Is The Seattle Conservative SuperCycle Over?

Probably

Alexis Mercedes Rinck’s stomping seventeen point victory suggests a serious change in Seattle politics may be afoot.

Backlashes

While Trump was in office last time, progressive candidates performed pertty well. The Mayoralty was still held by a centrist (Jenny Durkan), but the council was much more left leaning.

Then came 2020 and with it: Covid, lockdowns, George Floyd, protests, CHOP/CHAZ, tear gas and police abusing protestors, the closure of shelter spaces, public disorder, a crime wave and the fentanyl crisis. While many of these things were happening nationally, the backlash to local leaders was fierce.

I noted in a campaign email at the end of last year that:

In the last two city elections, all eleven seats (nine council, plus the Mayor and City Attorney) have been up for election. Ten of the eleven have shifted to the right, by an average of 11 percentage points. That’s two wave elections if I’ve ever seen one.

Only one seat did not shift rightward. District 4 shifted almost two points to the left. District 4 with its unfavorable redistricting. District 4, with more independent expenditures against us than any other race this cycle.* District 4, the part of Seattle that many in our progressive movement had written off as unwinnable and were unwilling to spend resources on.

And yet, with all that against us, we performed thirteen points better than the trend. I cannot overstate how spectacular that is. It may not have been enough to beat back the tsunami, but it is something to be proud of. It also produced the best results in terms of vote share for any open-seat progressive race citywide for two cycles. And it may provide a blueprint for successful campaigns in the future.

(*I was wrong about this detail. There turned out to be more independent expenditures in another race, but ours still had the most lopsided spend, with close to a 20 to 1 ratio against our candidacy.)

I made a graph to highlight the ugly trend we were living through.

You can spot the strongest performances pretty easily.

In addition to my modest progressive shift, the strongest resistance to conservative slippage came from Teresa Mosqueda (who stayed even and maintained the highest vote share as well!), Lorena Gonzales’s Mayoral run (-2 points though she was working from a low starting point), Dan Strauss (-3.5 points) and Andrew Lewis (-4 points). The other non-incumbent who significantly outperformed the swing was Alex Hudson (-5 points).

These are the races that went relatively well and if we are to look to the future, there are things we should probably learn from at least some of them, at least where the candidates’ actions are compatible with our values.

Backlasheses?

Rinck’ result suggests something may have changed.

Some suggestions for why seem entirely implausible. I keep hearing that this may have been because Woo was a weak candidate. She was indeed, but several of the conservatives in the last few years were equally clumsy and incompetent, and substantially less likable.

Rinck was a strong candidate, but in a similar vein to the strongest candidates above. Certainly labor showing up this year helped her, and business investing less on the conservative side did too. But labor spent big in 2021 and it didn’t matter, and the business folks clearly backed off at the end of 2024 because they knew they’d be lighting money on fire.

Turnout And Even Year Elections

One obvious big factor is turnout-related. This special election yielded a rare representative electorate because the elelction was held during an even year. This means 84% turnout, compared to the 46% that turned out for last year’s city council-only elections.

But there is probably more to the story. This year’s total vote share for progressive candidates was similar (58%) in the primary and the general. Although turnout in the primary was higher this year than last year (43% in August 2024 v 36% in August 2023), six points isn’t quite enough to make the difference.

Here is how I come to that conclusion:

It’s tough to say which share went to “progressives” in the 2023 primary, because a lot of candidates didn’t fit a particular mold, or little was known about them.

But for back of the envelope purposes, if we look at the three left-er incumbents running (Morales, Lewis, Strauss) and count them as a proxy for “progressive” vote share, they earned 48.6% of the total votes in their primaries (34,309 votes out of 70,567 cast). An increase in turnout of 6 points would have meant another 12,091 votes in the mix for those three districts. Even if 100% of those votes went progressive, you’d still not get all the way to the 2024 primary’s 58% progressive ratio. And there is no way those voter were 100% progressive. That doesn’t happen. Also, lower propensity voters are increasingly conservative, making this even more unlikely.

And, as Andrew Hong at the Washington Community Alliance has argued, the fact that the demographics of 2024 primary voters was so similar to those in 2023 but with different results suggests that some people are really changing their minds.

I don’t meant to discount the role an even year election played. This almost certainly gave progressives in 2024 a big bump. It is part of why Sara Nelson would prefer we avoid a truly representative democracy in Seattle, as would the Seattle Times and, of course, Tim Eyman.

More to the Story

The fact that turnout is an insufficient explanation does suggest the conservative super-cycle may be over.

Why?

That’s tough to know for sure. It could simply be that people now see the conservative council as responsible for the status quo they dislike, and their anti-incumbent bias is showing. This certainly didn’t manifest in statewide elections—but the Seattle City Council does inhabit a strange place in many people’s minds, bearing responsibility for things it has no power over. I chalk this up as plausible.

It could be that last year Seattle thought it was pushing out lefties in favor of mainstream Democrats, but has since discovered that was all a lie. This council spent most of the year governing like very conservative Democrats whose agenda oftentimes looks quite Republican, at least of the Reagan variety. Maybe 2024 was just correction.

But then again, were the people who voted last year tuned in enough to vote in a low turnout election but tuned out enough to miss that the council was obviously going to be conservative, but still tuned in enough to pick up that the governed as conservative Dems this year? That seems a stretch!

It is possible, however. Last year I saw a lot of mainstream media figures pretending the past didn’t exist and that all this talk of “audits” and magically conjuring up 1400 police officers was somehow real and very mainstream Democratic party stuff. So maybe they simply remembered that credulity is not objectivity, or they that they shouldn’t swallow every narrative frame put out by the Chamber. I don’t know. I have noticed that a few of these reporters have picked up on narrative frames that I have pushed for, over and over in this newsletter. Maybe a subtle shift in the media did impact public opinion.

Another cause may just be low turnout. Not the “odd v even” kind, but just that turnout was trending down and was quite low during 2021 and 2023. Maybe progressive voters were disaffected for some reason. Perhaps the city didn’t deliver their progressive vision. Perhaps what was delivered looked less palatable after a time. Perhaps they were mad about Gaza in 2023. I don’t know.

Last, I suspect Trump plays a huge part. He was President in 2017 and 2019, but not 2021 and 2023, and he was back on the top of the ticket in 2024. People here hate his politics. That by itself is enough to mobilize people, and remind them of why they are progressives. When Trump is in the background, Seattle voters probably even pay more attention to who the Democratic Party says it endorses, rather than just defaulting to the local newspaper of record. They might also notice how Trump and Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” sounds a lot like the BS spouted by Bob Kettle, Sara Nelson, Maritza Rivera and Rob Saka. Whatever the causal mechanism, I suspect Trump being around makes a difference, and will do so in turnout as well.

One caveat, the fact that this election took place in a Presidential year does make it harder for big business to buy the election, because ads are expensive and less likely to leave an impression on voters when people are obsessed over the national election.

What Does This Mean?

Although it is possible that the super-cycle has not ended, it seems likely that it has. Given that some of this was just turnout, or more attention to the top of the ticket, we should not assume that Rinck’s stellar 58% is anything like the new norm.

But Seattle politics are likely to return closer to their average. That means Sara Nelson and Ann Davison are both very vulnerable and a strong candidate should be able to handily defeat them.

It even means Bruce Harrell could be vulnerable.

Yes, he has done his best to not make too many enemies, so he looks set to coast to reelection.

But he has done this by failing to lead, accomplishing very little, and he is now already failing to stand up to Trump when our AG and Governor are showing much more courage.

Given that the top three concerns of Seattle residents are homelessness, public safety, and housing costs, and all have gotten worse during Harrell’s term, he has certainly not been successful in any serious sense. And with his budget cuts hitting things like affordable housing and oversight of labor violations, he is not exactly pursuing a popular agenda.

If his numbers dip below 45%, someone with serious political heft should challenge him.

But whether this gets anywhere is largely up to power brokers within the progressive movement.

The nation is facing a crisis. We are in a new moment in Seattle elections. Are we really going to wait five years to try to seriously improve governance in our city? Is that our answer to Trumpism? Five more years of not-doing-much? Unfortunately, that seems to be the current plan for the mayoralty. But fortunately, I do suspect we’ll see real challengers to Nelson and Davison.