The classic advice in sales is that the moment the buyer says “yes,” you shut up and let them sign on the dotted line. Anything you say after “yes” can only screw things up.
That’s sales, of course. Politics is different.
Progressives won big on Tuesday night—I know, because I saw the conga line at Stoup after the results came in. As of Thursday’s ballot drop, Katie Wilson is leading incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell by about four points. Erika Evans is leading incumbent City Attorney Ann Davison by 17—the same margin Dionne Foster enjoys over Council President Sara Nelson. Alexis Mercedes Rinck got 77 percent of the vote—63 points ahead of her nearest rival.
The temptation is to count the votes, pop the bubbly, and move on to bigger and better things: Hari Kondabolu is coming to town this September; that Ai Weiwei exhibit is still on at SAM; it’s sunny for a few more weeks. Why should the “why” matter when Seattle progressives are experiencing their first genuinely good vibes since last November? Shut up and take the W.
The “why” matters a lot. There’s a big difference between progressives winning because voters want progressive ideas, and progressives winning because voters think the incumbents are terrible and are itching to toss them to the curb. Don’t get me wrong—the progressives who jumped to big leads in a low turnout election on Tuesday ran excellent, disciplined campaigns. But the breadth of the sweep they are a part of suggests to me that there’s a broader trend here worth paying attention to.
Four years ago, Bruce Harrell and Sara Nelson swept into office because voters felt the city was going in the wrong direction. and they wanted a change. Four years later, after those two leaders failed to deliver on their core pitch to voters—less homelessness and better public safety—voters want a change again—for someone they hope will actually deliver.
That makes it really important that progressives do deliver. And that will be very difficult. The basic problem is not that progressive ideas are bad, it’s that progressives generally want to do things, and we’ve got a system that makes doing things incredibly hard. As my friend Gordon Padelford from Seattle Greenways is fond of pointing out, it’s taken Seattle longer to build a single Rapid Ride line in Eastlake than it took the Kennedy administration to put a man on the moon.
The broken Seattle Process™️ prevents elected officials from delivering for constituents, and helps fuel cynicism in local government.
— Gordon Padelford (@gordonofseattle.bsky.social) August 6, 2025 at 9:39 AM
If Harrell’s challenger Katie Wilson wants to open 4,000 units of shelter in four years, she’s going to need to move faster than that. If City Council candidate Dionne Foster wants to scale up the CARE team to lower tackle public safety, she’s going to need to move faster than that. If City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck wants to finish building our city’s decade-old bike master plan, she’s going to need to move faster than that.
All these things will take time, and there’s a lot of process in the way—tedious rounds of review, endless community input, paperwork and checklists and RFPs to scope RFPs. Four years later, will voters care about the details of why things haven’t gotten built faster? Or will they throw the new bums out in search of someone, anyone else.
To prevent that from happening, Progressives must focus on sweeping away structural barriers to delivering on progressive priorities in 2026. Alexis Mercedes Rinck has proven that delivering wins is possible even from the minority. Should these progressive candidates win, come January, it’ll be on them to tackle not just the symptoms of our broken system but structural, paralyzing features of our system of governance—the thousand veto points in our system, each innocuous on their face, that means that we need 20 years to deliver light rail and 13 years to deliver a bus lane (we could start by building up the city’s capacity to do more of its own construction and delivery work in-house.)
Call that whatever you want—abundance, sewer socialism focused on efficient municipal services, the Get Shit Done Party—but it’s key to our collective ability to keep living out our progressive values—not just from 2026-30, but for decades to come.
Rian Watt is a local housing advocate.
