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Katie Wilson, Seattle’s next mayor, is a millennial socialist with scant experience in electoral politics and a persona that may seem incongruent with the vibrant, artsy, tech-forward city she’s about to lead.
Ms. Wilson is a wonk, her fans say. A policy nerd, a thrift-store-shopping throwback to the days before Seattle got its Amazon-fueled glow up.
And while her campaign shared a focus on affordability from the left end of the political spectrum with another Democratic Socialist on the other side of the country — New York City’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani — they did not share a vibe.
“They are almost opposite sides of the same coin in terms of personalities,” said Joe Mizrahi, a Seattle school board member and secretary general of United Food and Commercial Workers 3000, one of the region’s largest unions.
“Katie is,” he said, “let’s just say ‘dry,’ OK?”
The election of Ms. Wilson, 43, finalized Thursday when the incumbent conceded after a more than a week of ballot counting in Washington’s vote-by-mail system, represents both a generational shift away from older, establishment Democrats and a return to the Pacific Northwest’s funkier, let’s-just-try-it roots.
In a state without an income tax, the mayor-elect has promised to pursue what she calls “progressive” new sources of revenue to pay for housing and other basic services, including potential local taxes on capital gains, digital advertising and buildings purposely left vacant. She’s pledged to push a $1 billion bond to build more homes and new protections for renters, who make up 56 percent of the city.
“There was time when we saw Seattle as kind of a laboratory for progressive policy,” Ms. Wilson said in an interview this fall. “And that time’s not now anymore. But why can’t it be?”
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Ms. Wilson defeated incumbent Bruce Harrell, who became the latest in a two-decades-long string of Seattle mayors who failed to win re-election. This time, the challenger has won with a margin of just a few thousand votes.
The mayor-elect only decided to enter the race in February after Mr. Harrell became the public face of a failed attempt to stop voters from putting a higher tax on wealthy companies to pay for housing.
Mr. Harrell, a former corporate lawyer who spent almost two decades in city government, finished a surprisingly distant second to Ms. Wilson in the August city primary. He used the period between August and the November general election to pepper potential voters with accusations that Ms. Wilson was too far to the left — particularly in joining calls in 2020 to defund the police, a stance she has since walked back — and lacked the experience atop a large organization needed to run a major American city.
“I am significantly concerned about how she will respond when she has to give a direct order to the police chief or the fire chief,” Mr. Harrell said in an October interview.
He questioned “how someone with such minimal experience and such pliable values can be chief executive of a city the size of Seattle.”
Mr. Harrell’s candidacy, and the prospect of the policies that might emerge from City Hall if Ms. Wilson won, spurred business owners, real estate agents and moderates in Seattle to make this potentially both the most expensive and closest mayor’s race in Seattle history; an independent political action committee reported raising $1.8 million for Mr. Harrell. He also earned endorsements from most of the city’s mainstream media organizations and civic leaders.
Seattle faces major, interlocking challenges that will be hard for any mayor. The region’s largest employers, including Amazon, are cutting thousands of jobs as artificial intelligence transforms industries. The affordability crisis has exacerbated homelessness and the graffiti, vandalism, and open drug use that seem to come with public camping.
Political strategist Sandeep Kaushik, who did some work for an independent group that supported Mr. Harrell in his 2021 campaign for mayor, said Ms. Wilson’s election represented a repudiation of moderates such as Mr. Harrell but also establishment progressive leaders.
“The $64,000 question about Katie is whether she’s going to be a thoughtful disrupter of the status quo or whether her election is just going to increase the paralysis and dysfunction that have characterized our politics here for the last decade plus,” he said.
How to respond to rampant public camping was one of the big policy differences between Ms. Wilson and Mr. Harrell. He promised more crackdowns. She preached a more patient, forgiving approach, which turned off Tom Graff, a real estate agent and commercial property manager in the Belltown district of Seattle.
On Thursday, Mr. Graff said he was willing to give Ms. Wilson a chance — if only because nothing else has worked.
“I’m going to be optimistic and hope she can be a change maker,” he said.
Ms. Wilson had never run for public office before, but she had led a series of campaigns over the past decade to expand access to mass transit, raise local minimum wages and add protections for renters — often through some form of taxing the rich.
“Grassroots organizing is about really hard, detailed, egoless work, just knocking on doors, making that next phone call, being willing to ask people for help, to help them even when you’re exhausted,” said Beth Bazley, chairwoman of the King County Democrats, which endorsed Ms. Wilson before her August primary win. “Katie does not believe in hierarchy, as far as I can tell, just digging in and getting the work done.”
Like many of Millennial and Generation Z voters who backed her, Ms. Wilson is a renter and a transplant to Seattle. She grew up in Binghamton, N.Y., with academic parents, both evolutionary biologists. One of her grandfathers, Sloan Wilson, wrote “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” and other novels.
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Always an activist on the left — she co-founded a chapter of the advocacy group Food Not Bombs in high school and met her future husband, Scott Myers, while serving free meals at an animal rights protest — she was six weeks from earning a degree in physics and philosophy when she opted for a more bohemian life. Ms. Wilson and Mr. Myers rode a Greyhound across America and settled on Seattle in 2004 because, the story goes, the University of Washington offered the lowest price on library access for people not enrolled.
As co-founder of the Transit Riders Union, an advocacy group, Ms. Wilson built a network of fellow organizers and won a string of campaigns to expand access to public services and fight the growing gap between the ultra rich and everyone else in the Seattle region. Ms. Wilson played a key role in convincing the Seattle City Council to create what’s known as the “JumpStart Tax,” a levy of 0.75 percent to 2.5 percent on the salaries of the highest-paid employees at about 500 of the city’s largest businesses. Revenue from the tax is supposed to fund affordable housing, small-business support and climate-change programs, though in recent years, the city has also used it to help balance its general fund.
As with the New York mayoral campaign, the Seattle race centered on affordability, especially in housing.
“When we moved here, you could just go on Craigslist and find a room in someone’s basement to rent that is pretty cheap,” Ms. Wilson said in October. “Those days may be over, but that does not mean the current situation is acceptable or unsolvable.”
Planners estimate Seattle needs 112,000 new housing units by 2044 to meet demand. The median home cost in the area is over $1 million — almost 10 times the median household income.
“You are seeing a generation of people who are working really hard but cannot see a path to financial stability,” said Dionne Foster, who won a Seattle City Council seat last week on a platform similar to Ms. Wilson’s. “That’s what drove voters, this sense that the prosperity Seattle has seen isn’t benefiting everyone, and is actually driving up costs for a lot of people.”
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The issue of rising costs carved the opening for Ms. Wilson’s campaign and a progressive wave that rolled through the region last week. In addition to the mayor, voters chose Ms. Foster over a moderate Democrat who was president of the Seattle City Council and a moderate Republican who was the city attorney.
Liberal candidates won two other seats on the nine-person City Council and a number of other positions in the suburbs, a sharp swing from the business-friendly, tough-on-crime attitude of local politics after the Covid-19 pandemic and the racial unrest of 2020.
“Katie was a political unknown facing a million and a half in spending from Bruce Harrell’s allies,” Mr. Mizrahi said. “That tells you something about the level of dissatisfaction with the status quo.”
