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

There is no easy solution to this problem, as consumers buy ever more online. But that doesn’t mean we cannot fix it. It just means we need a serious, all-hands effort to fix it.

A Public Option: I’m with Zohran Mamdani on this. If we assume that groceries are a basic good that should be physically present in all communities (and we should assume that!), and it is clear the market will not provide this, we should provide a public option.

These stores can be government-run, but they don’t have to be. They could simply be government-owned locations that lease at rock bottom prices, or government-owned but operated by a third party. One way or another, the market is not doing the job. They should certainly be unionized.

MFTE for Grocery - we have a program in Washington State that provides significant property tax reductions for owners of buildings with workforce housing set aside. One really cool thing about this particular tax break is that it is a tax shift - it mostly just shifts taxes onto the rest of the property base (we’re talking pennies per parcel), so we don’t starve local governments of revenue.

A similar property tax exemption for unionized grocery stores, with a more aggressive exemption for unionized grocery stores in food deserts, would go a long way.

Vacancy Taxes:

We need to design well-calibrated commercial storefront vacancy taxes that make it less profitable to hold out for a rich renter. This should include an exemption for newer spaces (so we don’t discourage them from getting built), and have a grace period that accounts for the regular interval between leases.

If done right, this will reduce rents for retail businesses all over the region

More GOD in our lives.

You’ve heard of Transit Oriented Development? How about Grocery Oriented Development!

Grocery stores inside urban growth areas should get substantial height bonuses and parking/setback waivers that allow them to build lots of housing on top of their stores, and in adjacent parcels. In Seattle, they should allow buildings up to a total of eight stories. A portion of these should be set aside for workers (this should be offset through funded inclusionary zoning, which must be designed to make the affordable set asides revenue neutral.)

This will greatly increase the profitability of building grocery store style buildings in the city. It will also help by bringing in a ready-made nucleus for both the customer base and workforce. And it will help with the housing crunch.

This one will require careful design. The funded inclusionary part will be particularly important to get right. Also, if the developer builds with this bonus but cannot keep the store leased, there should be a grace period, but then the loss of the property tax exemptions. This will keep them highly motivated to lease at a lower rate. The threat should not be so punitive, however, that the building never gets built in the first place.

Keeping the Consumer in the Center

None of this suggests we should juice the profits of these big corporations. These incentives need to be targeted to bring them into undeserved areas. At the same time, we also need to continue to protect consumers and workers from corporate consolidations and stop algorithmic pricing/price discrimination so consumers do not get ripped off.

The industry will do its best to portray these goals as at odds with one another. But we can manage to combat broad corporate exploitation of workers and consumers while we also target incentives to ensure good geographic coverage for grocery stores.

Just know this will mean a fight ahead. Here is the Seattle Times on recent attempts to address the matter.

“Yet despite broad public concern around the loss of grocery stores, and backing by labor and anti-hunger groups, legislators had scant success. Four of five bills stalled out under industry pressure, budget realities and the constraints of a short session.”

We will need legislators who are ready for the fight.

So our private sector runs roughshod over our politics, and we do not tax the rich, nor do we build the kind of affordable quality of life we all deserve.

Paris is a great example of political ambition. Anne Hidalgo is just finishing up her time as Mayor. This socialist leader took office in 2014 with a vision to clean up a dirty city, make it a haven for people on foot or on a bike, and start greening its too-concrete-filled landscape.

It has been a wild success. Tens of thousands of parking spots and many miles of car lanes have been repurposed as parks, protected biking lanes, promenades and pedestrian paths. A wildly ambitious expansion of the Paris metro is also underway - and it is being built much faster and at a fraction of the cost of Sound Transit.

And it has transformed the city.

Perhaps most stunning—look what it has done to the air quality. Infill housing is famously great for carbon emissions. But if it is managed correctly, local air quality can be pretty excellent too.

Keep in mind this city is more than 5x as dense as Seattle! Simply making alternates to cars more feasible and convenient transformed the very air they breathe.

Unsurprisingly, the socialist party that has ushered in these changes just decisively won another mayoral term.

We can transform our community too. We have the resources (we are actually even richer)—but we currently lack the courage.  

And please don’t tell me it can’t be done in a modern city, “built for cars.”

Much of our city was built before cars—Wallingford was a streetcar suburb! And anyway, even more modern style cities like Seoul (yes, an old city, but with a modern form) are transforming themselves too. Check out this freeway to stream + park conversion in Seoul, South Korea.

By the way, after they took out all those lanes, traffic got better!

As you can imagine, my frustration with our lack of progress is part of what motivates me to run for office.

I’m tired of weak-willed politicians who think thirty year time horizons for small accomplishments are good enough. I’m tired of people who are so stuck in trading small favors for gains that they have lost any imagination for what a real, better future could look like. And I’m sick, sick, sick of people who think that process is justice, rather than a potential means (or block) to justice.

By the way, this future isn’t just quieter, safer, healthier, and more fun. It’s far more affordable! 

Transportation is one of the top items in household budgets, often the second highest expense. Car ownership (depreciation, repairs, insurance, fees, gas) costs $10k to $15k a year in Seattle. Transit-only is about $100-$120 a month, and much lower for low-income “Orca Lift” cardholders. Even with $1000 set aside for a few uber rides a month, that’s less than $2500 a year for a middle class rider.

Interestingly, even a modest paring back on driving produces lots of savings. A new study suggests that in Washington State, driving 20% less results in $1800 saved per household statewide, meaning the saving is likely higher in Seattle. It would also save 170 people from car crash deaths per year, plus 1419 more lives saved from reduced emissions and improved fitness per year.

We can have an affordable city. But it means making it much, much easier to build. It means taxing the rich to fund the construction of the future. It means building up our building trades so we can actually deliver. And it means making the hard choices any city must make if it wants to make it as easy to get around without a car as it is with.

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This is bad news for Seattle in general, and transit riders in particular. “Ballard Link is . . . the highest ridership line planned as part of ST3, by far, with 90,000 to 147,000 daily riders expected to jump on trains between Chinatown International District and Market Street by 2046.”

Why the shortfall? Some of it, like inflation, was unavoidable. But the responsibility rests primarily in the hands of our legislature for four reasons:

1. They set up Sound Transit projects to all turn out insanely overpriced by giving local jurisdictions the power to extract huge concessions from the agency in exchange for a permit, and by empowering city politicians to run the board and meddle with projects to please their constituencies. This has caused a lot of dumb building decisions and huge, huge delays, raising costs by billions or even tens of billions.

2. Then, a few years ago, they cut back the most progressive (as in, tax the rich) source of revenue for the agency, costing it billions.

3. Then this year, they wouldn’t extend Sound Transit’s bonding capacity to meet its needs.

4. And finally, they walloped it with another multi-billion dollar funding cut when they cut future sales taxes on services. While sales tax cuts are generally a good thing, services are consumed more by wealthy people. And in any case, they didn’t replace the revenue.

For those of us who rely on/love these trains, it feels a little like the legislature has left us like this.

Perhaps you can understand why I don’t have faith in the folks that created these problems to be the ones to fix them.

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When I was 13, my great-aunt Jeanie, who was only in her forties, died of melanoma. It was an awful death, and it genuinely traumatized me at the time.

It was also fully preventable.

She and her husband did not have healthcare. So when they saw the early signs—they were reluctant to see a doctor. They waited a long time. And once melanoma has advanced, it is lethal.

My Aunt Jeanie—who always called me “Ronnie Paul”—was one of the kindest people I have ever met. She laughed and hugged easily, and filled a room like a song. Despite feeling larger than life—she was just as physically fragile as the rest of us.

I remember when my aunt Rhonda spoke at her graveside, she said Jeanie had been her godmother, and she had always thought of her as a fairy godmother. That seemed right.

Sadly, my aunt Rhonda also died young—in her fifties, from complications related to an autoimmune disorder. She too went years without healthcare, and her lack of access to good treatment destroyed her body’s basic functions.

I was in my late twenties by then—less traumatized, but no less filled with grief.

When I think about the fact that both could still be with us, I can only feel grief and rage. Their deaths have long animated my belief that healthcare should be a universal, basic, public good.

So i just signed the Whole Washington Pledge. Washington State is easily rich enough to fund universal healthcare—we just choose not to do so. Almost every middle income to wealthy country in the world has some form of universal healthcare.

It’s time we step into modernity, and embrace this basic form of morality.

Whole Washington has a representative bill, and a funding plan.

I plan to fight for it, and I hope you will join me.

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Here my launch video on Tiktok: Please watch it to the end, bookmark it, share it, and comment (or comment on comments!). Likes are helpful, but the other stuff makes it much more likely people will see it!

@voterondavis

I’m running to represent N & NE Seattle in the state legislature, to stop saying no and and start building our affordable future. Join us,... See more

Also, here is my launch video on Instagram.

Same story - please watch it to the end, save it, share it, and comment or comment on comments. This convinces Instagram to show it to far more people!

—

For fifteen years, we’ve been represented by a legislator whose answer to housing, clean energy, transit funding and so much more is ”NO.”

It’s time to say YES - to freezing the rent in public housing, to building over a million homes, to affordable childcare for every family, to doubling the buses on the road, finally fully funding our schools, and to stopping Trump.

It’s time to say YES to funding all of this by taxing the rich and corporations like we mean it.

Big money has opposed me before, and they will so again. Please help us in the fight and support our campaign!

Onward!

Ron

(This is a personal announcement from my longstanding personal newsletter and no piece of it, including the video, utilized any campaign resources).

The earliest evidence looked good—they put forth a genuinely bold plan to tax million-dollar+ incomes, raising $3 to $4 billion a year. That’s enough to fund universal affordable childcare in the state while giving caregivers a 20% raise; cover the deficit so we don’t have to cancel the climate investments voters overwhelmingly supported in 2024; and spend $500 million more on public health, transit, and housing—as well as defending civil rights. 

That’s the kind of taxing the rich I can get behind!

But it’s starting to feel like they don’t really mean it. 

Tax the rich . . . later?

First, the tax won’t gather revenue for several years. That’s not their fault—they are rightly anticipating court challenges and a likely ballot referendum. So what are they doing to fill the gap in the meantime? America is under attack from the Feds, and people are desperate. Is the establishment treating this crisis as a crisis?

State Dems don’t bother taxing the rich now.

Nope. In fact, their best option for doing so, which was the Well Washington Fund, which doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere. It was a modest payroll tax on high earnings, like JumpStart in Seattle. It even gave a break to businesses already paying JumpStart! Well Washington would have raised $2.5 billion a year.

But last year, Amazon, Microsoft and much of the Trump-enabling set spent $2.6M last year trying to bully Dems into backing down on corporate taxes. Apparently it worked. (Why are they worried? Do they really think a corporate branded-campaign against taxes on big corporations will persuade anyone right now? They are being cowards).  

In fact, they are cutting taxes for the rich

Not only that, but it looks like they plan to cut inheritance taxes for billionaires and other very wealthy people, from 35% to 20%. 

The millionaire tax bill itself even includes cuts for large corporations. Hanna Krieg at the Burner reports that the establishment quietly slipped in a $500 million tax break for big businesses.

So at the moment, when we’re already facing dire cuts, it looks like we plan to raise taxes several years from now (if the mechanism turns out to be legal and passes a referendum), but cut taxes on inheritance and corporations sooner so we can–what? Cut even more?

What are they doing down there?

I am a Democrat, AND I can see why people accuse us of being weak-willed, beholden to the donor class, and afraid to fight for the little guy.

Because too often we are weak-willed, beholden to the donor class, and afraid to fight for the little guy. 

We need better.

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Together they tackled the topic of “reactionary centrism,” the overwhelming instinct to turn to both-sidesism (“yes, Trump is cutting hundreds of millions from universities to force them to teach how he wants, but some random lefties no one has ever heard of were mean to someone on Twitter”) to the constant “the left made them do it” crap that comes from so many ostensibly “liberal” pundits. Their ability to capture vapidity masquerading as sophistication was, to put it mildly, refreshing. 

It’s a must-listen or, if you prefer, read. You can do both at the Volts website. I listened to it on my favorite podcast app (Overcast), but you can find it wherever you get your podcasts.

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65,000 passengers per weekday use the stations that will see the change. It will be a fantastic upgrade for the Davis household, that’s for sure. It will save all of us tons of time, make it much easier to avoid worrying about a late train, reduce crowding, and just generally make the train a more convenient and reliable option. 

The reason for this game-changing increase is that in about a month, Sound Transit will start carrying people across Lake Washington back and forth between Seattle and the new Eastside line. 

But ahead of that, Sound Transit has started running “simulated service”—running empty trains back and forth across the bridge. Simulated service sounds like no big deal, except it turns out that riders can use those trains running each way on the Seattle side of the lake. This doubles the number of trains on the main line in most of Seattle and all of the northern suburbs that the line reaches. Riders between the International District on the far southern end of downtown all the way up through the nose-bleeding northern stop of Lynwood will find that commuting life just got a little bit easier.

Sometimes people complain about Sound Transit. The agency has certainly been beset by delays, cost overruns (as with all infrastructure around the country), silly meddling by some of the politicians on the board, and cities using permits as a way to force bad and expensive choices by the agency. It’s easy to get frustrated, but we should also remember that our legislature could put reforms in place to fix some of the most glaring problems. Just as important, Sound Transit’s thousands of employees are hard-working public servants and their decades of work has done an immense amount to make it easier to get around our beautiful city.

Bravo! See you on the train!

The council refused to put a funding option on the ballot after the agency was created by initiative, so House Our Neighbors rallied the people and got the excess compensation tax on the ballot. The council’s conservative Dems like Sara Nelson, Maritza Rivera and Bob Kettle were adamantly opposed. So they added an “option 1B,” deliberately designed to confuse the voters. It was “pro” social housing, but eliminated the mixed income elements, funded it with only $10 million, and took that $10 million away from housing for much poorer people. 

Amazon, Microsoft and the Chamber dumped nearly a half million dollars into a campaign of misinformation to get people to pick 1B, and our Mayor put his face all over that campaign. But House Our Neighbors had done the work, inoculating voters. I was lucky enough to get to host their press conference in front of Amazon, alongside leaders from House our Neighbors, the Labor Council and the Democratic party. 

Look, ma, I’ve got a microphone!

In the end, the vote wasn’t even close: almost 2 to 1 in favor.

We were assured this would usher in the collapse of Seattle. (Just like we were assured JumpStart—our only other progressive tax—would kill the golden goose. And the minimum wage. And various other labor protections).

Alas, Seattle is still here! We won the Superbowl, in fact. Here I am with my favorite hardcore fan at the parade. He’s obsessed with Cooper Kupp and Jackson Smith-Njigba if you are curious. 

Sam Darnold giving off camp counselor vibes. The parade was fantastic fun for fans and the team.

The tax raised $115M. That means compensation packages in the City of Seattle for people making over $1M a year totaled $2.3 billion, not counting the first million dollars for each person! That is $1.3 billion more in earnings than was even expected.

Interestingly, my post about this on Instagram/Tiktok is my most-watched post by a massive margin. People want this sort of tax all over the country. And they should get it!

Feel free to share it on Instagram (video won’t load here, but the link should work).

Tiktok:

@rondezvousseattle

Seattle’s millionaire tax is a wild success. #taxtherich @House Our Neighbors: Yes on 1A @Tech 4 Housing

Or youtube:

Please spread the good word (via this article or the videos) with others. We need to tax the rich and spend that money to make life affordable for everyday working people. As my friends in the labor movement taught me to say, “When we fight, we win!”

For once, they tried to bring receipts, but they clearly didn’t try very hard.

In the article, they claimed that—since Seattle’s total employment is down slightly relative to Bellevue after the tax was created—the tax must be hurting us.

Had they put in more effort than a middle schooler playing with ChatGPT, they might have noticed that the small difference was due to a collapse in retail jobs during Covid (like every big city), from 82,000 to 32,000 jobs.

The Seattle tax only applies to incomes of $189,000 a year or more. How many people in retail do you know that earn $189k?

In fact, it turns out that the high paying services sector, which is where all those tech jobs are - have boomed since JumpStart. They have boomed much, much faster than Bellevue’s, both as a percentage and in absolute numbers.

If you have friends that are the newsletter reading type, please share this with them. If, like most folks, they are more into videos, here are the links to my short video addressing the same issue on YouTube, Instagram and Titkok.

Here it is if you want to see it.

Instagram post

The YouTube didn’t have sound this week, so you’ll want to listen to it as a podcast, wherever you get you podcasts, or at KUOW/NPR’s online site. Please give it a listen!

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I’ve also been commenting on ICE activity over on Instgram, Tiktok and YouTube. Please subscribe on any of these platforms you use, and stop and drop a like and comment on any videos you can. It’s a pain, but it helps boost the channels.

Last summer, when a far right group showed up to agitate against LGBTQ+ people in Capitol Hill, Seattle showed up to counter-demonstrate. The Seattle Police managing the event were mad that the counter-protestors weren’t willing to nicely stand behind a fence, separate from the hate rally. The police proceeded to use excessive force.

The officer was practically squealing with glee when he said:

We’re going in this time with guns blazing and all our pieces in place,” said one Seattle Police Department (SPD) officer around 2:17 p.m. on May 24, 2025. “We are past talking to people, we’re here to fuck people up now. We’re done with these guys and the shit they’re doing. They’ve pushed the envelope and now they’re going to get the full [unintelligible]."

Sound familiar? That sounds like the crap the ICE-militia would say. 

We are not safe when we are policed by people who think we are the enemy. 

Unfortunately, he’s unlikely to be fired, because reactionary people like Martiza Rivera and Bob Kettle on the Seattle City Council have championed the conservative crusade to prevent Seattle Police Officers from ever having any sort of meaningful accountability when they violate people’s civil rights. (To be fair, the conservatives aren’t aiming for violations of our rights. They are just choosing those violations because they think the lack of accountability will make the police union happy).

That is despite the history of repeated, notorious violations in Seattle, alongside scandals like the “laugh heard round the world” - where the second in charge of the police guild laughed about a police officer running over and killing a pedestrian in a crosswalk. 

Through the two labor contracts, our most conservative council members have made it so the police are practically untouchable. After the first contract, Seattle police became the highest paid in the state without getting any meaningful accountability in return. And even though we are not having trouble with recruiting anymore, they came back and gave SPD another HUGE raise, without any real tradeoffs in terms of accountability. 

This means all the city’s bargaining leverage is gone (which was clearly the point) and will remain absent for many years. So there is almost nothing that can be done at the city level to protect civilians from officers like the guy in the video.

In other words, politicians like Rivera and Kettle, as well as the now turfed-out Sara Nelson, have worked tirelessly to make sure a badge and a gun is a permission slip to violate civil rights with impunity. 

But the state legislature can thwart their reactionary efforts. 

The legislature needs to remove the ability of reactionary city leaders to pull this crap. All city power is granted from the legislature. Cities like Seattle have failed to use it wisely. So it needs to be taken back. 

City officials should not be able to bargain away the safety of our community members and any such bargaining to date should be null and void. Labor unions absolutely deserve the right to bargain over a broad array of matters pertaining to their own safety, compensation, and job experience. But at no point should our civil rights be on the table. 

The state needs to also form an independent oversight body, with full subpoena power over departments and the power to pursue serious remedies in the case of violations. It should be staffed by civil rights experts and when a case comes up, should include a panel of citizens from the impacted communities. 

Not only will this create more accountability, but once it is off the table, perhaps unions like SPOG can start behaving like some of their far more reasonable brethren around the state and stop acting like they are at war with our populace. 

However, this one would be statewide and come with a rebate for Seattle companies already paying the local tax. There are a few differences, but the basic gist is similar.

Unfortunately, the Senate Majority leader seemed uninterested in the idea based on some comments he made on KUOW, because he thinks it would put Washington Jobs at risk..

I beg to differ. Here is a two minute video on why.

Please watch it to the end, share it with your friends, comment, and like it. (I know, irritating to ask, but these algorithms are still getting to know me). We need to get the word out.

On Tiktok (yes, I know -I’m like the least Tiktok-watching person ever)

@rondezvousseattle

Tax Washington corporations to protect us from Trump cuts.

And Instagram

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Thank you!