Why I started/did the fundraising for the PAC for Katie Wilson

I’ll admit, I never thought I’d invoke Gandhi when talking about something as crass as an independent expenditure campaign (we’ll call it a *PAC, as that’s what it’s usually called). Gandhi said we should be the change we wish to see in the world, and I sure as heck don’t want to see more money flowing into campaigns.

And yet I wanted to see Bruce Harrell out and see Katie Wilson win, and my own election experience led me to want to see a PAC working on behalf of Wilson. So I got friends together to start it, and we raised the funds—and the majority of those funds came from individuals.

The race was so darn close that we feel like our donors made a critical difference.

Many people have asked me how this came to be. Here’s the story. I tell it because it’s a story of how “we the people” really can unite to improve the world we live in; I’m just one of the people who stepped up to make it happen.

It was last December when I suspected Harrell was vulnerable, so much so that I started reaching out to institutional players to make the case that it was time to find a good candidate. I was certain by February. Like Katie, I decided after the social housing vote that the data told a clear story—he was beatable. And like most of you, I was frustrated when big institutional players ignored the obvious evidence.

This is why, last March, I moved from critiquing various Mayoral failures as they came up, to systematically prosecuting the case that Harrell needed to go. I hoped this would inspire a progressive candidate. I argued in The Urbanist that he was a protector of abusers as well as a failure on public safety, housing affordability, and homelessness. This summer I made my closing statement in The Stranger, pulling the threads together and concluding Harrell was a failure, unfit for office.

Right around the time that my Stranger article came out and left-leaning institutions were mostly still standing on the sidelines, I was doing some volunteer work, raising some money for P3 (the progressive PAC that usually supports local progressive candidates but could not support Katie) to make sure Dionne Foster defeated Sara Nelson. After a conversation with my friend Scott—who shared my frustration over a lack of institutional support for Katie, and who said he’d be thrilled to donate to a Katie PAC—I realized that the existence of a PAC supporting Katie Wilson was exactly the change I could bring into the world that would make a difference. 

I was inspired in part by my own experience as a candidate. In my race, our team of volunteers out-fundraised, out-door-knocked, and outworked my corporate-backed opponent. It mattered - my election was the only progressive campaign in 2021/2023 that improved the progressive vote share compared to the elections of 2017/2021, outperforming my peers by an average of 13 points on that front. 

But it wasn’t enough. 2023 was a historically conservative year, and it was also a year that institutional progressives mostly sat out. (Except for one union that did spend $17k in my race - thank you Unite Here!). Big Republican and corporate and downtown real estate money spent $337k in PAC money to elect my conservative opponent, almost 20x as much at the PAC supporting me! As you can imagine, my wish for a change in the world had considerable personal energy behind it

When big money sees that someone like Katie Wilson is a threat to the status quo, it acts—and spends big to stop them. And this summer, it didn’t look like progressive organizations were prepared to mobilize their resources to make stop the billionaire money from buying the election.

So when my friend Scott made his comment to me this summer, I realized if I didn’t start a PAC, it might not happen. I started making some calls—to friends who staff P3, to potential individual donors, and to some institutional funders who I thought might be encouraged to break for Katie if they knew they had friends to pool resources with.

By the end of July we had figured out there was real appetite, and so I called Katie Wilson and told her I was no longer able to speak with her for the next few months (a legal barrier that was apparently meaningless to Harrell). My friends and I set to work, with our consultant Stephen filing the paperwork on our behalf the morning of the primary.

We spent $450k to Harrell’s Republican and billionaire-funded PAC’s $1.82M. This took the independent expenditure gap from almost 20 to 1 in my race to 4.5 to 1 in the Mayoral race. And given that I was a volunteer and the Mayoral PAC had to pay its fundraiser for many months, and that it opted for some expensive, lower return prestige-marketing, the actual voter contact ratio was likely a good bit narrower.

And then Wilson eked out a win, remarkably similar to the size of my loss in 2023.

Interestingly, I often heard reporters call our campaign the “Labor PAC.” 

While we were THRILLED and are extremely grateful for our Labor partners—who played a critical role in both early and large donations—it is still important to note that a significant majority of the funds (about 62%) came from individuals and a few small institutions. Make no mistake: this was a people-funded PAC! Even something as institutional and “back-room” as a PAC ends up people-powered when it works in service of an effort like electing Katie Wilson.

In terms of the “how,” it was a lot of sweat! I raised about ⅔ of the funds and our work was largely lots and lots of calls and texts to donors—large and small, long-timers and first-timers as well as holding six fundraisers around the city with our friends. We also had some donations that came from organic traffic to our website. I worked hand in hand with our consultant on our direct appeals to our Labor partners as well. It was an all-hands effort, and while the many hands didn’t make the work light, it did make the work possible! And none of it would have been possible without a candidate like Katie that our donors found inspiring and compelling.

We were able to focus that energy and those resources and push out tens of thousands of texts, hundreds of thousands of mailers, and millions of commercials that reached Seattle voters. We were scrappy with our money and we got really far because of it.

And when I thought we had come up against our limits, I went out on my own (separate from the PAC), wrote a script, and got some friends to turn it into a pretty damning video about Harrell’s problem with abusers. (Thanks to Joe Mallahan for promoting it to his more moderate base!). I put it up on TikTok:

@rondezvousseattle

Bruce Harrell stands up for predators, ignores the abused. #bruceharrellformayor

In the end, it was a close race. One of the things about close races is that everything counts. Every one of the thousands of us who chipped in can feel good that we played an important part. I do, and I hope you do too!

Going forward, this whole experience has given me a great deal of hope and (re)taught me several important lessons. 

• It shows me that in addition to shoe-leather volunteers, there is a real groundswell of financial support for genuinely progressive candidates out there, and that this remains under-tapped. 

• It shows me that even when big money decides it can buy a race for their favored corporate candidate, we can still beat them. 

• It shows me that even when our normal progressive allies hold back for their own reasons, we don’t have to wait for permission to get to work and win. 

• And it reminds me that focused, committed action by a few people can make a big difference. 

I hope it inspires you to action too!

PS. If you are wondering about the fate of the PAC, I am retiring it. Going forward, (in addition to my day job, of course!)--I will be working on folding some of the institutional capacity we developed at our Katie PAC into P3, which is the entity that will continue. This will help P3 move closer to its longer term goal of a larger, more diversified funding base in support of progressive candidates. I’ll be working with the folks associated with the Wilson campaign who so successfully built such a strong people-powered effort–to make sure that our learnings and the relationships we developed at the PAC can help aid their efforts to create a year-round organizing machine. 

*“PAC” or “Political Action Committee” is a specific kind of legal designation. Our “PAC” was actually an “Independent Expenditure Campaign” or “IE,” a slightly different thing. But people tend to use the word “PAC” and so I stuck with that here.