Seattle City Wire

In a Nov. 14, 2019, piece for City Journal, Christopher F. Rufo looked at the potential for victory for moderate city council candidates.

The Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce commissioned a poll that showed citizens were unhappy with the then-current council, and said that voters in every district believed the city was on the wrong track.

The election pitted moderate candidates with the backing of business against progressive and more socialist candidates who had promised to revive the “Amazon tax,” impose rent control and make it legal for the homeless to camp in the city. These progressive, socialist candidates also promised to abolish the Seattle Police Department, Rufo writes.

But, the business community, backing the moderates, sided with moderate Democrats, neighborhood groups and also public safety unions, created a frame for the 2019 Seattle City Council elections that Rufo called it a choice between the “dangerous divisive status quo,” and a “return to responsible government,” he writes.

Rufo reports that as ballots went out, Amazon contributed $1 million to the Chamber of Commerce’s political action committee, which "collapsed" the narrative, and the city election became national news. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warrant denounced Amazon and announced that Amazon was “trying to tilt the Seattle City Council elections in their favor," Rufo writes. 

Progressive and socialist-leaning candidates changed their narrative and framed the election as a choice between Amazon and the #Resistance, Rufo writes, and this transformed the message from a referendum on failed city council policies to an election focused on corporate power.  

Seattle voters chose the progressive-socialist candidates and elected most of the progressive candidates, including incumbent Kshama Sawant, who believes Boeing and Amazon should be nationalized; they also voted in Tammy Morales, who is associated with the Democratic Socialists of America, even though the business-moderate coalition outspent them 4-1, Rufo wrote.

And that group announced what Rufo calls "an ambitious agenda," with rent control, drug consumption sites, decriminalization of prostitution, legalization of homeless encampments, removing funding from police programs, and free public transit, as well as other items.