It may be Seattle 2021, but there’s a smell of 2016’s and 2020’s national elections in the air. Perhaps fortunately, that stench is rising mostly from a rather down-ballot race, for city attorney. Most voters here probably don’t realize how modest Seattle city attorney’s powers really are. But that doesn’t matter: we have a full-blown Right vs. Left culture-war on our hands. In Seattle.
The villain, pictured above, is Ann Davison, who by all evidence seems to be a narcissist cut from the same materials as Trump. Look at what she’s done in just 2 years in politics:
- In 2019 she came out of nowhere to win 2nd place in our top-2 primaries for Seattle District 5 city council. That’s my district — part of north Seattle, an increasingly diverse district. The incumbent Debra Juarez is one of the least progressive council members, but Davison tried to challenge her from the hard right. In particular she spewed anti-homeless hate including an idea to hastily renovate abandoned warehouses and, well, warehouse the homeless there. She lost 61-39.
- In 2020 she registered as a Republican to run for WA Lt. Governor. The top of the R state ticket running for Governor was Trumpist conspiracy-theorist Loren Culp, and… well, you know who topped the national ticket. Davison was rather explicitly proud of running as a Republican in 2020. She didn’t go far — finished 3rd in the primaries with 12%, but was still the top Republican vote-getter.
And now in 2021 she’s running for the 3rd consecutive year, for a 3rd and completely different position: Seattle city attorney, promising — wait for it — a return to “Law and Order” policies. On paper she’s a lawyer but she apparently does commercial law and has none of the background that public attorneys really need. Now she claims she’s not a Republican but an “independent thinker” or something, and says she voted Hillary in 2016 and Biden in 2020, despite making all this Trumpist propaganda during her 2020 primary campaign. Sounds like a perfectly reliable person to put in charge of a major progressive city’s legal affairs, right?
Just like her prior campaigns, Davison’s 2021 ads and messages have been full of falsehoods, and gaslighting, and lack of any interest or understanding of policy and of the role. So she’s the villain all right — but she’s not the culprit.
The culprits are various respectable business owners and public figures, who came out to normalize her. Front and center for me was the owner of our neighborhood Ace store, a beloved local institution. In July he broke his career-long political silence in order to not only endorse Davison, but host a campaign event in the store — again, the first ever time the store was used for that. I learned about this when randomly popping in for some anti-yellowjacket stuff. The electronic billboard advertised Davison’s event. I had to go back home and google to verify that this is indeed the same Ann Davison from 2019 and 2020. It was just shocking. I have not and will not step foot in that store again, conveniently located as it is.
Less shocking, and probably more influential, was the endorsement by Seattle’s only daily, the rich-Republican-old-boy Seattle Times. The Times has a long and sordid history of trying to screw this progressive city come election time. Usually they’re on the losing side (and they are smart enough to endorse the Democrat candidate for President, since that’s what WA will choose anyway), but they still have influence over confused people in the middle. Despite the incumbent attorney Pete Holmes being a relatively harmless mild progressive, they decided to endorse this unqualified Trumpist narcissist against him. Without their endorsement and the normalization by many others, Davison would have turned into the running-joke candidate that she deserves to be.
Meanwhile, our Seattle Times antidote, progressive alt-weekly The Stranger whose colorful endorsements seem to determine the votes of at least 30-40% of Seattle voters, also gave Holmes a cold shoulder and preferred public defender and police abolitionist Nicole Thomas-Kennedy. These dueling endorsements were just enough to place Thomas-Kennedy in first with 36.4% and Davison second with 32.7%. Holmes got squeezed into 3rd and out of office with 30.6%.
Fast-forward a couple of months. Tweets from June 2020, magically unheard of before the primaries, suddenly surface in which Thomas-Kennedy cussed local police and went as far as wishing them to eat “covid-laced shit” or something. Pearls get clutched, all kinds of ossified public figures including two retired Dem governors choose to endorse Davison, lest the city’s lawyership fall into the hands of rude commies. I know, the irony, right? A Trumpist is about to win in a leftie city, only because her opponent made… some mean Tweets. The brain, it hurts.
No, seriously. The only poll that came out post-primaries had Davison (who would have surely been a long-shot underdog if not for these unearthed Tweets) well ahead of Thomas-Kennedy. Meanwhile, we are getting huge — really, like 3x3 feet or something once you unfold them — huge mailers in scary black background, mailers that look like they belong in Alabama rather than Seattle, warning us of “Chaos” if Thomas-Kennedy is elected. Those mailers were bought by some of the biggest money in Seattle, e.g., the Vulcan real-estate speculation company founded by Paul Allen. Hopefully those ridiculous mailers backfire as nicely as Amazon et al. overplayed their hand in 2019 when they tried to unseat progressive council members by drowning the races in money. In 2019 this heavy-handed interference enraged voters and led to the most progressive council in living memory, a council that used the pandemic and racial-justice awakening to impose an “Amazon tax” much bigger than was thought possible.
But — unfortunately — between 2019 and now, a pandemic and various national disturbances have happened, and Trumpism and its idiotic right-wing culture wars showed a scarily surprising attraction power in November 2020. So the nation and apparently the city are in a very odd and scary mindset, and Seattle foolishly does its electoral business in odd years, giving disproportionate power to older/wealthier White voters.
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I wish that this rather symbolic attorney’s race was the only one in which a rightward lurch seems imminent. But we also have the mayor’s race, where progressive darling and city council president Lorena Gonzalez is now underdog vs. the decidedly more centrist Bruce Harrell. Both are council members — oops, Harrell was in the council 2007-2019. Both are people of color, and Harrell is almost 20 years older. His ads scare us of “the failed policies” that exacerbated the homeless crisis. What he’s neglecting to say is that he’d been sitting on the council forever, and his policies look near-identical to the failed ones of the current mayor. It’s the boldly progressive approach to homelessness that hasn’t been tried yet by the mayor’s office. Funny (NOT) how on so many issues, progressivism is used as a political and media scarecrow, but never actually used to run policies. Scratch that — every once in a while a progressive policy is actually enacted, and is therefore immediately rebranded as “apolitical” (see under Civil Rights, Social Security, Medicare, to name a few).
Anyway, I really think Gonzalez would be a brilliant mayor. After a string of bad ones and 3 successive single-term mayors, each leaving embittered or disgraced, we deserve some fresh air. It’s unfortunate that the pendulum seems to swing towards more of the same old, same old, of the type that has failed Seattle for most of the past generation.
Lastly, in a high-profile citywide council race (“District 9”) to replace Gonzalez, we have another local progressive radical hero, the charismatic queer biracial spoken-word artist, lawyer and organizer Nikkita Oliver. Nikkita narrowly failed to make the top 2 in the 2017 mayoral primaries (disclaimer: we voted for her and I believe our son canvassed for her), and in 2021 decided to set her sights on a more attainable target. Like Thomas-Kennedy she’s an abolitionist, and like her she won the primaries, but only by 0.7%. Confronting her now is an almost stereotypical NIMBY White woman, the owner of a brewery who lives in a one of the city’s most lily-white yuppie neighborhoods.
So the 3 races have turned into a culture war between two visibly partisan “tickets”. But here’s the thing: the 3 progressives have openly endorsed and supported each other. Their 3 opponents — the creepy narcissist, the washed-out centrist, and the NIMBY in distress — have not. They are playing the coy plausible deniability game, wink-wink and nod-nod. Meanwhile the press and those “public figures” have normalized their dirty game, and the hateful incitement mailers sent by their big-money backers look eerily similar.
I’d say all 3 progressives are underdogs right now, perhaps Oliver a bit less so. I will be very happy to be proven wrong — again, 2019 was a loud reminder that this is a progressive city, after all — but then again, this is 2021 and the world has changed, much of it in a dark way.
Anyway, we vote by mail. Many people (us included) cast their ballots late. So if you’re in Seattle or know Seattle voters, please make sure to do your part so that progressives win here again.
Thank you.