We Started a PAC in Seattle to help Katie Wilson beat Harrell.

Friends,

Short version if you don’t have time

I got together with some friends and we started a PAC to help Katie Wilson beat Mayor Harrell in the Seattle mayoral campaign. 

After seeing that Seattle wants change, Amazon leaders and the Downtown Real Estate Industrial Complex have already raised $630k for their superPAC to try to stop the voters in their tracks and buy the election for Harrell. I expect they will raise much more in the coming days

They will spend their yacht-loads of money to try to paint Katie Wilson–a thoughtful, brilliant, and highly successful changemaker who has won every Democratic Party endorsement–as an inexperienced, Marxist kook. 

It’s time to fight back against their lies. We’ve beat them before, and we’ll beat them again. 

Amazon has made itself one of Trump’s biggest sugar daddies-and they think they should be able to own Seattle and write their own rules. 

We cannot let them. 

Please donate to the PAC now and get friends to join. Katie’s campaign looks like it will max out on the money it is allowed to raise directly, and so this is will be your best opportunity to financially contribute. 

If you can make a larger donation, feel free to reply to my article to get information on how to send a check or wire so you don’t have to pay credit card fees.

Fuller version

As many of you know, Seattle’s Mayor Harrell is the epitome of a do-nothing Democrat, who barely prioritizes any of the Democratic Party platform in his local policy. He has failed when it comes to our big three issues: housing costs, homelessness, and public safety/substance abuse. 

He has an ugly history of standing up for abusers, sweeping his own son under the rug,  creating a hostile working place for women, and even pulling a gun on a pregnant woman over a parking dispute and lying to cops about it. 

In other words, he’s not good at his job and he’s not a good guy.

I summed up the case here.

Meanwhile, Katie Wilson is running to replace him, and doing a hell of a job at it, having drubbed the “untouchable-even-though-there-is-no-evidence-of-this” Harrell 50.7% to 41.2% in the primary. 

While Harrell was on the council for twelve years, some as Council President, and now has almost four years as Mayor, Wilson has been working on City Hall issues for much of that time as an outsider. 

Ironically, though Harrell has had the official job titles, Wilson has far more relevant experience–if you count actually delivering real government outcomes as the important part. I know that is what matters most to me!

Her advocacy got us our only tax that taxes the rich in Seattle, raising $1.5 billion so far in funds to pay for things like affordable housing, childcare, and green infrastructure. She has run successful minimum-wage campaigns around the region and brought tenants’ rights to hundreds of thousands of people. She also put together the coalition that brought ORCA Lift (very affordable transit fares for low income riders) and free youth transit in Seattle, which was later expanded statewide. 

Harrell has nothing like this to show for himself. Wilson has arguably accomplished more substantial public policy as an outsider than Harrell has with the levers of power in his hands.

I started thinking hard about this a couple months ago, as I was raising money for P3, the PAC that is supporting Dionne Foster against Sara Nelson. As I was asking people for money for that race, donors were happy to chip in, but also wanted a place to give to Katie. 

I remembered what it felt like to have the corporates come in to rescue my (much more politically inept than Harrell) opponent in my own race. And I thought, ”Katie has come alongside so many of us in this region to get big stuff done. We have to show up for her, too.”

Maybe there was more swearing in my head. 

So anyway, I helped start this PAC alongside my friends at Protec 17, the union that represents city workers. We partnered with the strategist working with Progressive People’s PAC (P3), which is supporting Dionne Foster against Sara Nelson. We were so excited that we filed the morning of the primary, without waiting for results. But we were sure delighted in the results that evening, and as more votes came in, things got even better than we had hoped. Now we are well on our way to $200,000. 

We are also partnering with Common Power, with unions that represent Seattle City workers, grocery workers, hospital staff, Democratic Party organizers, and many more. While we will not match the funding level of oligarchs, we don’t have to. We just have to show up and show up hard. 

• For anyone who believes in the core tenets of the Democratic Party platform, this should be a no-brainer. 

• For anyone who believes that the leadership skills of tall men are consistently overrated, this should be a no-brainer.

• For people who don’t think back-slapping politics covers a multitude of sins when it comes to the treatment of women, this should be a no-brainer. 

• In the era of Trump and widespread institutional capitulation—for anyone who wants someone with a spine who will fight instead of someone who craves the approval of the powerful, this should be a no-brainer. 

Please dig deep and support Katie Wilson. 

Picture of Katie Wilson taken from The Center Square