Thursday night marked the unofficial kickoff to Seattle’s general election campaign season. For the first time since the August primary, candidates for King County Executive, Seattle Mayor, Seattle City Attorney, and citywide Council positions 8 and 9 were all under the same roof, answering the same questions, seated side by side. And if your kink is candidates having the ability to make bold claims with zero followups, two-minute answers to 20-year problems, and Rachael Savage trolling North Seattle libs with her praise for Trump, only to get booed as a fascist (I mean, if it quacks like a duck), then the Haller Lake Community Club had a candidate forum for you!
The room was a crush of bodies and heat, a democracy sauna where civic virtue mingled with sweat. The audience skewed very North End and very white, “Imagine a seasoning rack that only believes in salt,” as one observer put it. On stage, though, half the candidates were people of color, which meant the dais had more flavor than the crowd. People fanned themselves with programs, campaign flyers, anything flat. A man behind me muttered, “I’ll vote for whoever brings AC.” Hard to argue with a platform that concrete.
Last night’s event was the warm up for a general election campaign cycle that promises to be heated. Each candidate faced off with their challenger for the first time, giving us an early glimpse into how they hope to run their campaign in the coming months. Moving race by race, questions flying, answers clipped short by the tyranny of the timer, here’s what we learned from this season’s preview.
Mayor: Katie Wilson vs. Bruce Harrell
The marquee matchup of the night was, of course, Mayor Bruce Harrell and Katie Wilson. This is the first time they’d been on a stage together since Wilson finished first in the August primary with more than 50 percent of the vote. It was the night’s heavyweight bout.
The first question landed on Harrell’s signature One Seattle Comprehensive Plan, the document meant to guide 20 years of the city’s growth. Harrell leaned on his familiar style of managerial command-and-data-driven assurance.
“A plan is a plan—and it’s malleable,” Harrell says. “We put a stake in the ground for 330,000 units, and we’re listening on water quality, trees, livability. We can do better.” He added that his job was to plan for growth while balancing neighborhood concerns, rattling off specifics about water rates, tree ordinances, and even cubic-foot pricing for utilities. The mayor’s approach was part technocrat, part neighborhood whisperer: I hear you, Madrona. I hear you, Mount Baker.
Wilson, by contrast, cast Harrell’s plan as both too timid and too selective. “We need more neighborhood centers, more of the city sharing growth—including ones struck from earlier drafts,” she says. “That includes the mayor’s own neighborhood, Seward Park, which somehow got pulled off the list. Build more housing and protect mature trees. We can do both.”
Wilson went further, arguing that Harrell’s version of One Seattle still leaves too much of the city insulated from change, while pushing the burden onto already-dense areas. Her framing was sharper, almost prosecutorial: the mayor’s plan is not bold enough to match the scale of the crisis.
The contrast deepened when the conversation turned to public safety. Harrell touted falling violent crime numbers and new leadership at SPD. “I won’t rest until my granddaughters can walk any neighborhood,” he says. “Violent crime, homicides, shots fired—they’re all going down. We measure everything. We’re modernizing policing.”
He pointed to his hire of Chief Shon Barnes, and, in a moment clearly designed to preempt criticism, said he personally visits precincts at 4 a.m. and 11 p.m. “I told our officers: if you don’t think George Floyd was murdered, you should not work for me,” Harrell said, reusing a refrain from his first campaign.
Wilson wasn’t convinced. She reminded the audience of the messy interlude before Barnes’s hire (former police chief Adrian Diaz’s chaotic exit, and suing of both Harrell and the City): “We lost high-integrity officers, morale cratered, and Seattle had excess homicides compared to national trends,” she says. “We need to hire more officers, yes, but also more civilian responders. And we need to finally implement accountability through the police contract.”
Her critique wasn’t just about staffing; it was about culture and structure. “Other cities have built far larger alternative response systems,” Wilson says. “We are behind. And the accountability ordinance from 2017 is still not real because it hasn’t been implemented in the contract. That is a failure of leadership.”
If Harrell came off like the guy assuring you the bus is “just five minutes away,” Wilson reminded everyone that the bus actually broke down three stops back, and leadership never called a tow truck. Harrell leaned on his greatest hits: steady delivery, lots of numbers. Wilson pressed the point that tinkering around the edges isn’t cutting it, and the moment demands urgency, not another round of wait-and-see.
But if you were looking to understand what Harrell’s strategy is going to be after his poor primary showing, the lightning round told us everything we need to know. The candidates were asked to answer, in one word, if they were to the right or the left of their opponent. Harrell initially balked at the premise (“I don’t really like the question”) before relenting with, “I’m to the left, and I can prove it with data and 1,600 pieces of legislation.” (Fact check pending.) Maybe there’s a multiverse where Mayor Harrell is Che Guevara with a city pension. But in this universe? That was late breaking news. Wilson wasn’t about to let that one slide: “I learned something new. Bruce Harrell is to my left,” she quipped, before pivoting to remind the room that “all people care about right now is results.”
City Attorney: Ann Davison vs. Erika Evans
The City Attorney race represented the clearest binary of the night: deterrence vs. treatment, lawsuits vs. alternatives.
The moderator’s first question asked why Shoreline has been more successful limiting drug use. The framing felt suspect—it’s largely understood that Shoreline simply pushed the drug use further south—but it was the perfect question to clarify the valley between the candidates.
“Our laws have to matter,” Davison says, a mantra she’s been chanting for four years. She pointed to her authorship of Seattle’s drug possession law and SOAP/SODA restrictions. She argued that focus should be on the “118 people responsible for more than 2,400 referrals” and highlighted her lawsuit against gun manufacturer, Glock.
Evans shot back that this was missing the point. “What works is going after traffickers and high-level suppliers—not criminalizing people who are unhoused or in substance use,” she says. “That’s ineffective policy.”
On the unfilled behavioral health beds due to a public defender shortage, Evans was direct: “Hire more public defenders. That’s important. It’s basic, and it’s urgent.”
Davison responded that competency restoration is a state-level gap. “We should not be walking by people and leaving it at ‘we don’t know what to do,’” she says. “I’m not in charge of housing—but I can build re-entry and diversion that actually reduces recidivism.”
City Council Position 8: Alexis Mercedes Rinck vs. Rachael Savage
Position 8 had the widest gap in the primary, Rinck bested Savage by a whopping 65 percent, and it delivered the sharpest, and most entertaining, clash of the night.
The tree ordinance question should have been a layup: candidates were asked whether they supported the city’s 30 percent canopy goal and Councilmember Rivera’s Amendment 93 to protect trees. Rinck kept it squarely on climate justice, warning about urban heat islands and underscoring the need to expand the city arborist’s office. “We need to make sure that we’re having a clear focus on getting to 30% tree canopy across this city,” she said. “These heat events are dangerous, and we don’t have the infrastructure in place to keep people safe. Expanding canopy isn’t just aesthetics, it’s climate resilience.”
Savage, meanwhile, swerved hard into her favorite culture-war cul-de-sac. “My opponent thinks that permanent, supportive housing—housing that allows drug addicts to use drugs and die in our city—has miraculous powers,” she declared, calling Housing First “a colossal failure” that “crushed businesses” and “destroyed[ed] neighborhoods.”
“I thought we were talking about trees,” Rinck snapped back.
Savage doubled down, describing Capitol Hill and Belltown as “a nightmare” and calling permanent supportive housing “a harvest for drug addicts for free.” Her refrain: “I’m a pro-police candidate. The first thing I’ll do is amend the public drug use law so police can arrest for public drug use. That protects all of us—and it helps get people into treatment.”
It was the starkest contrast of the evening: Rinck, who sees safety rooted in housing stability and climate resilience, versus Savage, who sees disorder everywhere and wants to police her way out of it.
In the lightning round, Rinck went for the jugular: “My opponent is a Trump supporter. I think everyone up here is to the left of her.” Savage, never one to duck the spotlight, leaned into the heel role, “Proudly to the right. Common sense.”
During the closing arguments, Savage’s praise of Trump and declaration that she’d left the Democratic Party over their inability to address crime, prompted a man in the back to shout “fascist” and “that she was full of shit.” Some in the crowd expressed agreement, while organizers asked for “quiet.” A man later identified as Savage’s campaign manager marched over to the man, and started screaming at him. After a tense shouting match back and forth the disruption eventually quieted.
City Council Position 9: Sarah Nelson vs. Dionne Foster
In Position 9, the divide was less combustible but still clear. Sara Nelson, often pausing to ask moderators to repeat questions, reminded the audience she supported the current tree ordinance but admitted, “The way it was rolled out was very unfortunate… it was flawed.” She leaned on her pragmatic record, saying she supported Rivera’s amendments because “we have got to incentivize smart design of housing… that’s exactly how we get past this growth versus tree mindset.”
Her challenger, Dionne Foster, countered by making accountability her watchword. She argued that she supported amendments aimed at police reform—such as restricting SPD’s use of blast balls and providing a private right of action for people harmed by SPD that Nelson voted against. “We need both adequate policing and accountability,” Foster said. She also pressed for expanding the CARE department so alternative responders don’t have to be co-deployed with police, saying, “We can’t keep asking them to do their jobs with one hand tied behind their back.”
Nelson, meanwhile, returned to the City Charter as her anchor. “Our charter requires adequate police presence in every district of the city,” she said. “That is our responsibility.”
During the lighting round, Foster stuck with a clean “Left,” while Sara Nelson finally offered, “I quite frankly don’t know what her politics are because I haven’t heard enough specifics from my opponent.” Which led the moderator to once again say “in one word.” The lightning round proved one thing: brevity is the first casualty of campaign season.
County Executive: Claudia Balducci vs. Girmay Zahilay
In the lightning round, when they were asked to say if they were left or right of their opponent, Balducci hedged with a “pretty similar,” though she joked that she was sitting to the right of Girmay. That’s been her line since the primary: that they’re vastly similar on most counts, and vote together 99 percent of the time. But since she lost to Zahilay handily in the primary, she’s been making small gestures to the right, appearing to court the Republican voters who no longer have a horse in the race.
But in the forum, they didn’t have a wide gulf between them.
On the recent Department of Community and Human Services audit that found that the county’s lax oversight potentially paved the way for fraud, Balducci was blunt: “We don’t know where it’s gone. We don’t know how much has been wasted. We don’t know if there has been fraud.” The fix, she argued, can’t wait: “We need to have an internal audit function, and we need to get on it now. The report said… we’ll finish implementing recommendations by the end of 2026. No. We need to start implementing basic financial controls immediately. This is the basic function of government, and we know how to do it.”
Zahilay argued for deeper structural reform. “Absolutely the findings in that audit were unacceptable. We need much stronger financial controls,” he said. “Like my colleague mentioned, we need a proactive, automatic audit system. I would hire a chief operating officer tasked with auditing every single department. That audit happened because one of our colleagues requested it—we shouldn’t have to wait for someone to ask. There should be internal audits automatically.” He added that his King County Delivers plan would require quarterly reports—“just like every public company does”—to track whether goals are being met.
When asked about behavioral health, Zahilay reframed the “repeat offender” narrative. “Ten years ago, King County did a study called Familiar Faces,” he said. “They looked at people who’d gone to jail four times or more in two years. Out of that population—2,500 to 3,000 people, 95% had overlapping substance use and mental health disorders. So what we’re calling a repeat offender crisis is actually a behavioral health crisis.”
Balducci countered with frustration over delays. “Voters have been very generous with King County,” she says, pointing to the five crisis care centers approved two years ago. “We haven’t opened the door to a single one of them yet.” She also noted the stalled Harborview behavioral health expansion: “We voted five years ago… not a single spade of dirt turned.” For Balducci, the issue isn’t money or ideas, but competence: “We need to push harder to deliver results for the things we’ve already promised.”
The Last Word
Former mayoral candidate Colleen Echohawk who lives in the area and attended Thursday’s event, appreciated the forum but didn’t mince words about her discomfort with how some of the questions were framed, especially the one about crime and safety on light rail.
“As a District 5 person whose family rides light rail every day, that didn’t feel real,” Echohawk says. “There was some fear-mongering going on. The way the question was phrased, it made it sound like light rail is this crime-ridden danger zone. That’s not the experience of most people I know. For a lot of us, it’s just how we get to work, how our kids get to school, how we live our lives.”
She also took exception with the way candidates were pushed to talk about “prostitution” in the neighborhood. “The framing erased their humanity and made it sound like they’re a problem to be managed instead of people who deserve rights, safety, and dignity,” she says.
Echohawk acknowledged that a few candidates stood out, though she’s undecided about who she’ll vote for come November. “Katie Wilson’s public safety answer was fantastic, and it was truthful,” Echohawk says. “[Harrell] also made strong points about housing and showing the data around what’s been built. Could we do more? Yes, but he has done a lot.”
Glaringly missing on the night was any discussion of immigration, climate change, or displacement.And without allowing for followups, a candidate could’ve claimed they pulled world peace straight out of their ass, and we would have swiftly moved on to the next question.
Democracy in Seattle, at least last night, looked like a hot room with too little oxygen and too many questions made for two minute clips. It looked like people fanning themselves with campaign flyers that doubled as sweat rags, and an audience that was, demographically speaking, a salt shaker waiting for pepper. It looked like a predominantly white audience listening to why tree canopy, police staffing, and transit safety are less separate issues than variations on the same crisis: how you build, who you protect, and what you value.
It also looked like choices, some trivial, some tectonic. Whether we confuse punishment for treatment. Whether we let slogans stand in for systems. Whether we keep treating housing as a NIMBY skirmish over buildings instead of the scaffolding that holds up everything else: safety, equity, climate survival. Ultimately, these formats have limited value. They’re “made for social media clip” spectacles, where essentially the wannabe (re) elected’s job is to simply not royally fuckup, and come across amiable enough.
The real question for the next two months, as candidates haul themselves to almost-weekly forums and debates, is whether we’ll convert all this civic heat into something illuminating, or whether we just keep sweating through our civic underwear and call it actual political engagement.
