There is an old and probably apocryphal story from the French revolution that goes like this: A bourgeois leader of the revolution is seated comfortably at a café by the side of the road in the 12th arrondissement, sipping wine and enjoying the company of a friend. Suddenly, a mob rushes by, carrying torches and pitchforks and shouting revolutionary slogans. “There go my people,” remarks the revolutionary. “I must find out where they’re going so I can lead them there.”
I’ve been thinking about this story a lot over the last few months as I’ve watched the Harrell administration struggle to respond to the growing challenge posed by Katie Wilson’s upstart mayoral campaign. As things stand, Wilson is almost exactly tied in fundraising, way ahead in Democracy Vouchers, quite possibly leading the polls, and is now endorsed by The Stranger.
Here’s the problem for Harrell: He needs to be progressive enough to ward off the threat of Wilson without being so progressive that he burns bridges with his big business funders. That’s not easy to achieve! Consider his painfully awkward defense of partnering with Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck to update Seattle’s Business & Occupation tax code:
We are not trying to run business out of Seattle, we are open for business,” Harrell, newly anointed fan of progressive revenue (or just a man worried about being another one-term mayor) continued. “So as we look at dealing with a $250 million deficit … the fact is that the state legislature only gives us so many tools, and this is a tool we think along the lines of progressive revenue that is a smart policy to adopt.
Inspiring stuff.
To the Mayor’s credit, signing onto the Rinck proposal did earn him some predictably wide-eyed apoplexy from his usual friends at the Downtown Seattle Association. (Perhaps they missed the part of the proposal where 90 percent of businesses will see lower taxes?) Harrell has also shown a willingness to sign on to, and publicly champion, good housing, transportation, and education levies (though after working to size them down behind the scenes). And his comprehensive plan proposal is a fairly decent start (though it still falls far short of what’s needed).
But in a political moment that demands ambition and moral courage from our local and national leaders, Seattle deserves better than a Mayor who needs to be backed into a corner to champion good ideas. We deserve a leader.
Happily, Katie Wilson has never needed a poll to tell her what to do—and she’s already with the majority of Seattle voters on essentially every issue that matters. She wants tons more housing. She’ll take practical steps to build more shelter while investing in long-term solutions to homelessness. She wants to protect our city’s finances from the threat of the Trump administration, she’s for transit and transit riders, and she wants to make the richest people in our city pay what they truly owe. She is for the working class because she is from the working class.
You’ve already felt Wilson’s impact if you or your kid have zipped around the city with a subsidized Orca card. Her organizing with the Transit Rider’s Union made that happen. If you’ve had your move-in or late fees capped for your rental apartment, you’ve also benefited from her work. And if you’re working a minimum wage job that actually pays you what you need to survive, you can thank her too. Those aren’t empty promises from a do-little Mayor, those are actual results from a private citizen without even a fraction of his power. Imagine her in his office.
Irritatingly, many of Seattle’s elected progressives have been slow to admit—thanks to Harrell endorsements locked in before he faced a serious challenge in Wilson—that what they love in Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York City is available right here in Seattle. Tenemos Katie Wilson en casa, folks! For upwardly mobile electeds, I can understand the temptation to avoid nettling a still-powerful and famously petty Mayor. But this is not a time for cynicism. It’s a time in which to deepen our commitment to our most cherished values and fight like hell to defend them.
Harrell hasn’t been a terrible follower. But he’s hardly been a leader. He’s a guy whose MO is to negotiate with advocacy groups in private and take credit for their advocacy after the deal is struck. This style of backroom maneuvering, quiet phone calls, collared advocates, in-groups, and out-groups produces largely inadequate results and leaves precious little room for genuine, ambitious leadership in times that dearly demand them.
One reaction to the threats our city faces now, from Trump, from the consequences of our own policy choices, might be to fold into a defense crouch and fall back into our old ways: cutting up and watering down proposals until they do nothing that might upset anyone in power.
Another approach might be to marry genuine ambition for, and pride in, what’s possible in our city with an organizer’s capacity to deliver—to set a clear standard, articulate clear values, and then do the hard and thankless work of building the coalition around an idea so that that idea can actually work. That’s Katie Wilson’s style, and it’s not a hypothetical. She’s already done it. There’s a word for it, too: Leadership.
Rian Watt is a local housing advocate.
