With much of the country fixated on New York’s decision to elect as mayor a socialist with little experience, it was easy to miss the news that Seattle has done the same. Voters from coast to coast will now get to witness two real-time experiments in radical governance.
Katie Wilson, an activist with even less experience than New York’s Zohran Mamdani, narrowly defeated the incumbent mayor of Seattle earlier this month. The 43-year-old community organizer, a first-time candidate with no meaningful management experience, will soon lead a city of around 800,000 residents with nearly 14,000 municipal employees and an $8.9 billion budget.
Who is Wilson? She does not own a car. She lives in a rented 600-square-foot apartment with her husband and two-year-old daughter. By her own account, she depends on checks from her parents back east to cover expenses. To let them off the hook, she seeks to force residents of Seattle to pay for “free” child care and other goodies.
Fourteen years ago, after working odd jobs as a barista, baker, lab technician and legal assistant, Wilson co-founded an advocacy group called Transit Riders Union to agitate for better public transportation, paid for by new and higher taxes. She says she decided to challenge Mayor Bruce Harrell (D) earlier this year after he opposed a new tax on high earners to pay for housing construction. She campaigned on a local capital gains tax, a digital advertising tax and a statewide wealth tax.
Harrell conceded graciously last Thursday. It’s a low bar, but he was the best mayor Seattle has had in some time. He oversaw a reduction in crime and open-air drug use by hiring more police officers and removing homeless encampments from city parks. He was expected to cruise to reelection until backlash to President Donald Trump, especially his immigration raids and federal cuts to local funding, animated the left.
Seattle is already struggling and residents find the city unaffordable because it’s long been a petri dish of failed progressive social experiments and absurdly high taxes. Restaurants and coffee shops keep closing because of a $20.76-an-hour minimum wage. By one estimate, Seattle has the second highest prices for dining out in the country – below San Francisco but above New York.
Seattle’s office vacancy rate is now above 33 percent. Major employers like Amazon, which was founded by Post owner Jeff Bezos, have relocated thousands of workers from Seattle to Bellevue, right across Lake Washington, because it’s safer and friendlier.
The mayor-elect’s plans will simultaneously accelerate the exodus of businesses while making the city more of a magnet for vagrants and criminals. For example, Wilson criticized Harrell’s sweeps of homeless encampments. She backed off previous support for defunding the police, but many officers remain nervous.
Like the mayor-elect in New York, Wilson wants to open government-run grocery stores, despite their record of failure. She suggested during a September event that she won’t allow private supermarkets to close locations that aren’t profitable. Instead, she wants to require them to give more notice and pay generous severance packages to their employees. “Access to affordable, healthy food is a basic right,” Wilson said.
Wilson may be less constrained than Mamdani. Fellow progressives also toppled the incumbent president of the Seattle City Council and the city attorney while picking up two other seats. Only two of the seven council members have served more than one term. There are not many silver linings here, except that the country may be able to more quickly see the failures of their policies — which could prevent voters in other cities from falling for socialism.
“I will appoint a cabinet of exceptional leaders,” the mayor-elect promises on her website, “whose lived experiences reflect the diversity of Seattle’s Black, Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Islander, Latinx/Hispanic, and People of Color communities as well as that of women, immigrants and refugees, 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, people with disabilities, people of all faith traditions, and residents from every socioeconomic background.”
We’re sure 2SLGBTQIA+ Americans everywhere shed tears of joy, but it doesn’t matter who she appoints if they’re implementing policies that will make Seattle poorer and less safe.
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