On October 21, KUOW published a story with the headline: “Katie Wilson can barely afford to live in Seattle. That’s why she wants to be mayor.” The story then goes on to reveal that while she “speaks the language of the working people,” there’s something missing from her campaign narrative: “Her parents give her money,” the reporter wrote.
Harrell’s campaign seized on the idea that support from her parents undermines Wilson’s credentials as an advocate for working-class Seattleites. Two days after the KUOW article came out, Harrell sent out a press release with the headline: “Katie Wilson is Not Who She Says She Is.” It went on to say that the profile “shatters Wilson’s carefully constructed narrative: she is not a working-class Seattle resident, and doesn’t bear the stress felt by cost-pressured Seattleites.” His campaign website dedicates an entire page to the article.
And this weekend, a bunch of Seattleites got a text from the Bruce for Seattle campaign linking to the KUOW like a tabloid scandal: “Katie Wilson’s campaign built around working class identity, but parents paid her bills.”
It was a classist, sexist attack from a millionaire with a household income that falls somewhere between $500,000 and $1.2 million.
According to Wilson’s family, it also wasn’t true.
For the two decades Wilson’s been in Seattle, “we have been very apart from her finances,” Wilson’s mother, Anne Clark, tells The Stranger. “We haven’t had anything to do with supporting her materially, in any way.”
That only changed earlier this year, when Wilson told her parents that she planned to run for mayor. Clark knew that campaigns are enormously taxing, and that Wilson and her husband had been getting by without paying for childcare up to that point. She and Wilson’s dad thought they might be able to help with the stress by contributing to the cost of Josie’s daycare. “I don’t even think we cover the whole cost,” she says. And, she clarifies, she has never underwritten Wilson’s bills. “I don’t even know what her bills are.”
She says she plans to keep helping when she sees opportunities to. “This is my only grandchild. What grandparent doesn’t want to invest in their grandchild if they can?”
Clark has read the KUOW story about Wilson. She was “irritated and amused,” she says. “It made me think: I don’t know who wrote that for Harrell’s campaign. But he has kids. Surely he’s invested in his kids.”
Even without the clarification from Clark, the story was a relatable one for a lot of voters. Nearly half of millennials and Gen Zers rely, in some measure, on familial support. That help may take the form of a grocery run, a lingering phone plan, a subsidized insurance premium, or the occasional rent check, small acts of intergenerational care, as wages have lagged farther and farther behind inflation.
The original story clearly lays out a narrative that Wilson would not be able to live in Seattle without her parents’ support. “Wilson presents herself as a sensible coalition-builder who runs a small nonprofit—the Transit Riders Union – and has lived a mostly working-class life. A renter and a mother, she runs on issues close to her heart. She speaks the language of struggling people,” the story reads. “But not included in the narrative Wilson tells on the campaign trail is how she affords this expensive city. The answer is simple, and arguably very Seattle: Her parents, professors in New York State, give her money.”
Wilson’s campaign reached out to KUOW to request a correction or clarification in the story. The news station said they wouldn’t add a correction or editor’s note because the article was inspiring “really interesting conversations about what it takes to live in the city,” and that they would prefer to simply do a follow-up interview. The Wilson campaign declined.
The Stranger contacted the station over the weekend to ask if they wanted to comment about their decision to not clarify the story. On Monday morning, they added an editor’s note stating that they’d added “context and an additional quote” to “further illuminate Katie Wilson’s parents’ financial support.”
The two paragraphs read:
“Before I decided to run for office, my husband and I were just kind of juggling our kid back and forth,” Wilson said. “We didn’t have her in daycare because it’s so expensive. But then when I decided to run, we’re like, we really need childcare.”
Wilson has mentioned the exorbitant cost of child care in Seattle throughout the campaign —noting what it costs to send her 2-year-old to daycare — but without noting how she paid for it.
The changes do not address the clear narrative in the story that Wilson could not live in Seattle without her parents’ support—something she did for decades. “We stand by our reporting and plainly did not state that Katie Wilson was receiving money from her parents at any other period than what she told us herself,” the station said in a comment.
There are eight days left in this campaign season. Polls from The Stranger and Northwest Progressive Institute both show Wilson in the lead, but this election will all depend on turnout. And so for those eight days, we should expect a lot of the same: Wilson holding rally after rally trying to get out the vote, and Harrell pulling out every class-shaming, sexist half-truth he can find to make voters wonder if maybe they just shouldn’t vote this time around.
