Politics

Zohran Mamdani’s victory wasn’t a fluke. Right now, it is being built upon in Seattle, three time zones from the Big Apple. Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell has been gliding along a path toward reelection. He has garnered the support of developers and tech oligarchs. All the opinion leaders are along for the ride with the mayor. Of course, he is going to win.

But weirdly, a vote of the people has challenged that wisdom. Last year, Seattle housing activists had gathered signatures for the City Council to pass a tax on excess compensation to fund social housing. The tax, to be paid by employers, levies a 5 percent tax on individual compensation greater than $1 million. Raising $60 million, and with bonding, this will enable the production of thousands of economically integrated housing units in which no tenants will pay more than 30 percent of their income in rent.

The City Council set a vote on this measure for February 11, expecting a low and conservative turnout. The council also put a competing measure on the ballot, which took $10 million from an existing fund for low-income housing to build a few units of social housing.

The corporate community, led by Amazon and Microsoft, poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into an opposition campaign. Mayor Harrell got into the act, with his face on all the opposition literature. The die seemed to be cast for a victory of the status quo over actual social progress. Only it wasn’t. The election resulted in a 26-point victory for social housing over the mayor’s proposal.

That got Katie Wilson, the founder and general secretary of Seattle’s Transit Riders Union, to rethink the 2025 elections. Katie had already launched the Transit Riders Union, gaining free transit for school kids and low-income people. She organized successful minimum-wage campaigns in Seattle suburbs. She developed the Jump Start tax, a tax on employers when individual compensation exceeds $189,371. Without this tax, Seattle would have been savaged with cuts in public services.

So Katie decided it was a good time to become mayor, to gain the power progressives need to transform our city. She embodies the policies and hopes and dreams of most of us in Seattle who can’t figure out how to pay for childcare and rent increases and healthcare, or those of us who recognize and want to provide the solutions for these issues.