family per year — two bucks a week — in place of feeding every child in the district every day.

Despite intense lobbying, lopsided testimonial, and a serious grassroots effort to stop the amendment, it passed by an overwhelming margin of six to three .

Voting for the means-tested delay: Dionne Foster, Joy Hollingsworth, Maritza Rivera, Dan Strauss, Bob Kettle and Debora Juarez.

Voting no: Eddie Lin and Alexis Mercedes Rinck, which is exactly what I’d expect from both of these stalwart progressives. (Thank you!).

The welcome surprise was the no vote from the more conservative Rob Saka. Saka shared a story from his own experience that brought the burden of means testing to life:

We qualified for free and reduced lunch, which means we also would have likely qualified for Medicaid,” Saka said. “But I never went to the dentist and only went to the doctor a handful of times in nine years because of the severe, significant, non-trivial, and substantial administrative paperwork burden imposed on people that need these valuable resources.

Then the the people showed up.

The backlash against that vote was ferocious. Parents, teachers, PTA folks, food security advocates, and a lot of people who have never testified about anything in their lives put the council on notice.

And the People Won.

It took one day. On July 23rd, Hollingsworth, Foster and Strauss came back with a plan to fund universal meals starting this fall after all. Wilson pushed back on pulling it from a general fund “already facing a $175 million deficit,” and the city landed on unused money from an affordable housing project instead — funding the meals and the vouchers. The cost for this amazing benefit is a rounding error in the city’s budget - $3.3 million in year one, $4.7 million in year two.

That reversal doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when a mayor builds a base of people who expect this city to be affordable for working families, and then an issue comes along so obvious that it catches fire well beyond the usual political crowd. Nobody on that dais wanted to be on the receiving end of that backlash.

A people-powered movement and a people-powered mayor pulling in the same direction, and every kid in Seattle eats today because of it.

You love to see it.

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If you haven’t heard by now, the two random complainers formally withdrew their recall petition against Mayor Katie Wilson, just days before it would almost certainly have been thrown out by the court. The judge never got to rule on the merits — they pulled it first.

Andrew Villeneuve of The Northwest Progressive Institute beat me to the punch with the following excellent piece: Melinda Jacobson and Dale Osterud’s non-recall of Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson was a media stunt that the mass media fell for.

His sub-header was even better, “Two disgruntled constituents had no legally sufficient grounds to start a recall of the Emerald City’s chief executive, but Seattle newsrooms rewarded their ploy for publicity with weeks of credulous coverage anyway.”

But I think Andrew was being generous when he called the coverage “credulous.” I think this silly saga was an open embrace of sensationalism and disproportionate coverage in service of the media’s embarrassing political bias against Seattle’s Socialist Mayor.

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Let’s take a quick look.

First was the use of the word “charges” in headlines.

MyNorthwest went with “Jake and Spike analyze recall charges filed against Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson,” and followed up the next day with a petitioner explaining “why she filed charges.”

Washington’s recall statute calls the complaint against a Mayor “charges.” That’s the term of art, and it means a civil petition alleging misfeasance. To a normal person scrolling a phone, “charges” means the police. Which is almost certainly why it was in the headline–to make an indictment out of an inconvenience.

At least one national conservative media outlet moved beyond subtle hints. Fix This Nation put up a headline that read, “Socialist Mayor Faces RECALL Over Criminal Allegations.”

In fact, the use of “charges” was so stupid that even rightwing KOMO eventually included a note that mentioned that “The recall allegations were made by the petitioners and are not criminal charges filed by the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.”

Every single story that mentioned “charges” should have said something like this.

But they didn’t.

The headlines came hard, fast, and ready for the National Enquirer.

Post Alley: “Under Fire: A Petition to Recall Mayor Katie Wilson.”

MyNorthwest should get an award for its slate of idiotic quotes as headlines. There was one from one of the two crank petitioners (“She’s failed this city miserably”) and some big-biz loving KIRO podcasters (“She’s still floundering,” “They think she’s bad at her job,” and my favorite, where they came up with a fake hypothetical charge that wasn’t even in the filing, “it hits the bar for malfeasance.”) Host “Gee” of Gee and Ursula also got a headline, (“You knew what you voted for’: Gee says don’t act shocked as Katie Wilson’s approval plunges amid recall effort“).

Amazingly, their only reasonable headline came from a conservative talk show host, John Curley. (“‘A little outside the bounds of credulity’: Curley questions who’s behind the Katie Wilson recall effort.”) No kidding!

The Everett Post picked up a story from The Center Square, a conservative site, which led with “‘Not surprised’: Reactions follow recall effort against Seattle Mayor.” The “not surprised” quote came from local MAGA-friendly crank Andrea Suarez, who pals around with Seattle’s right-wing media grifter industrial complex–like credibly accused abuser Jonathan Choe (of Proud Boys promoting fame) and Brandi Kruse, who made a cringey appearance at a Trump roundtable, urging him to go after “antifa.”

Other national conservatives were just as delighted. The Washington Times started with “Socialist Katie Wilson losing the love of her own leftist Seattle voters” that led with her “fending off a recall effort” and followed up with a poll from the super objective Chamber of Commerce. Four days later, their headline read “Seattle Residents Petition to Recall Socialist Mayor Katie Wilson Over Crime Woes.” The Gateway Pundit, “THAT WAS FAST: Seattle’s New Socialist Mayor Katie Wilson Already Facing Recall Effort”.

Fox News (the national one) quoted a local right-wing radio host saying she “should not have been elected in the first place.”

A national outlet.

Because two angry randos filed a document.

Just for context, there are about 284,000 cases filed per working day in the United States, or 71 million per year.

KOMO, FOX13, KING 5 and KIRO all had headlines that were more neutrally written, but managed to keep the completely irrelevant and frivolous petition top of mind as much as they possibly could. They found headlines to write about the Mayor responding, when court days were coming, which court they’d be in, and a bunch of other uninteresting things meant to make the Mayor look bad and beleaguered and get you to feel like most of what is going on in this city is some sort of mass uprising.

One of the most absurd came from local Fox affiliate Fox 13, when the couple that filed the complaint missed their briefing deadline, which put the case in jeopardy. Somehow they still managed to use this to make the Mayor look bad. Their headline read, “Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson Recall Chaos: Major Deadline Missed” with Katie Wilson’s face front and center.

Sure the deadline was missed by the people complaining about the Mayor. Sure that wasn’t really chaos. Sure, the Wilson administration had responded in a controlled, professional manner and was kicking the petitioner’s ass while barely attending to it because they are living in reality and actually focused on governing.

But it gave Fox13 a chance to put the word “chaos” in bold with Katie Wilson’s name and picture and they were delighted to do so.

Not all the coverage was bad. Scott Greenstone’s piece was among the best. His headline made it clear, “Recall petition filed against Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson faces uphill battle.” It was well-written and researched, with expert commentary and historical context.

And remember that MyNorthwest headline “’You knew what you voted for’ Gee says?” Read past it. In that very same segment, on August 20th — eleven days before the hearing that never happened — Ursula Reutin said it straight: “This recall is gonna go nowhere. Let’s call a spade a spade. It’s not gonna go anywhere. Malfeasance would have to be proven, and I don’t see this succeeding.”

All in all, I count over 40 headlines (with help from Claude) about this nonstory, and a good number of them are national.

A frivolous, obviously-doomed stunt pulled by two random people got far more coverage than things our Mayor is actually doing — work that will likely save dozens of lives and prevent countless injuries, that transformed thousands of daily commutes overnight, that feeds every kid in Seattle Public Schools. That’s an indictment of the media’s core job: telling the truth and informing the public.

I’m not just suggesting they cover her wins. They could cover the things going wrong in the city too - there’s plenty of work to be done in Seattle. They could cover the suffering of the unhoused, the inequities in enforcement related to sex work, the way that commercial land value decreases raises residential tax rates and more.

The point isn’t that they need to be friendly or fawning (although they often were with the last Mayor). It’s that they need to actually root their coverage in reality. The coverage should represent what is actually happening in the world and impacting people’s lives–rather than shining a spotlight on a non-event sideshow repeatedly until it manifests into whatever reality they are trying to create.

And there is plenty of local politics that has nothing to do with the Mayor that is also far more important than this silly little sideshow. Seattle teachers may strike for a fairer contract, delaying the start of school. This is hugely impactful but getting far less attention.

Even though anyone who read these articles could easily see that the case was meritless and that the couple trying to push it forward are way in over their heads, the headlines highlighting the end of the case came with what is, I fear, some unfortunate foreshadowing. The two cranks had nothing ready for court and they withdrew their complaint, but the headlines from KUOW, KOMO, KIRO 7 all decided to continue to elevate their words by putting them in the headlines, “it’s not over.”

Unfortunately, I don’t think that is just a reference to the case.

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Katie Wilson put down nine blocks of red paint. Here’s what it bought.

Yesterday a rider named Alex posted this:

“I lived on the 8 route for more than a decade and this would have made my life so much better seeing this video for the first time brought me to tears. One of my friends took the 8 from SIFF to Broadway yesterday during rush hour and it took them 18 minutes this is transformational.”

Mayor Wilson’s work brought tears of joy to commuters. That’s what you want to see from a Mayor.

(From the L8 website, when this fix was just a twinkle in progressives’ eyes).

The 8 carries about 7,000 people a day and was the least reliable route in King County, — hitting only 31% eastbound on-time at rush hour last July against a goal of 80%. It is so slow that last summer 200 people raced it down Denny, hopscotching and polka dancing and the like. The people on foot won, which means commuters under Bruce Harrell lost.

It wasn’t even close. The bus averaged 1.4 miles per hour.

Five weeks later, Harrell’s SDOT ruled out a fairly easy fix — a protected bus lane for a small stretch, because it would inconvenience car drivers who already get almost all the right-of-way in the entire city. SDOT’s sophomoric analysis also pretty much ignored how much demand for driving varies when conditions change.

Then Wilson won, replaced the SDOT director, and signed an executive order on January 15th telling them to build it anyway.

She and Councilmember Rinck also jumped into help with painting.

Photo credit, the Urbanist.

The lanes opened August 25th.
The video shows how drastically the bus has sped up.

Eight months and four million dollars from executive order to red paint.

For comparison, we spent roughly $100 million on a police hiring push that netted approximately zero additional officers.

And for the drivers? Alex Hudson, a senior policy advisor in Wilson’s office, pointed out to MyNorthwest that travel times for riders and drivers counter-intuitively often go down when you paint a bus lane. This is likely in part to the change in demand for driving on that road at that time. Time will tell, (and so will SDOT, because the Mayor is requiring it!) but this is the norm.

It doesn’t look anything like the traffic-pocalypse that the planners claimed when they ignored the reams of past data and instead predicted the future with their vibes.

And this is a pattern.

Business leaders screamed that the minimum wage was going to kill restaurants. Sick leave was going to break small business. JumpStart was going to slaughter the golden goose — it hit $383 million last year. The social housing tax was going to go nowhere and kill businesses. It was projected at $50 million and brought in $115 million. And most Seattle high paying job categories are growing faster than Bellevue, which doesn’t have these taxes.

And now 7000 people a day get a shorter commute.

A bus lane is not a giveaway. It’s a smart use of resources.

A general traffic lane moves somewhere between 600 and 1,600 people an hour. That’s NACTO’s number, and it assumes 600 to 800 cars an hour with one or two people in each.

A dedicated bus lane moves up to 8,000.

(I generated this image with AI because I can’t draw worth sh**).

Paint the lane red and it didn’t get smaller. It got several times better at its actual job.

SDOT is now looking at nine more corridors thanks to Mayor Wilson!

That’s the model, and it isn’t complicated: a mayor who rides the bus, listens to people who ride the bus, doing a cheap unglamorous thing fast — over the objection of a traffic study that valued vibes and not data about drivers’ convenience over the actual time of seven thousand riders, most of whom aren’t rich and none of whom hired a lobbyist.

More red paint. Nine more corridors. Let’s go!

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While campaigning, there has been so much I’ve wanted to communicate about with you regarding non-campaign related events, but alas, campaigns + work + family = very little extra time.

Still, my busyness didn’t stop the march of madness from continuing.

From the gleeful feeding frenzy by our shell-of-a-local-media ecosystem related to Katie Wilson’s so-called gaffes, and their bald faced hypocrisy compared to how they covered her predecessor, to the MANY wins of the Wilson administration (universal school lunches when city councilors tried to kill it to undermine the Mayor! no more rental junk fees! launching the fix for one of the states busiest but slowest bus-lines! a huge win on a huge library levy! record months without murders! sending the voters the first ambitious transit levy in years!), to the latest Trump administration kidnapping tactics and what to do about them, or the amazing Mamdani/YIMBY fusion spreading around the country, and more—there is so much to catch up on.

I certainly won’t get to it all, but I’m looking forward to returning to my regularly scheduled programming of speaking up. The world might be maddening, but we can get the word out together.

In the meantime, I’m doing some relaxation and family time and ramping up my regular work to catch up on missed wages. I’m also dedicating any of my “free” volunteer time to some absolutely amazing grassroots stuff that is bubbling up, that has real game-changing potential. So please be patient with me.

Also, I want to say thank you so much for sticking with me for so long, and give you one fun update. I checked our “reads” last night and this little newsletter has been read 1,056,825 times!

And that excludes our pieces that were in other publications, including the Atlantic (yeah, they are way too centrist, but it was cool to get a national audience). Given that I’m about as low-key not famous as they come, this is pretty darn exciting to me. The me part is whatever. But getting the messages out - that makes me so happy.

That’s all for now.

I hope you enjoy these lovely dog days of summer. I am!

My apologies for the delay, as I’ve been enjoying life as a regular citizen with my family and friends. And sorry for the longer hiatus before that, as I was consumed with campaigning.

First and foremost I want to offer my congratulations and concession to Gerry Pollet, who earned a majority of the votes in this primary election (congratulations, Gerry!). When I launched this campaign, I anticipated it would be a contest between two progressives who both want what’s best for our neighbors in NE Seattle. While I’m obviously disappointed with the results, I’m not disappointed to see that the other progressive is carrying a majority.

Second, I offer my concession to The Stranger and particularly its investors, who have successfully found a way to buy outsized and undeserved influence in our electoral process without ever having to disclose their identities. Truly, this is an impressive feat – even the generous folks who came together to form a PAC trying to counteract The Stranger’s malignant influence in our race had to report their contributions to our state’s campaign finance regulators.

Whether by direct interference in the endorsement process or strategically turning over the newsroom to less experienced, less rigorous, and less progressive staff, the new management group at a once-reputable outlet has executed a coup of influence purchasing the likes of which even Amazon’s bottomless pockets could not achieve.

Every losing candidate reflects on their campaign, decisions they might have made differently, and reasons why the majority of voters made a different choice. As I did so, I came back to the same inexorable conclusion I reached in early July: that The Stranger's endorsements really are that powerful, and that it's nearly impossible for a progressive to overcome its influence even with a strong campaign and a lot of grassroots support/

My decision-making over these last few weeks has been driven by this reality, and in this last moment of my campaign, I would like to share the insight I’ve gained in this process and what it means for the broader movement seeking opportunities for making progressive change.

When I received the news that The Stranger had endorsed the centrist Dem in my race, I recognized that I had gone from frontrunner to likely having lost. It’s not widely discussed outside very political circles, but there is only one known example in the last couple decades out of hundreds of candidates in as many elections where a progressive candidate made it through the primary without The Stranger’s endorsement. And even then, she had a real resources advantage (and many with that advantage have also failed). With all that out of state money in Dreher’s hands, this was not the case in my race.

So if history was any guide, we knew we had lost.

When campaigns reach this point, they usually just put on a brave face, try extra hard and avoid burning too many bridges through election day. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

But I looked at the situation differently. I had a significant sum of money raised, and a month to work with an extremely dedicated base of volunteers. I focused on what I could do with those resources that would have the most progressive impact.

I would still try to win, of course. But my objectives would need to reach beyond the likely outcome of this race so we didn’t waste those resources.

After consulting with many people I respect, including several current and past progressive politicians and Stranger darlings who were shocked by the paper’s egregious endorsement of Dreher. Never in living memory have they endorsed anyone like this, a guy who at times used anti-housing rhetoric, also promised big budget cuts, also never showed up for anything in this community, is paid for by out of state interests, and campaigned to put anti-abortion and pro–presidential immunity Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh in his seat.

So I set two additional objectives. Here they are, and why I pursued them:

1. 1. Reduce the likelihood that Will Dreher would win a general election against Gerry Pollet

   
   This goal was within my (and my similarly horrified supporters’) grasp.

   
   While I ran against Rep. Pollet because I felt our district needed a change, I did not mean that we should change to become centrist, or worse–cravenly opportunist, dishonest, and unethical. Never did I imagine that Rep. Pollet and I would face someone in Will Dreher who would show himself to be all three.

   So, I swallowed my pride and put a lot of resources into the “negative” side of campaigning.

   
   I knew our hollowed-out media ecosystem would not get the key messages into the hands of enough voters in time. The Stranger had let a very well-resourced snake into our garden, and as someone who was about to pay to communicate with thousands of voters who don’t tune into local political news, I knew that I was the best positioned to draw attention to that, even if as a candidate I was a flawed ambassador.

   
   Which is why I decided I had to lean in to emphasizing Dreher’s deep and well-documented history of prioritizing his own career advancement ahead of his professed “progressive” values.

   
   Dreher hid his history of working for one of the few individuals directly responsible for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, along with dozens of other horrendous decisions, then refused to grapple with his role in promoting his former boss to the Supreme Court. Even now, he has scrubbed his campaign website of any mention of his history of supporting Brett Kavanaugh, hoping that the thousands of general election voters who did not return their primary election ballots will not learn of this careerist decision before November.

   (For a candidate supposedly well-positioned to lead the fight against Big Tech and regulate AI in Olympia, Dreher appears woefully unfamiliar with the Wayback Machine.)

   Nor is this the only evidence of his mercenary and centrist leanings that Dreher has sought to scrub from the internet. I imagine more of those will emerge in the general election.

2. Educate my community on how the recent purchase of The Stranger by still-anonymous wealthy investors had corrupted a once-reliable ally in the progressive movement.
   

   Most of us know that corporate ownership and manipulation of the media is disgusting, a key source of  the rot that threatens American freedom, democracy, and civil rights.
   

   The Stranger was the perfect target for local wealthy politicos with vested interests in the outcomes of state and city elections seeking influence that their ideas and their own identities would never earn them. Its ironclad grip on the left side of Seattle primaries means that any political outsider cannot succeed without The Stranger’s backing. At least, for now.
   

   To be clear, only a small group of people—whose ability to pay rent and put food on their tables is certain—know exactly what went down in this primary season’s endorsement decisions. Whether you believe the staff union’s vehement denial of interference by the new management or think that they doth protest too much, the reality is the same: the newsroom staff has largely been turned over in the two years since the sale of the paper, management has now fired two senior editors immediately following the release of their endorsement packages, and the candidates chosen in back-to-back primaries have left many progressive leaders shocked and dismayed.

   While I don’t have firsthand knowledge of these conversations, here’s the scuttlebutt I’ve heard that I believe needs to be put in print: Seattle progressives openly discuss that this capture of a gatekeeping institution was The Stranger’s new Publisher Brady Walkinshaw’s pitch to his investors. The phrase he is said to have used is, “We’ll never have to deal with another NTK again.” (Whatever one thinks of NTK, this is an ethically disgusting way to behave as a publisher who claims to support editorial freedom).
   

   The only individual investor I’ve seen confirmed publicly as an investor in the Stranger is notably married to the Chief Legal Officer of Amazon. Not hard to see why they would have appreciated that argument when they signed their check.

   And now The Stranger has picked a mix of pro-establishment, at times even centrist, candidates in almost all of the competitive Seattle legislative races. They tried it outside Seattle a bit as well–fortunately, their grip in other places is much weaker. And even when they did “endorse” progressives, they appeared to do their level best to undercut them.
   

   So I decided one of the most impactful things I could do was start beating out a path to reduce The Stranger’s grip on Seattle elections.
   

   As we honed our pitch to voters, it became apparent that The Stranger’s strength is not deep trust. It took only about 30 seconds of basic facts during an in-person conversation to inoculate a voter against their cheatsheet.
   

   The problem was decades of habit. Without that conversation, voters were likely to follow deeply ingrained behaviors.
   

   We saw that this was very unlikely to succeed enough to change the overall result in the couple of weeks we had after honing our pitch. We certainly couldn’t talk to the right 14,000 voters that fast, face to face. We knocked 14,000 doors, mind you! But not in the last two weeks, and most voters don’t answer! Since other forms of communication (mail, video, text) take repetition over time, we were boxed in. And it would obviously have been best for an anti-Stranger campaign to have been separate from any candidate–I was fully aware of how I was a flawed ambassador.
   

   But we decided we had a good chance to at least build a prototype for future activists–to show the beginnings of how to move voters away from this paid-for, establishment source.
   

   While we were working on this, a separate group of activists stood up the “Lefty Cheat Sheet.” I have been asked whether I was “behind” this. Not at all. In fact, I was initially very frustrated about the Lefty Cheat Sheet. I thought that the short timeline meant only one message about The Stranger could get through to voters. Building up an alternative brand is harder, takes longer, and muddles the messaging. I figured all we needed was for voters to take a second look and if they were progressive, they would overwhelmingly pick the progressives that The Stranger had vetoed. So I not only wasn’t behind it - I was opposed to it.

   
   However, I was very wrong about these activists’ campaign. Their efforts spoke to the hunger for the simplicity of an alternate cheat sheet. It created trust by acting as an aggregator, and paying attention to grassroots groups that have been changemakers.
   

   So in the last weeks of the campaign, we started pointing people to that cheat sheet. It turns out that the combination of letting people know that The Stranger had been Bari Weiss’d and there is an easy cheat sheet that has been aggregated from many trusted sources is powerful.

   I’d say the opposition’s behavior suggested they agreed. The message was so powerful that Will Dreher’s staff started ripping out thousands of dollars worth of the signs and posters with this message. (We have much clearer footage that we have shared with the PDC that is not in this article). Dreher may be deeply unethical, but he’s not stupid. Our campaign started to show the way.  

Campaigning with these objectives as additional measures of success.

None of this was fun. I didn’t want to run a negative campaign, focused away from the issues that matter most to me. I ran to move the conversation forward–on housing, transit, childcare, and taxing the rich like we mean it. I knew that assailing The Stranger would look petty and aggrieved, and pointing out Dreher’s serious moral weakness would harm my reputation.

But here is what the sophomoric establishment commentary hasn’t been able to wrap its head around. I wasn’t in this for me.

I was in this to make progressive change, and I was willing to hurt myself to do it.

Because the cause matters more.

At the Washington Observer, a journalist wrote “In short, an ambitious Seattle progressive candidate is now running against, at least in part, the biggest name in Seattle progressive media. To quote the quotable Omar Little of The Wire, “‘If you come for the king, you better not miss.’”

This analysis is way off base because journalists used to covering establishment politicians in power assume everyone trying to replace those establishment figures thinks like an establishment politician. And I do not.

The premise behind this “better not miss” quip is that I should be afraid of The Stranger because they can make or break my political career and, like most politicians, they assume that’s my paramount concern.

I did go for the king. But I knew that with only a few weeks, I was unlikely to win the race and thus “miss” the king by conventional standards. Toppling the king was never a very realistic outcome, and so while I hoped we might get lucky, I wasn’t judging success only by whether we won. Instead I wanted to show others that the king is vulnerable. A better dated pop culture metaphor then, is–”strike me down and I [we] shall become more powerful than you can imagine.”

I’ll discuss in my rondezvous newsletter why the data is convincing many smart politicos in Seattle that we did uncover the vulnerability. We have a prototype for victory and a clear plan for what improving it looks like.

And on Dreher - I think the data suggests a nonincumbent challenger in this race was likely to get to more than 50% of the vote and, even though it likely harmed my own numbers too - the negative (but true) campaigning switched the vote totals exactly as we had hoped, with Rep. Pollet at 52% or so today. Given the impossible headwinds we faced, I’m proud of the work my dedicated volunteers put in and believe we did what was right to protect the interests of the people of the 46th district.

Going forward – Don’t feel bad for me!

After losing my last race by a few votes, I went on to start rondezvous, which is approaching a million reads and has shaped significant pieces of the political discussion in Seattle.

I chose to be a sharp critic of Sara Nelson and Bruce Harrell’s extremely flawed governance when no one was systematically doing it. I believe that impacted the narrative around both. I convinced friends to start the independent expenditure campaign that supported Katie Wilson’s mayoral bid and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for that effort. I had unique opportunities to help out House our Neighbors in its quest for funding social housing, a cause that is now raising $135M a year for a groundbreaking policy! I put together statewide coalitions that passed housing bills - one of which is bigger than anything I could have done in city office.

I didn’t cut any ribbons and my life was perfectly wonderful during that time. In fact I loved it.

It was very hard to decide to run again because of the personal cost of public life (and the nasty commute it would have brought). So do not feel bad for me, and do not feel too bad for the cause - we will move it forward one way or another, despite this temporary setback.  

Closing

I’m not going to give you a “the real campaign is the friends we made along the way” speech - although I very much did make some wonderful friends, and I was stunned at our volunteers’ dedication! 14,000 doors, more than almost any campaign for state house in the state!

Instead I’ll say the following. Yes it’s sad this election didn’t work out how we wanted it to, and that several others won’t either. Yes it’s even sadder that the Democratic establishment managed to make Washington something like the only state in the union that isn’t embracing bold, new progressive leaders right now and it’s also sad that a once-proud publication played such a key role in that. It’s more than sad–it’s disgusting.  

But even if every single progressive challenger had won this year, there would still be years of work ahead of my fellow travelers in the progressive cause. And we still pulled real victories out of this defeat. We teased out the clues on how to eventually displace The Stranger so the oligarchs can’t buy races that way in the future. We worked to reduce the chance that the 46th District becomes represented by a chameleon climber who has never invested in the political betterment of this community in any way, shape, or form.

In short, I chose against the conventional way of saving face and preserving my own future political prospects, which would have brought certain loss, though probably a higher vote share, and no impact on the other objectives. My way was instead a swing for the fences strategy: maximize gains for the movement even if it came at personal cost.

And that, my friends, we did. I feel good about that. Really good, actually.

I hope you do too. At the very least, I hope it makes my actions more understandable if you are at all confused about what I was up to.

More to come. =)

All my best,

Ron Davis

It’s been such a busy season with the campaign, with work, and with my family, I haven’t been able to Rondezvous with you here. I’ve missed that.

But tonight is our election night party and you are invited! 

It is tonight, Tuesday, August 4th from 7:00 - 9:00 pm at The Westy in Roosevelt. It is family friendly, and we’ve bought a bunch of yummy food - so bring the kiddos! Mine will be there too.

Join us as we watch the election results come in and hopefully get one step closer to representing the 46th District in Olympia.

Can’t wait to see you!

Feel free to invite your friends, family and neighbors! Appetizers and non-alcoholic beverages will be provided.

Details include:

Ron Davis for State House Election Night Watch Party

Tuesday, August 4th from 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

The Westy in Roosevelt

1215 NE 65th Street, Seattle, WA 98115

RSVP Here or email zach@breakbluestrategies.com

If you are unable to attend but would like to join in and donate to Ron’s campaign to help pay for voter outreach in the final stretch, please do so here.

Thank you for all your support along the way and we look forward to seeing you tomorrow, August 4th at The Westy!

And Vote Ron Davis by August 4th!!

PAID FOR BY Friends of Ron Davis (D). PO BOX 20792 Seattle, WA 98102

Politicians love to talk about how they are going to make it easier to build housing. But something I’ve noticed is that very few of them understand how.

We need to build 1.25 million net new homes in Washing State over the next twenty years, and we’re building only about 35,000 per year. This means we are on track to fall short by more than a half million homes.

And this is a problem, because—while housing scarcity is not all that matters in the housing market, it does still matter very much.

Here's the thing most politicians don't understand about addressing this: it's not just zoning.

So, here is how we fix it:

Zoning does matter — a lot. When housing was affordable in Los Angeles, there was four to seven times as much zoned capacity as there were existing homes. All that availability meant landowners couldn't gouge buyers. Washington has made real progress here — backyard cottages, missing middle housing, transit-oriented development — and as a board member at Futurewise, I've been a part of those fights. But there's more to do. We should end apartment bans statewide, expand stacked flats into most urban growth areas, extend transit-oriented development to bus lines, and allow more housing near parks, schools, and grocery stores. More zoned capacity takes land scarcity off the table as a cost driver. When there's lots of legal room to build, landowners can't hold the market hostage.

The building code is also driving up costs — dramatically. Code changes from 2012 to 2022 alone increased construction costs by over 11%. Rules about parking, double stairways, elevators, setbacks, and more add tens of thousands per unit, often provide zero safety benefit, and force buildings to have fewer family-sized homes and less natural light. Most politicians have no idea this is even happening.

Take single-stair buildings. In Switzerland, Sweden, and South Korea, single-stair buildings are allowed up to 15 or 20 stories. In the US, we've treated it like a radical idea — though Seattle, New York, and Honolulu have allowed it for years, and 18 states are now pursuing reform. Why does it matter? Single-stair buildings dedicate far more of their floor area to actual living space — up to 10 percentage points more. They allow larger, family-friendly units with light and air on multiple sides. And they cost 6–13% less to build. Oh, and they're just as safe!

Or take elevators. A four-stop elevator in New York City costs four times what the same elevator costs in Switzerland — which is itself an expensive country. Maintenance can run up to ten times more. Why? Because we've mandated oversized, overengineered units that serve a tiny domestic market. I worked on a bill this year to start chipping away at this. We can go much further.

The bigger picture: if we simply extended the residential building code to small apartment buildings — paired with a high-quality sprinkler and firewall requirement — we'd save enormous amounts per unit without sacrificing an ounce of safety.

Then there's permitting. I'm honestly tired of hearing politicians talk vaguely about "permitting reform" — not because we don't need it, but because so few of them know what it actually means or are willing to fight for it.

Permitting delays add an average of 6.5 months to projects statewide. In some jurisdictions, it's 18 months. Construction loans accrue interest the entire time — roughly $45,000 per unit in a 120-unit building, before you even count the fees. Research shows every six months added to an approval timeline reduces housing production by nearly four percentage points.

So what does real reform look like? Cut unnecessary steps — design review boards, for example, don't produce better-looking buildings, but they do add years. (In Seattle, we had a seven-year fight over the color of brick at a Safeway. I am not joking.) Make standards objective and by-right. Redesign the process for speed and clarity — Seattle runs a dual-track master use permit and construction permit system that are barely coordinated with each other, which is just dumb. Pre-certify reusable building designs. Staff up permitting departments. And set firm time limits: no small building should take more than six weeks to permit, no large building more than twelve. If a jurisdiction can't meet those timelines, allow third-party certification.

Finally, finance. Yes, interest rates are high. Yes, existing homeowners are locked in. We need federal help — but there's meaningful action Washington can take right now.

The biggest housing booms in American history happened when government actively ramped up investment to drive production.

The Center for Public Enterprise has developed a model that several states are already using: a revolving loan fund that acts as a force multiplier. Here's the idea: construction loans typically cover about 60% of a project's cost. The remainder comes from expensive equity financing. The state steps in as a subordinate second lender, covering just 10% of the project. That small contribution reduces the costly equity share and often unlocks better terms on the primary loan. With clear criteria — middle-income households, family-sized units in high-opportunity areas, stalled pre-approved projects — this could be deployed immediately. The fund would require upfront state investment, but it would ultimately be (modestly) profitable for taxpayers. And the public benefit would be enormous.

Beyond that: we need to implement things like impact fee waivers. Property tax exemptions like the Multifamily Tax Exemption — which is largely a tax shift, not a revenue loss. Expanding condo liability reform, so we can finally start building starter homes for first-time buyers again. And a land value tax reform I've been working on that would navigate Washington's constitutional constraints, save money for most property owners, raise taxes on speculators sitting on underdeveloped parcels, and dramatically increase the incentive to actually build.

I want to close with something that doesn't get talked about enough: we can build better neighborhoods, not just more units.

So much infill housing in Seattle is depressing — buildings sprawled across lots, trees cut down, units staring directly into other units fifteen feet away, long dark hallways, mostly studios and one-bedrooms. It doesn't have to be this way.

Seattle on the left, Hamburg on the right. Which do you prefer?

If we build modest single-stair buildings around the perimeter of a standard city block, we can house 130 people per acre at four stories — with 65% of the site left as open space, trees, or shared courtyard. The comparable Seattle block, developed the way we currently do it, houses about 56 people per acre. We could have plenty of housing, and lots, lots more greenspace. And it doesn’t even require high-rises.

We can build beautiful, livable, affordable communities. We have the resources. What we need is the courage — and leaders who actually understand how to get it done.

That's what I'll be working on in Olympia.

— Ron

Donate to my campaign to help make this a reality

An ICE officer has been charged by Minneapolis officials with assault for “brandishing a gun.” Of interest, my most popular post ever on Bluesky demands that we start prosecuting ICE employees that violate people’s rights.

It is absolutely WILD to me that up until now, ICE officers have not yet been charged for any of the many crimes they have committed with impunity. In fact, I would suggest, they have often exercised this impunity because we have not made them sufficiently afraid of breaking the law.

This has been a triumph of the tip-toeing lawyererly class over basic sense, and in my opinion, over the law itself.

As a JD that graduated from a fancy law school myself, I can testify that the tendency among many elite lawyers involves a paranoid aversion to risk, particularly when the levels of risk are hard to assess. This means an unwillingness to break legal ground, which has been an enormously stupid and cowardly way to approach the ICE issue. After all, this kind of widespread, federal oppression doesn’t have a perfect precedent–and so any sufficient response will be “unprecedented” as well.

The truth is, while the Supremacy Clause does grant the federal government significant latitude to carry out its tasks, it does not preempt the bill of rights. And it is unlikely to preempt large swaths of the neutrally written criminal code as well.

It is also the case that Trump and his corrupt cronies respond to only to power and costly pushback. If we continue to resist and protest and rise up and push back, and if the our state legislatures write the right laws and the courts work in tandem to put the fear of god in his minions, we can make them realize that they are increasingly likely to face prison for their corruption and oppression. And we can win.

Too bad our legislature Washington State seems to be ruled by this tip-toeing type. After all their rhetoric about existential threats to democracy, they did incredibly little to create novel tools to push back on the Trump administration.

Washington did pass a nothingburger of a bill that allows someone who is harmed by a masked ICE officer to sue if it is found that the ICE officer has violated their civil rights. How does that protect us now? Where are they supposed to sue from? Ecuadorian Prison? Alligator Alcatraz? Given that the feds will pay the fine on behalf of the abuser, how does this create a real deterrent to abusive ICE agents? I would have voted for this bill, but I would have fought for amendments to turn it into something with teeth.

Washington State didn’t choose to exclude ICE officers from public employment, punish collaborating companies by pulling contracts, create a criminal face make ban, or a host of other options they were given. They didn’t shut down Republican’s implicit veto power over bills (or at least there being many good bills) by stopping their ability to run out the clock on floor time, or find ways to sequester federal funds, or even pass a funding bill that would cover the immense healthcare cuts on their way.

It’s past time for new leadership in Washington State. As a reminder, I’m running for office, and if you have a few bucks to chip in, it would sure make a big difference.

DONATE TO MY CAMPAIGN

I’m running against a longtime incumbent who has been on the wrong side of most of these issues. But we know how party politics tends to favor incumbents.

And yet, the local Democratic Party offers an opportunity for the grassroots to weigh in.

I need a small favor, that will have a big impact. 

The 46th District Democrats will vote to endorse me, both of us, or neither of us, and YOU can sway this vote! This endorsement could be pivotal. All you have to do is:

1. Join the 46th District Democrats (you/your spouse and any 12+ year old children if appropriate). Choose whichever dues level is appropriate for your personal situation. It’s quite affordable, and the money stays with the local group, not the party.

2. When you sign up, be sure to provide them with your email and cell phone number so that they can send you the information required to participate in the endorsement meeting.  (The 46th doesn't spam or sell your data! )

3. Fill out this form so our campaign can send you an invite for the meeting on the afternoon of May 17th, when to join the zoom call, and how to vote.

4. Recruit your friends and family to join as well! Each family member should sign up individually, except that youths 12+ should be included on their parents' membership.

We will need a large turnout to ensure a win and endorsements have come down to a single vote in the past. Get those teens involved!

It would mean the world to me.  

Unsure if you live in the 46th? You can use this address checker. 

Feel free to reply to this email if you have questions.

Thank you!

Ron

PS. Here is a map of the 46th District. It’s more or less 45th in the UDistrict up to the Shoreline Border, from 99/Aurora in the West to Lake Washington in the East, with a few exceptions.

As Seattle moves to the next big stage of our 20 year growth plan, the letter focuses on how the council can expand housing options near transit, (and not just on the busy roads) around large parks, along planned bus lines, as well as some bus routes that were excluded from the Harrell version of the plan. It requests more housing near “multi-use trails, streets with protected bike lanes, Neighborhood Greenways, and Healthy Streets.”

Next up—more pocket parks and more water management/drainage options in areas with a lot of multi-family housing, and the exchange of some street parking with street trees.

Finally, it asks for amendments in support of the proposals from the Complete Communities Coalition (member orgs include House Our Neighbors, Habitat for Humanity, Futurewise (where I’m on the board), and the Housing Development Consortium) for courtyard and Passive House bonuses.

It’s spot on, high value, and easy. Please jump on and sign/send it!

Ask Seattle City Council for more housing near transit, parks, and trails!

This is our chance to build the city of our dreams. Send a letter to City Council to ask for more apartments and social/affordable housing near transit, parks, trails, and in quiet neighborhoods all over the city!

Action Network

Citizens United was a turning point. Beside being a stupid decision on the merits, our Supreme Court gave corporations the ability to spend infinitely in politics. And now the servile political class increasingly does their bidding.

But there is (amazing!) effort afoot that might provide a workaround. It won’t get all of money out of politics, unfortunately. But it is promising for getting corporations out, which would be a HUGE step. Here is how it works:

Some leading legal scholars have come up with an idea to use corporate law instead of speech law to fix the problem. While states are not allowed to limit the speech of corporations, states have a different right that is extremely, repeatedly, settled law. They grant corporations the ability to exist, and the states get to decide what that existence includes and does not include - as in, what these corporations can and cannot do. And when other corporations do business in these states, they have to abide by the same laws.

The idea here, then, is simply to restructure their enabling statutes to prevent them from engaging in political speech.

Here are some key sections of a writeup from the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance:

Citizens United (558 U.S. 310) held that lawmakers cannot regulate a corporation’s right to spend independently in elections. But regulations are just one tool in the legislative toolbox. Another extraordinarily powerful tool has gone largely unexamined until now: every state’s virtually unlimited authority to define the powers it grants its corporations.

Corporations have only the powers that states give them—no more. States stopped being choosy about the powers they granted to their corporations in the mid-1800s. But every single state retained the authority to be as choosy as they like. Every single state retains the authority to decide to no longer grant its corporations the power to spend in politics.

No state has exercised its clear power to exclude political spending from the powers it grants its corporations. “Why not?” asks University of Chicago law professor Vincent S.J. Buccola. “One possibility is that the average legislator thinks cases such as Citizens United and Hobby Lobby were sensibly decided. This might be true—it is unlikely—but in any event it is uninteresting. Another possibility is that legislators do not know their own legislative authority. If so, maybe they will soon discover it.” . . .

The difference between regulating rights and declining to grant powers is not semantic. It is doctrinal. It is foundational. And this may make The Montana Plan the most promising new strategy to eliminate corporate and dark money in politics since the day Citizens United was decided . . .

This structure draws upon two centuries of Supreme Court jurisprudence regarding corporate powers. The Court has held that states may define, limit, or revoke corporate powers for any reason, or for no reason at all. “That body need give no reason for its action in the matter,” the Court held in Greenwood v. Freight Co. (105 U.S. 13, 17 (1882)). “The validity of such action does not depend on the necessity for it, or on the soundness of the reasons which prompted it.”

For more on this - here is the website -

Transparent Election Initiative

A bipartisan team of former Montana officials have unveiled an oddly simple yet startlingly robust legal mechanism for undoing Citizens United that ...

The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance • Tom Moore

Sadly, this kind of ambitious proposal is exactly the kind of thing the political establishment in Olympia is uninterested in actually doing. So many of them would rather campaign on “saving democracy” from Trump while tinkering around the edges and not actually saving democracy. We will likely need an initiative to make this happen unless the gaggle of left challenges this year turns into a slate of wins and scares the legislature into upgrading their behavior. I’ll certainly fight for it if I make it through!

This Montana initiative is the coolest legal innovation I’ve seen in a long time. If in Washington we paired this with ranked-choice voting, publicly funded elections, and consolidation to even years when most people vote - we might start to actually see a political class that represents what the people want!

I don’t say any of this to set aside the deep federal work that must be done. Obviously as soon as we can, we need to expand the court dramatically, depoliticize it by creating randomized rotations (including from the appeals courts) and term limits, and then rebuild constitutional law. Then we need to get all private money out of politics.

But in the meantime, this is pretty damn cool! I have added it to my own platform. I hope you will support it.

Check out my campaign website