We Lost. But we figured out how to beat the Stranger.

Good afternoon friends and neighbors,

My apologies for the delay, as I’ve been enjoying life as a regular citizen with my family and friends. And sorry for the longer hiatus before that, as I was consumed with campaigning.

First and foremost I want to offer my congratulations and concession to Gerry Pollet, who earned a majority of the votes in this primary election (congratulations, Gerry!). When I launched this campaign, I anticipated it would be a contest between two progressives who both want what’s best for our neighbors in NE Seattle. While I’m obviously disappointed with the results, I’m not disappointed to see that the other progressive is carrying a majority.

Second, I offer my concession to The Stranger and particularly its investors, who have successfully found a way to buy outsized and undeserved influence in our electoral process without ever having to disclose their identities. Truly, this is an impressive feat – even the generous folks who came together to form a PAC trying to counteract The Stranger’s malignant influence in our race had to report their contributions to our state’s campaign finance regulators.

Whether by direct interference in the endorsement process or strategically turning over the newsroom to less experienced, less rigorous, and less progressive staff, the new management group at a once-reputable outlet has executed a coup of influence purchasing the likes of which even Amazon’s bottomless pockets could not achieve.

Every losing candidate reflects on their campaign, decisions they might have made differently, and reasons why the majority of voters made a different choice. As I did so, I came back to the same inexorable conclusion I reached in early July: that The Stranger's endorsements really are that powerful, and that it's nearly impossible for a progressive to overcome its influence even with a strong campaign and a lot of grassroots support/

My decision-making over these last few weeks has been driven by this reality, and in this last moment of my campaign, I would like to share the insight I’ve gained in this process and what it means for the broader movement seeking opportunities for making progressive change.

When I received the news that The Stranger had endorsed the centrist Dem in my race, I recognized that I had gone from frontrunner to likely having lost. It’s not widely discussed outside very political circles, but there is only one known example in the last couple decades out of hundreds of candidates in as many elections where a progressive candidate made it through the primary without The Stranger’s endorsement. And even then, she had a real resources advantage (and many with that advantage have also failed). With all that out of state money in Dreher’s hands, this was not the case in my race.

So if history was any guide, we knew we had lost.

When campaigns reach this point, they usually just put on a brave face, try extra hard and avoid burning too many bridges through election day. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

But I looked at the situation differently. I had a significant sum of money raised, and a month to work with an extremely dedicated base of volunteers. I focused on what I could do with those resources that would have the most progressive impact.

I would still try to win, of course. But my objectives would need to reach beyond the likely outcome of this race so we didn’t waste those resources.

After consulting with many people I respect, including several current and past progressive politicians and Stranger darlings who were shocked by the paper’s egregious endorsement of Dreher. Never in living memory have they endorsed anyone like this, a guy who at times used anti-housing rhetoric, also promised big budget cuts, also never showed up for anything in this community, is paid for by out of state interests, and campaigned to put anti-abortion and pro–presidential immunity Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh in his seat.

So I set two additional objectives. Here they are, and why I pursued them:

1. 1. Reduce the likelihood that Will Dreher would win a general election against Gerry Pollet

   
   This goal was within my (and my similarly horrified supporters’) grasp.

   
   While I ran against Rep. Pollet because I felt our district needed a change, I did not mean that we should change to become centrist, or worse–cravenly opportunist, dishonest, and unethical. Never did I imagine that Rep. Pollet and I would face someone in Will Dreher who would show himself to be all three.

   So, I swallowed my pride and put a lot of resources into the “negative” side of campaigning.

   
   I knew our hollowed-out media ecosystem would not get the key messages into the hands of enough voters in time. The Stranger had let a very well-resourced snake into our garden, and as someone who was about to pay to communicate with thousands of voters who don’t tune into local political news, I knew that I was the best positioned to draw attention to that, even if as a candidate I was a flawed ambassador.

   
   Which is why I decided I had to lean in to emphasizing Dreher’s deep and well-documented history of prioritizing his own career advancement ahead of his professed “progressive” values.

   
   Dreher hid his history of working for one of the few individuals directly responsible for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, along with dozens of other horrendous decisions, then refused to grapple with his role in promoting his former boss to the Supreme Court. Even now, he has scrubbed his campaign website of any mention of his history of supporting Brett Kavanaugh, hoping that the thousands of general election voters who did not return their primary election ballots will not learn of this careerist decision before November.

   (For a candidate supposedly well-positioned to lead the fight against Big Tech and regulate AI in Olympia, Dreher appears woefully unfamiliar with the Wayback Machine.)

   Nor is this the only evidence of his mercenary and centrist leanings that Dreher has sought to scrub from the internet. I imagine more of those will emerge in the general election.

2. Educate my community on how the recent purchase of The Stranger by still-anonymous wealthy investors had corrupted a once-reliable ally in the progressive movement.
   

   Most of us know that corporate ownership and manipulation of the media is disgusting, a key source of  the rot that threatens American freedom, democracy, and civil rights.
   

   The Stranger was the perfect target for local wealthy politicos with vested interests in the outcomes of state and city elections seeking influence that their ideas and their own identities would never earn them. Its ironclad grip on the left side of Seattle primaries means that any political outsider cannot succeed without The Stranger’s backing. At least, for now.
   

   To be clear, only a small group of people—whose ability to pay rent and put food on their tables is certain—know exactly what went down in this primary season’s endorsement decisions. Whether you believe the staff union’s vehement denial of interference by the new management or think that they doth protest too much, the reality is the same: the newsroom staff has largely been turned over in the two years since the sale of the paper, management has now fired two senior editors immediately following the release of their endorsement packages, and the candidates chosen in back-to-back primaries have left many progressive leaders shocked and dismayed.

   While I don’t have firsthand knowledge of these conversations, here’s the scuttlebutt I’ve heard that I believe needs to be put in print: Seattle progressives openly discuss that this capture of a gatekeeping institution was The Stranger’s new Publisher Brady Walkinshaw’s pitch to his investors. The phrase he is said to have used is, “We’ll never have to deal with another NTK again.” (Whatever one thinks of NTK, this is an ethically disgusting way to behave as a publisher who claims to support editorial freedom).
   

   The only individual investor I’ve seen confirmed publicly as an investor in the Stranger is notably married to the Chief Legal Officer of Amazon. Not hard to see why they would have appreciated that argument when they signed their check.

   And now The Stranger has picked a mix of pro-establishment, at times even centrist, candidates in almost all of the competitive Seattle legislative races. They tried it outside Seattle a bit as well–fortunately, their grip in other places is much weaker. And even when they did “endorse” progressives, they appeared to do their level best to undercut them.
   

   So I decided one of the most impactful things I could do was start beating out a path to reduce The Stranger’s grip on Seattle elections.
   

   As we honed our pitch to voters, it became apparent that The Stranger’s strength is not deep trust. It took only about 30 seconds of basic facts during an in-person conversation to inoculate a voter against their cheatsheet.
   

   The problem was decades of habit. Without that conversation, voters were likely to follow deeply ingrained behaviors.
   

   We saw that this was very unlikely to succeed enough to change the overall result in the couple of weeks we had after honing our pitch. We certainly couldn’t talk to the right 14,000 voters that fast, face to face. We knocked 14,000 doors, mind you! But not in the last two weeks, and most voters don’t answer! Since other forms of communication (mail, video, text) take repetition over time, we were boxed in. And it would obviously have been best for an anti-Stranger campaign to have been separate from any candidate–I was fully aware of how I was a flawed ambassador.
   

   But we decided we had a good chance to at least build a prototype for future activists–to show the beginnings of how to move voters away from this paid-for, establishment source.
   

   While we were working on this, a separate group of activists stood up the “Lefty Cheat Sheet.” I have been asked whether I was “behind” this. Not at all. In fact, I was initially very frustrated about the Lefty Cheat Sheet. I thought that the short timeline meant only one message about The Stranger could get through to voters. Building up an alternative brand is harder, takes longer, and muddles the messaging. I figured all we needed was for voters to take a second look and if they were progressive, they would overwhelmingly pick the progressives that The Stranger had vetoed. So I not only wasn’t behind it - I was opposed to it.

   
   However, I was very wrong about these activists’ campaign. Their efforts spoke to the hunger for the simplicity of an alternate cheat sheet. It created trust by acting as an aggregator, and paying attention to grassroots groups that have been changemakers.
   

   So in the last weeks of the campaign, we started pointing people to that cheat sheet. It turns out that the combination of letting people know that The Stranger had been Bari Weiss’d and there is an easy cheat sheet that has been aggregated from many trusted sources is powerful.

   I’d say the opposition’s behavior suggested they agreed. The message was so powerful that Will Dreher’s staff started ripping out thousands of dollars worth of the signs and posters with this message. (We have much clearer footage that we have shared with the PDC that is not in this article). Dreher may be deeply unethical, but he’s not stupid. Our campaign started to show the way.  

Campaigning with these objectives as additional measures of success.

None of this was fun. I didn’t want to run a negative campaign, focused away from the issues that matter most to me. I ran to move the conversation forward–on housing, transit, childcare, and taxing the rich like we mean it. I knew that assailing The Stranger would look petty and aggrieved, and pointing out Dreher’s serious moral weakness would harm my reputation.

But here is what the sophomoric establishment commentary hasn’t been able to wrap its head around. I wasn’t in this for me.

I was in this to make progressive change, and I was willing to hurt myself to do it.

Because the cause matters more.

At the Washington Observer, a journalist wrote “In short, an ambitious Seattle progressive candidate is now running against, at least in part, the biggest name in Seattle progressive media. To quote the quotable Omar Little of The Wire, “‘If you come for the king, you better not miss.’”

This analysis is way off base because journalists used to covering establishment politicians in power assume everyone trying to replace those establishment figures thinks like an establishment politician. And I do not.

The premise behind this “better not miss” quip is that I should be afraid of The Stranger because they can make or break my political career and, like most politicians, they assume that’s my paramount concern.

I did go for the king. But I knew that with only a few weeks, I was unlikely to win the race and thus “miss” the king by conventional standards. Toppling the king was never a very realistic outcome, and so while I hoped we might get lucky, I wasn’t judging success only by whether we won. Instead I wanted to show others that the king is vulnerable. A better dated pop culture metaphor then, is–”strike me down and I [we] shall become more powerful than you can imagine.”

I’ll discuss in my rondezvous newsletter why the data is convincing many smart politicos in Seattle that we did uncover the vulnerability. We have a prototype for victory and a clear plan for what improving it looks like.

And on Dreher - I think the data suggests a nonincumbent challenger in this race was likely to get to more than 50% of the vote and, even though it likely harmed my own numbers too - the negative (but true) campaigning switched the vote totals exactly as we had hoped, with Rep. Pollet at 52% or so today. Given the impossible headwinds we faced, I’m proud of the work my dedicated volunteers put in and believe we did what was right to protect the interests of the people of the 46th district.

Going forward – Don’t feel bad for me!

After losing my last race by a few votes, I went on to start rondezvous, which is approaching a million reads and has shaped significant pieces of the political discussion in Seattle.

I chose to be a sharp critic of Sara Nelson and Bruce Harrell’s extremely flawed governance when no one was systematically doing it. I believe that impacted the narrative around both. I convinced friends to start the independent expenditure campaign that supported Katie Wilson’s mayoral bid and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for that effort. I had unique opportunities to help out House our Neighbors in its quest for funding social housing, a cause that is now raising $135M a year for a groundbreaking policy! I put together statewide coalitions that passed housing bills - one of which is bigger than anything I could have done in city office.

I didn’t cut any ribbons and my life was perfectly wonderful during that time. In fact I loved it.

It was very hard to decide to run again because of the personal cost of public life (and the nasty commute it would have brought). So do not feel bad for me, and do not feel too bad for the cause - we will move it forward one way or another, despite this temporary setback.  

Closing

I’m not going to give you a “the real campaign is the friends we made along the way” speech - although I very much did make some wonderful friends, and I was stunned at our volunteers’ dedication! 14,000 doors, more than almost any campaign for state house in the state!

Instead I’ll say the following. Yes it’s sad this election didn’t work out how we wanted it to, and that several others won’t either. Yes it’s even sadder that the Democratic establishment managed to make Washington something like the only state in the union that isn’t embracing bold, new progressive leaders right now and it’s also sad that a once-proud publication played such a key role in that. It’s more than sad–it’s disgusting.  

But even if every single progressive challenger had won this year, there would still be years of work ahead of my fellow travelers in the progressive cause. And we still pulled real victories out of this defeat. We teased out the clues on how to eventually displace The Stranger so the oligarchs can’t buy races that way in the future. We worked to reduce the chance that the 46th District becomes represented by a chameleon climber who has never invested in the political betterment of this community in any way, shape, or form.

In short, I chose against the conventional way of saving face and preserving my own future political prospects, which would have brought certain loss, though probably a higher vote share, and no impact on the other objectives. My way was instead a swing for the fences strategy: maximize gains for the movement even if it came at personal cost.

And that, my friends, we did. I feel good about that. Really good, actually.

I hope you do too. At the very least, I hope it makes my actions more understandable if you are at all confused about what I was up to.

More to come. =)

All my best,

Ron Davis