Why It Took So Long to Call Seattle’s Mayoral Race

By now it’s clear that Katie Wilson will be the next mayor of Seattle.

As of Wednesday evening, when the Seattle Times called the race, Wilson had garnered 138,489 votes, a 1,976 vote lead over her opponent, Bruce Harrell, the first-term incumbent. Anything less than a 2,000-vote lead triggers an automatic recount, but with votes still coming in it’s a relatively comfortable lead for Wilson, a progressive activist whose chances of victory looked slim when she launched her campaign last spring. It’s especially comfortable compared to the results that came in on election night, when Harrell had a lead of 53 percent to Wilson’s 46 percent.

Early results in Seattle elections are often illusory. Elections in Washington, along with a handful of other states, are run entirely by mail. Voters receive their ballots in the mail about three weeks before Election Day and have to return them before the deadline. The closest a voter can get to voting in person is dropping their signed ballot in a drop box. Election officials begin posting results on Election Day, but that only includes the ballots that have been received and counted by that day. Ballots only have to be postmarked by Election Day, so they continue to trickle in for days after the voting stops.

New results are posted each day, and in the last several elections, there’s been a distinct leftward shift in the voting results with each passing day. The final tally shifted nine points in favor of the more progressive candidate in the 2013 race, 10 points in 2017 and 12 points in 2021. That was the year Harrell, a moderate Democrat, won by a landslide. But his lead against the progressive opponent, Lorena González, shrunk from 65 percent on election night to 59 percent in the final tally, as her share rose a comparable amount.

The reason for the leftward shift is that different factions of the Seattle electorate tend to vote at different times, says Sandeep Kaushik, a local political consultant who’s worked with companies and Democratic candidates for public office. Everyone gets their ballots at the same time. But older, wealthier homeowners tend to return them first. Younger, more progressive renters tend to drop them later. Both factions are liberal Democrats, but the younger voters are farther left and more likely to support socialist-aligned candidates like Wilson.

“We are increasingly becoming a city of the haves and the have-lesses,” Kaushik says. “We have a significant class of younger renters, often highly educated but not making that much money, struggling to make ends meet and seeing the enormous prosperity of Seattle around them and feeling like they’re not able to take part.”

In this year’s race, the vote tally only moved about seven points to the left after Election Day — a much smaller shift than in recent elections, but enough to put Wilson over the finish line. Wilson is a well-known activist in Seattle and the head of the Transit Riders Union, an advocacy group that has campaigned for a range of progressive causes related to transportation, housing and the cost of living. Harrell had lined up support from business and labor groups. But his popularity in the city had slipped after he sided with big businesses like Microsoft and Amazon against a social housing ballot measure that eventually won with 63 percent of the vote. The re-election of Donald Trump as president also re-energized parts of the progressive left in big cities. Wilson criticized Harrell’s approach to a range of local issues, like his administration’s aggressive clearing of homeless encampments. But her campaign also rode a wave of concern about affordability that swept Democrats into office all over the country.

Wilson has welcomed comparisons to Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who won New York City’s mayoral race. She supports raising taxes on big businesses, and was the “intellectual architect” of Seattle’s Jumpstart Tax, a tax on corporations with large payrolls, according to Kaushik. But she has also said she’s “not going to be stupid” about how she approaches progressive taxation as mayor.

Seattle hasn’t re-elected a mayor in 20 years, and the city’s politics keep swinging back and forth between the progressive and moderate Democratic visions. Kaushik says the way Wilson approaches the role — more hard-line ideological or more practical and conciliatory — could determine how quickly the pendulum swings again.

“It’s going to be really interesting to see what happens with Katie as mayor. I don’t think any of us know,” Kaushik says. “She is an outsider to city hall, has never held elective office, and she is a true believer — a progressive activist. That said, she’s interesting because she’s very, very smart, and she’s self-reflective. She is a student of what works and what doesn’t in municipal politics.”