When Bruce Harrell talks about his campaign for re-election as Seattle’s mayor, he sounds perplexed. After all, he says, he’s got an inspiring life story, almost three decades of experience in civic life, a long list of endorsements and a record of steady, if slow, progress since 2020 from the Covid pandemic and turbulent George Floyd protests.
But in 2025, such qualifications are proving to be liabilities in a progressive city thirsting for change. As ballots in the Nov. 4 city election hit mailboxes this week, Seattle’s race for mayor is shaping up as a generational and economic showdown — much like the one in New York City.
In the August primary, a 43-year-old community organizer named Katie Wilson captured 50 percent of the vote in a field of eight candidates. Mr. Harrell 67, came in a distant second with 41 percent. Both finalists are Democrats, but polling indicates that millennial and Gen Z voters, in Seattle and beyond, appear to be rethinking what it means to be qualified for the job of running a major American city.
“I’m kind of an elder millennial,” Ms. Wilson said, “so I’m part of this generation that at some point realized that we were on the whole less well off than our parents and probably always will be.”
Ms. Wilson’s housing-heavy platform and social media-savvy campaign are reminiscent of the approach that Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee in the New York mayoral race, is taking. She has leaned into the parallels, offering Seattleites her own version of 21st-century socialism, albeit granola-flavored and Goodwill-dressed.
Mr. Mamdani was elected to the New York State Assembly. Ms. Wilson has never held elective office. The fact that many Seattle voters appear to be flocking to her speaks to the distance they have traveled since the troubles of 2020, when part of Ms. Wilson’s neighborhood, Capitol Hill, was declared by protesters to be a communal living “autonomous zone,” free of police. In his first term, President Trump, threatened Democrats in the city and state: “Take back your city NOW. If you don’t do it, I will.”
Ms. Wilson, the child of evolutionary biologists, grew up in Binghamton, N.Y. Determined to avoid academia, she dropped out of Oxford University six weeks before finishing her studies in philosophy and physics, and then rode Greyhound buses across the country before settling in Seattle, where the University of Washington offered inexpensive access to the library for nonstudents.
Ms. Wilson had stints in construction, boat maintenance and busking with a guitar and harmonica at Pike Place Market, before she became a community organizer focused on the price and availability of public transit. The group she helped found, the Transit Riders Union, focused on taxing the city’s largest companies and highest earners more heavily to expand economic opportunity. The group pushed for higher minimum wages, stronger protections for renters, and lower bus and train fares for low-income riders.
She hadn’t considered harnessing that network for a political campaign until this year.
Like most major West Coast cities, Seattle desperately needs more housing. In 2023, city voters approved the creation of a regional public housing agency. This year, organizers returned to voters seeking a financing mechanism for the new office, an “excess compensation” tax of 5 percent paid by employers on compensation above $1 million paid to any employee.
That’s where Mr. Harrell split with Ms. Wilson, giving her a lane.
With the city’s chamber of commerce and giants like Amazon and Microsoft balking, the mayor backed a competing measure that would have directed the Seattle City Council to pay for the new housing agency through existing budgets.
In February, 62 percent of Seattle voters chose to tax the rich. That night, Ms. Wilson told her husband she wanted to run for mayor.
Mayor Harrell and his challenger live in the same city but different worlds.
In neighborhood forums and interviews, Mr. Harrell talks often about his working class, Democratic roots, his Black father’s migration west to escape racism and his Japanese American mother’s experience being interned during World War II.
His story is of striving, turning a football scholarship at the University of Washington into a corporate legal career, which enabled him to pay $1.4 million for a 7,000-square-foot house in the Seward Park neighborhood of Seattle 14 years ago.
“People perceive me as a powerful person because I wear suits to work most days,” Mr. Harrell said. “But they forget I was the little biracial boy who grew up on the streets of Seattle.”
Ms. Wilson grew up upper middle class, and then chose a path that led away from financial certainty. She and her husband don’t own a car and rent a 600-square-foot, ground-floor apartment. Most nights, they put their 2-year-old daughter to sleep in a portable play pen in the sole bedroom and then move it to the living room when they go to sleep. Ms. Wilson said rent and utilities cost them around $2,200 a month. She told a local broadcaster her parents help pay for child care.
Campaign videos posted to social media chronicled her thrift-shopping trip to find a debate outfit and her promise that she is not “the terrifying monster” Mr. Harrell and his supporters suggest. Trying for reassuring, she told her viewers jokingly that she did not start the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, nor did she drive the N.B.A.’s Seattle SuperSonics to Oklahoma City.
“Seattle is on its way to becoming a majority-renter city, so she’s putting out a story that a growing, dissatisfied segment of the city understands,” said Patrick Schoettmer, a political scientist at Seattle University.
Both candidates have accused one another of not recognizing their own privilege.
Mr. Harrell put it in racial terms. If Ms. Wilson was not white, he suggested, she would face far more skepticism for her lack of experience running large organizations. Seattle has an annual budget of almost $9 billion and more than 13,000 employees. The Transit Riders Union’s annual budget is about $200,000.
“Let’s say, for example, she was a former football player, an African American man, with an imposing size,” said Mr. Harrell, who still has the broad, muscular build of the linebacker he once was. “I do believe you’d be asking more questions about why she didn’t finish college or never had a significant job to speak of.”
Ms. Wilson has been no less personal, but her focus is wealth — his money and her lack of it.
“He talked about how he bought his first house for $80,000 when he was only making $35,000 or $40,000,” she said, referring to a moment in one of their two dozen planned mayoral debates. “So he’s talking about a time when your house might cost twice your annual salary, not 10 times that.”
The median single-family home price this year in King County, Wash., topped $1 million. The median household income is around $122,000.
“He doesn’t understand reality for most people today,” Ms. Wilson said.
History is not on any incumbent’s side in Seattle. Voters haven’t re-elected a mayor since Greg Nickels won his second term in 2005.
“There’s a kind of war of attrition for mayors,” Mr. Nickels said. “The faster the city changes, the faster you lose people on different issues. And we are changing so quickly in Seattle.”
Four years ago, Seattle was just emerging from the 2020 racial justice protests. Mr. Harrell ran as a stabilizing force, a sort of pragmatic moderate who supported the police and promised to balance kindness with a commitment to reduce public camping and quality-of-life crimes like vandalism. He would back businesses as they recovered.
Now, in the second Trump administration, Seattle voters appear to have shifted leftward again.
“A lot of people in Seattle are not necessarily angry at Harrell,” said Mark Alan Smith, a political scientist at the University of Washington, “but they’re absolutely angry at politics.”
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