Mayor Katie Wilson's Bad Bets, The Stranger's Mysterious Power, and the Slow Death of KCRHA

[00:00:10] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Seattle Nice, the only podcast that tells you what's really happening in Seattle politics with Erica C. Barnett of Publicola and political consultant Sandeep Kaushik. I'm David Hyde, and today we have election results. We're taping Wednesday at three o'clock, so before, after the first ballot drop, before the next ballot drop. And let's start, Erica, we had a library levy and some other mayoral priorities. How did it work out for Mayor Katie Wilson this year?

[00:00:40] So far. Mayor lost on a couple of races where she endorsed in the state legislature. She endorsed Hannah Savio Howell in the 43rd. She's challenging Jamie Peterson, the state senator there. And then in the 46th, she endorsed Ron Davis, who's challenging Jerry Pellett, the state representative. And it looks like Ron Davis is out. Hannah Savio Howell is still in, but trailing really far behind Jamie Peterson.

[00:01:07] The mayor's priority. The other priority was passing a library levy, and it did indeed pass. This is not like earth shattering news, but the city did vote to more than double the size of library levy. So that was a victory for the mayor.

[00:01:23] If you see it that way, and just briefly to challenge the premise, I don't think anybody gives a fuck who the mayor endorses that much, except for the candidates who are being endorsed. I don't think people are, you know, voting based on looking at who the mayor endorsed and voting based on that. I think they're actually looking at, you know, institutional and newspaper endorsements much more than like individual ones.

[00:01:45] Yeah, that's a good challenge. I mean, she's no Mayor Mondami in terms of her endorsements having a huge impact. And Seattle's no New York City, I guess, is part of what's going on here. But Sandeep, what do you think of this election and the mayor's endorsements?

[00:01:59] Well, starting with the mayor first, look, I do think Contra, Erica, I do think this is a political setback for her, right? She made a big splash in the days after Mom Donnie made these bets in three congressional races in New York City, endorsing in two of them against incumbent Democrats, you know, kind of establishment Democrats.

[00:02:19] And he won all three of those bets. His insurgents, you know, DSA type candidates won in New York City. He got a lot of political street cred and media credibility for those wins. And within days of that happening, Mayor Katie Wilson made two big splashy bets where in the 43rd, she bet against the sitting Senate majority. They're kind of like, plop, plop.

[00:02:46] Right. And look, if Hannah Savio Howell had done really well in this primary, and if Ron Davis had come through in really strong numbers, I think the mayor would be taking a huge victory lap and her people would be saying, like, this shows her political coattails and her strength. Obviously, that didn't happen. The opposite happened. Their performance of both of those candidates is really not good, right? You know, I mean, Ron is coming in third, well behind Will Dreher.

[00:03:13] You know, Jamie Peterson ended up at 71 percent. It just, you know, better than I think anybody expected in these primary numbers. So. Initial. I mean, that'll close. Yeah. Yeah. But it doesn't feel super close. So I do think the mayor takes a hit on that, right? I think that the mistake you're making, Saideep, is comparing Seattle to New York City and comparing two local, you know, sort of sub-regional, less than, you know, a fraction of the size of Seattle races for congressional races.

[00:03:42] I just think these are such completely different scale events, you know, that like saying, oh, Katie Wilson and Mondavi, kind of the same thing. Not really. I mean, mayors endorse in races, lots of politicians endorse in races. I just don't think people are paying attention to this. But, you know, maybe I'm wrong. I mean, you know, Saidee, do you talk to different people than I do?

[00:04:03] But most of the people that I know kind of in the normie world, like barely know who their state legislator is, can't be, you know, asked to learn much and probably don't know which elected officials endorse them. I think that I think that's true. But it seems like there's two separate questions here. One, Saideep saying, you know, she well would have taken a victory lap had her endorsements been more successful.

[00:04:24] But it is also true, isn't it, Saideep, that as Eric is saying, Seattle's known in New York City and the mayor's endorsement in New York City was like hugely covered. Whereas here, you know, whatever we talked about on Seattle Nice, but there was nothing really that compared to the monumental earthquake of Mondavi's endorsements, which were really a big deal, much bigger deal. Well, we don't have the same kind of, you know, we're not the, you know, kind of global center of the media the way New York City is. So in other words, no one heard about it. No one heard about that.

[00:04:52] There was a ton of media coverage. A lot of people heard about it. They wasn't comparable to New York, though. Right. Not comparable to New York. If you walk out on the street right now and ask anybody who the mayor endorsed in the 43rd district, they're not going to know. Like, go do it. We can both go outside right now and ask. Both of those candidates highlighted in big, bold ways that the mayor was supporting them in this race. I don't think it was helpful that in the last week before the election she was having, as we talked about last week, a really horrible, horrible, horrible. I cannot imagine that to have one single vote.

[00:05:21] You know, but anyway, look, I. And if it did, if it did, why did Neeloo Jinks, the progressive, win in the fifth? I mean, you know, it's it's it's just, you know, the idea that like voters are seeing Katie having a bad week with the police chief. And they're like, oh, my God, I remember she endorsed Hannah Savio Howells. I'm going to vote for Jamie Peters. And like the logic train there just doesn't make sense to me. It doesn't seem very likely.

[00:05:45] No, well, what happened in these races is that once again, for better or worse, and I think there are a lot of people on the left that aren't so happy about this. But the stranger continues to be the kind of primary, especially in primaries and left lanes, the kingmaker in Seattle races. And the people they pick, they have the power to either anoint or torpedo a left lane candidate in city of Seattle races. Yeah, you're changing subjects, though, but I don't disagree with that.

[00:06:14] And, you know, I think a lot of people assumed Ron Davis was going to get that stranger endorsement. He was very close to the previous regime with the stranger of Rich Smith and Anna Krieg and those people. He didn't get it with his new regime. They went with Dreher. There was a whole uproar about it. He spent the last three weeks of the campaign basically running against the stranger and tried to denounce them for weird, I don't know, reasons we could, you know, unpack or whatever. But like, turns out like those endorsements still matter.

[00:06:41] Well, you're talking, yeah, you're talking about a completely different. So we were talking about the mayor. Now you're talking about the stranger. So, yeah, I mean, more conservative voters go with the Times, more liberal voters go with the stranger. I don't see what that has to do with Katie. But yeah, I mean, I agree that people do look at those cheat sheets. And that's kind of what I said in my initial comment on this is that people tend to look at institutional and newspaper endorsements more than they do, you know, one individual politician. There is no stranger anywhere else. There's certainly no stranger in New York City anymore that has near this kind of influence.

[00:07:11] I mean, so it's another reason why we aren't New York City. Yeah, it's really unique. The power that the stranger has in primaries and endorsements here in Seattle, especially as the paper itself has hollowed out quite a bit. I mean, obviously, Eric and I are both former stranger people, right? But, you know, at least for me, I left more than 20 years ago now. And it was a very different paper back then and more robust paper on the news side. I just don't think the quality of the news coverage has really been there in recent years.

[00:07:40] But it doesn't seem to have affected the impact of their endorsements. And, yes, that is a unique situation. I totally agree. It's been hollowed out. I mean, they don't really cover City Hall. They don't really cover the state legislature. They kind of dip in and they do these candidate interviews when people announce. And then they endorse. And that's the extent of their coverage. And I think that, you know, that that is it is unfortunate that people would kind of not look further.

[00:08:04] I mean, but I guess it is, you know, overall a very general sort of barometer for like who's left here. But I think like, you know, in that real Will Dreher endorsement, I think there were real issues with their endorsement. I mean, not least that he was at one point a clerk for Brett Kavanaugh.

[00:08:22] But, you know, but also he was the I learned actually today on another podcast that I was on that she'll go unnamed that he was sort of the choice of like the tech AI companies like Anthropic and Amazon and other companies that gave him money because they, you know, believe that they'll represent their interests in the state legislature. To me, that's very alarming. But I mean, there's kind of no mention of that from the stranger.

[00:08:47] And and I just want to mention one kind of funny thing that happened this morning that, Sandy, if you pointed out to me, they they had the wrong results in their in their sort of reporting on the election. They were looking at statewide races and they reported county only results, made a bunch of conclusions about the state being, you know, exceptionally lefty based on the King County only results and then had to correct it after, you know, I poked a little fun at them on social media.

[00:09:15] And, Erica, Will Dreyer was also endorsed by progressive city council member Dion Foster and our city attorney, Erica Evans. So, you know, they apparently there are people on the progressive left that are backing Dreyer. Oh, for sure. It's not just like he's some tech bro. No, no. But I'm saying it's complicated.

[00:09:36] And if you're basing your endorsements or your your vote on what the stranger says, I think they, which is what we were talking about, you know, have a somewhat limited perspective because they don't cover any of the stuff. I, you know, so not to be sit here and carry Will Dreher's water, but like, you know, he also endured he clerked for Elena Kagan, I believe, you know, and the AI money thing is he didn't get money from the companies.

[00:10:01] He got money from employees because there was a kind of AI reformer blogger guy who endorsed him and a bunch of like these are people who work at the companies, but they're kind of AI doomers who are giving him money because he's a he's a he's a he's saying that AI is bad. We need to regulate it and stuff. So I think some of the stuff, obviously, I just learned about this this morning and I didn't make an endorsement in this race because, you know, I don't typically endorse in races where, you know, I'm not able to really lock in, which is why, you know, and also I'm just one person don't really do that anymore.

[00:10:30] But I mean, I think that if you are endorsing, you need to sort of mention all the angles and all the details about somebody. And I just I did think that the endorsements fell flat and I think they fell flat because they don't cover this this stuff anymore. And, you know, when Sandeep and I were there and the you know, in the in the good old days, in the ancient days, ancient history, you know, we did cover the legislature and city council and city hall.

[00:10:56] And and, you know, and I think that's a really important role of a, you know, city publication. But I agree with that. Those that that was the golden age. But I would also say, like, some of the weird campaigning by candidates against the stranger. Like, I didn't get that as a strategy and it didn't work. And I guess I'm I will just say I'm not sorry about that piece of it because that just seems strange to me. I wanted to really ask about like this election.

[00:11:21] A lot of times we talk about was this a win for the progressive left or the more, you know, center, you know, center left overall. Did either of you have any sense of that? Yeah, if I can. Yeah. First, quick comment about Katie, just to close out the mayor thing. I do think it's highly unusual for a mayor to endorse against, you know, the incumbent Senate majority leader.

[00:11:45] Right. A Democrat who just passed the millionaire's tax and who's a very powerful politician in Olympia when, you know, the city obviously depends on Olympia for a lot of stuff. That's a big, bold move. And and and obviously that's kind of not gone her way. So anyway, but but I and I do think that, yes, that was unusual. But David, coming back to your question, I think this is a really good night for the Democratic establishment in Washington state.

[00:12:10] Right. Like if you are, you know, we've been talking or if you've been watching nationally, there's been all the sense that the Democratic establishment is teetering. Democratic voters want huge change. They're going with Democratic socialist candidates, throwing out incumbents. There's been a lot of national media attention about this. We just saw that happen in Michigan going with El Saeed, a Democrat, you know, a Democratic socialist adjacent candidate in the Senate primary there.

[00:12:37] So anyway, a lot of things nationally here. You know, Jamie Peterson's at 71 percent. Democratic incumbents are winning like in the ninth congressional district. Shama Sawant seems to be going down in flames, going against Adam Smith, the congressman like. And it just seems like the Democratic establishment types here have been doing really, really well in this primary. And Marie Glusenkamp-Perez in Washington's third congressional district defeated or seems to have defeated, right, a progressive challenge.

[00:13:05] She has. Yeah. I mean, I think and said if you worked for Marie Glusenkamp-Perez back in 22. Yeah, I did that race. Yeah. The cons. And, you know, I think that, again, I mean, if we actually look, there aren't that many examples of things. I mean, I think this was, you know, kind of a boring election and with a lot of pretty predictable results. But I don't I wouldn't look at it and go, oh, my God, the centrist beat the, you know, the ups, the insurgent progressives, because really there's only a couple of cases of that that in Seattle.

[00:13:34] And you're talking it's the ones we've talked about already in the 46th and the 43rd. I think Adam Smith, I think Shama Sawant running against Adam Smith is like a really, really outside case. I mean, Shama Sawant is, you know, not affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America. I don't know what her views are. She, you know, campaigned against Kamala Harris. So, you know, she's she's not really let's let's put her to the side.

[00:13:57] And then in with Marie Glusenkamp-Perez, I think that that is not particularly representative of Seattle or of the national movement. But she's down there in Vancouver. It's a very conservative district that she's in. And she's practically a Republican and is struggling for, you know, being a Democrat down there. So I wouldn't draw any broad conclusions from these outcomes, except if you're drawing conclusions about the 43rd and the 46th, which are, you know, subregions of Seattle.

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[00:15:02] Download the Ikes app today or head on over to Ikes.com. That's Ikes.com. I agree with that. But I also think the national narrative really was this one of, you know, progressive wins, which it's always a mixed bag. These things are always kind of local.

[00:15:25] If you look at Sandeep mentioned Michigan, I mean, in that race, Abdul El-Sayed was forecast to be 13 points up and barely won so far, at least. Right. Or I can't remember. Maybe that one's already over. But the point being like it's a little bit unclear exactly which side of the Democratic Party is winning right now. And so, you know, yes, it's not a victory necessarily for the centrists, but it's certainly not a victory for the progressive left either, right?

[00:15:52] Well, first of all, you guys are both saying that I didn't say that it was a victory for the centrists. I said it was a victory for the Democratic establishment, but not to complicate narratives here. But the Democratic establishment in Washington state is pretty progressive, right? Like the candidates that are winning were all supporting a millionaire's tax and, you know, taxing the rich. But what I'm saying is, like, voters here are pretty happy with, like, how progressive the Democratic establishment is and weren't pushing to go even farther left than they were.

[00:16:21] But I would not call – you know, I don't think Jamie Peterson, after what he's, you know, done the last couple of sessions, really counts as like a squishy centrist or, you know, a lot of these other candidates who seem to be doing well and hounding off their challengers and stuff. So anyway, yeah, I mean he's not – Yeah, there's always a question of candidate quality in all these races.

[00:16:41] And when you're talking about a very tiny number of races, it's – you know, the question is, like, is Will Dreher this formidable, you know, opponent to Jerry Pellett, you know, an entrenched incumbent who's pretty popular? Was Hannah Sabio Howell or is she, you know, a formidable opponent against Jamie Peterson, even more entrenched and pretty popular incumbent as well? So there's just so many factors. I mean, I agree with Sandy.

[00:17:04] You can't really say, you know, oh, the centrist won because Jamie Peterson is not really a centrist and Jerry Pellett isn't either even though he is an envy. I just had to get that in there. Yeah. You know, I was just thinking Ron Davis, this is his second shot. Does he get a third? How many times did Tanya Wu run? I'm just – I'm wondering, is this the end for Ron Davis? I think he's going to find something else to do. I mean, you know, he's a very active – before he started running for office, he was very active. I mean, he has a job, obviously.

[00:17:33] He's an attorney and has his hands in various businesses that I don't understand. But, you know, he's a prolific writer for The Urbanist and Advocate, and I imagine he will continue to do that. I don't think he's going to run again, though. Do you, Sandy? I don't know. I mean, I don't know if you have to ask Ron. You know, he hasn't kind of told me of his plans. I do think it becomes harder, right? If you've lost a couple times, it becomes harder to run again.

[00:17:59] You kind of get that, you know, taint on you and people start to kind of move on. So I don't know. They call it the Tanya Wu stink. Yeah. I mean, to have lost kind of two big races in a row, you know, definitely puts him at a disadvantage. Were he to try to run again, I don't know that it's necessarily – And to be clear, he ran for city council before just for listeners who might not know. He lost to Moritz Rivera for the city council.

[00:18:28] Like Good Space guy, he ran for a whole bunch of different kinds of offices. Yeah, well, Ron, you know. Never stopped. Okay, so Erica C. Barnett, let's shift now from politics to our other favorite topic, the KCRHA, King County Regional Homelessness Authority. More details emerged in the sort of unwinding of some of their jobs this week. But jobs were not lost. I'm trying to figure out exactly what's going on. Yeah, so I'm going to be reporting on this this week. It may be up by the time people listen to this.

[00:18:57] But this week, the city and county sort of began to announce their plans for, as you said, unwinding a lot of what the KCRHA does. They're taking back a bunch of contracts, actually all the contracts except for a few emergency shelter, you know, winter weather kind of shelters. Those are going to stay at the county, but they're taking back hundreds of contracts with 40 different contractors, and the city and county are going to administer those.

[00:19:26] And so what that's going to mean at the city is they're going to have to hire 23 new people. They're calling them emergency hires. I don't know exactly what that means, but it does mean money. And at the county, they're hiring 10 new people. And at the same time, I learned today that King County Regional Homelessness Authority has not laid off anybody. So they've got 73 employees. The city and county are going to hire these new people.

[00:19:47] So there's going to be some overlap, and I think there's going to be some extra cost to the city and the county, which, you know, are both facing, as I mentioned, you know, really big budget deficits. And so this is not going to be a cheap or easy thing to sort of start the process of possibly shutting down or transitioning KCRHA. And I was a little bit surprised to hear that they hadn't started doing layoffs yet since that was announced several weeks ago that they were going to need to do that. Yeah. I'm – color me shocked.

[00:20:17] Shocked that, you know, somehow the agency fucks up and this ad, you know, becomes an excuse to build more bureaucracy, you know, in different places. Well, how else is – how do you propose an administration contract from the city and county if not, like, hiring people to do it?

[00:20:36] I mean presumably we are seeing this low unwinding of KCRHA, you know, and one would hope that even if it's not happened yet, that if these new positions are being created to handle these functions at the city and the county, that KCRHA will shed those positions relatively soon. Or maybe those same people could move over to, you know, take over the jobs under the umbrella of the county or the city. We'll see. But yeah. Yeah. I just don't know.

[00:21:08] Given KCRHA's track record, I just don't have a whole lot of confidence that we're going to see, like, kind of rational moves happen on that front.

[00:21:44] Well, yeah. We want new people with new perspectives and new experiences and blah, blah, blah, blah. So they ended up not hiring a lot of people from the city who are already doing these jobs perfectly well at the city. I'm talking about, like, administering grants and contracts, like boring work that is, you know, that is still a very hard job to be good at. And I think that is kind of what one of the things that started them down this path that, you know, has led to this audit that found that they, you know, still don't have track of $8 million.

[00:22:16] So, you know, I think the city, if they hire folks who are, like, you know, at KCRHA and are actually competent, you know, that would be more than the KCRHA did for them the first time. Well, yeah. The second part of your sentence there is scaring a lot away and are actually competent. Like, like, it's not 100% clear to me that everybody at KCRHA is entirely competent. But if they are, then yes, hopefully they can find a good landing space and they've got experience and they know what they're doing.

[00:22:42] I mean, sure, you know, let's make use of that. I mean, I just, I guess I'm just getting at the point that, like, KCRHA had such contempt for institutional knowledge. And, of course, like, institutional, the lack of institutional knowledge is, like, affecting everything right now. I mean, whether you're talking about, you know, editorial boards or whether you're talking about the federal government. And so I think, and I agree with you, like, I don't think everybody there is doing a job that they're qualified for right now. So I don't mean to say they should all just transfer over.

[00:23:11] It's just kind of funny, I mean, to think back on, you know, how ridiculous it was and wonder why everybody bought this idea that, you know, people who have been doing the job and know how to do them are, should not be considered to continue doing the job. We need new people. Well, yes, one really big example of that at the outset of KCRHA, and I remember hearing quite a lot of carp, well, more than carping, but, like, kind of quizzical, like, sort of complaints from existing providers saying this is not going to end well,

[00:23:41] is that KCRHA set up their own entire new outreach program where they hired their own people. They paid them 20% more than the going rate, you know, than they were going to do all this Partnership for Zero stuff about addressing homelessness and encampments downtown. And they ended up, like, poaching a bunch of people from existing organizations,

[00:24:02] but they had to stand up an entirely new outreach structure when they were already quite extensively experienced organizations in town that were doing that work, but they didn't want to work with them, you know, and wanted to have it all. I forgot about that element of it, that they hired people away from those groups. Yeah. We're like, we'll pay you more. Yeah. There was a lot of, like, sense of, and then they didn't really know what they were doing about how to structure the outreach. You know, it was like, why, why, why, why?

[00:24:33] Why are we doing it this way? The eternal question. Right. So. When we write the obituary for KCRHA, which I think we're going to eventually have to do, there'll just be so many stories like that to tell. Hmm. So depressing. All right. Well, that, that perhaps is a good place to end. That's it for another edition of Seattle Nice. He's Sandeep Kaushik. She's Eric C. Barnett. I'm David Hyde.

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