The primary was an acid trip for the history books. We gotta make it real. Vote, vote, vote, vote, vote.
Just because progressives did well in the primary, doesn’t mean this is a shoe-in. Money has been pouring in for Harrell since his pitiful primary performance. He’s accumulated over $1.5 million from business CEOs and real-estate developers. And that’s just counting his PAC’s money. He’s rocking another million in campaign contributions. They believe this election can be bought. If you don’t show up, it will be. A lot of your neighbors don’t know what the hell is going on.
We have the chance for once in our city’s recent history to have a progressive mayor and not-totally conservative city council simultaneously. We can stop the rubber stamping of absolute bullshit and introduce adults to the halls of power. There’s a chance you can forget Sara Nelson’s name. Maybe you can even crack open a soapy can of Fremont Lush IPA and not have to tell your priest about it. Bruce Harrell can actually become the outsider he’s so sure that he is after 20 years in Seattle politics. We are so weary of this man and his sworn oath to destroy everything that doesn’t make his eyes light up with dollar signs.
Harrell and the council have already done a number on the Seattle of the future by pulling a gun on the Comprehensive Plan because it was in their parking spot. But all hope is not lost. There’s still time to make a Seattle that is walkable and affordable, with a public transit system that functions. If we keep the people in power who only drive cars and live in suburban castles, then we will not have this future. You didn’t listen to us last time when it was also true in 2021. And in 2023. You better listen to us this time.
And you did in the primary! The progressive slate of candidates jiu jitsu'd the more conservative weirdos into submission. Dionne Foster left Nelson in the dust. Katie Wilson embarrassed Harrell so badly we almost hope he has a humiliation kink in addition to his boot fetish. In District 2, Eddie Lin outskated Adonis Ducksworth by a mile. City Attorney and Republican Ann Davison better pack her bags for Palouse come November if the returns for challenger Erika Evans hold. Of course, Alexis Mercedes Rinck outshone Rachael Savage—we’re surprised she didn’t read that in her tarot cards.
We’re also picking a County Executive, school board members, State Representatives, and a bunch of super important ballot measures to fund things like early-learning and paramedics. We’re living in hell. Life is expensive, the history book horrors are at our doorstep, the kids have rotted brains, but Seattle can still be a haven. Sometimes bubbles are good. Vote for this city. Vote for your future. Vote for the kids. Vote against your uncle’s next heart attack. Vote like you’ll need to join a naked bike ride for freedom. Vote.
City of Seattle
Mayor
Katie Wilson
In this mayor’s race, we are relitigating the same conversation we’re always relitigating in Seattle: Do we want a mayor like Katie Wilson, who is interested in making our city better for people, or one like Bruce Harrell, who is interested in making it better for businesses? There’s another question, too. Do you want your mayor to be a dick? That would be Harrell.
Wilson built her career working with and for people. She left the world of prestige that comes with an Oxford degree to do the thankless, penniless work of organizing, literally building Seattle at her construction gigs, yacht cleaning, and busking at Pike Place Market. Those lived experiences shape a campaign centered around the affordability of housing, childcare, and transit.
Bruce Harrell was arrested for pulling a gun on a pregnant woman and her family. He has used the victims of gun violence as political props while ignoring their mothers’ pleas for help. As PubliCola reported, when mothers asked him to show up for their community, he picked a fight with one of them, slammed his hand on the table, and told her, “I didn’t even want to come here,” before trying to storm out of the room. From our endorsement meeting, we can tell you that spending 59 floor-stomping minutes in a room with him could be sold as a great escape room. We wanted to jump out of the window.
Misogyny is pervasive throughout the Harrell administration and the Harell campaign. Half a dozen women who worked in his office have called it a “boys club” where women were condescended to. His main criticism of Wilson, a woman who’s been in the grassroots Seattle political sphere for decades, is inexperience. Harrell cannot bring himself to say “his opponent’s” name, let alone acknowledge that she can and will do a much better job than him.
When we endorsed Wilson in July, she was the long-shot candidate without a name. Harrell had been on city council for 16 years, and had been mayor for almost a full term. She still kicked his ass. People are over his bullshit and they like the pretty, pragmatic, and human-centric picture of Seattle Wilson has been politely, and sometimes awkwardly, painting for them.
Her vision of Seattle has free childcare in the summer. It has 4,000 units of emergency housing for unsheltered homeless people. It has more civilianized first responders so armed police officers aren’t responding to people in crisis when they don’t need to.
Wilson’s not just pissing good intentions into the wind. She backs her ideas up with funding models that don’t throw the weight of the city’s budget on the backs of average, working Seattleites. She says she’ll champion a capital gains tax. She’ll convert empty workforce housing into emergency shelter and redirect the 2023 housing levy to address the cost of operating them. And, on the subject of piss, she wants to actually fund public bathrooms.
Harrell and brainless, business-casual editorial boards in this city claim Wilson hasn’t done anything substantial before. If you are part of the ORCA Low Income Fare program and pay a dollar per ride on public transit, thank Wilson. She helped pass higher minimum wage laws in Tukwila and Burien. She helped design and pass Seattle’s JumpStart tax. She was part of the group that first proposed the change to the B&O tax that became the Shield Tax. You can find Wilson’s fingerprints on most of the things that have made Seattle more affordable in the last decade. And that was all from the outside—building coalitions and herding volunteers who only have so much time to spare.
Harrell’s track record is grandstanding and failure. He says he stands by his record of building 3,000 units of housing in his term, but in reality, we have only 13 more units than when he started. He spent millions on hotel rooms to shelter homeless people, and then just… stopped using them. When anyone calls him out for how little he’s actually done, he blames the other cities in King County for our lack of progress. He won’t acknowledge his record-breaking history of sweeping homeless people around the city. And his idea of revitalizing downtown is to build a 10-foot AI-powered wall that lets you ask MLK Jr. what he had for breakfast (this is a real proposition that came out of his mouth).
Harrell is not a good, or even capable mayor. In debates he’s touted the fact that he’s a former linebacker—that with him in the way, the Trump administration couldn’t bully Seattle if they tried. But that doesn’t matter if Harrell’s bullying Seattle himself.
Bruce Harrell is desperately clinging to the power he has. He’s scared and should be. So are the businesses who benefit from his mayorship. They’ve spent piles of cash trying to keep him afloat. Harrell had his four years, and he has so little to show for it. Katie Wilson has a real chance to turn him into a one-term mayor.
We deserve a quarterback, or a coach, or whatever. Vote Wilson.
City Attorney
Erika Evans
We need Erika Evans to be our new City Attorney. We’re not just saying that because incumbent City Attorney Ann Davison is a Republican freak with bad ideas. Well, that does play into it for us, but we genuinely think Evans will be good for this city.
The city thinks so, too. Evans crushed Davison in the primary with over 58 percent of the vote in a crowded race of candidates who, like everyone else, hated the incumbent. Clearly, Seattle doesn’t want a Republican (who joined the party in 2020) at bat when the National Guard makes like the Seattle Police Department and starts flinging tear gas s(t)inkers at us.
The City Attorney has two jobs. The first is to prosecute all of the city’s misdemeanor cases—mostly low-level things like shoplifting, but also impactful things like domestic violence and DUIs. The second is to represent the city in civil cases like when one of Seattle’s finest runs over a student, the Chamber of Commerce wets itself over a new payroll tax, or rich lakesiders decide they’ve had enough of the buff at Denny Blaine for a lifetime.
It’s a big job. Davison is bad at it. Her regressive stances on crime have led to useless (at best) and genuinely harmful (at worst) results. In brief, her decision to dismantle community court was devastating. Her Close-in-Time filing policy to get rid of case backlogs didn’t work. Her “High Utilizer Initiative” targeting frequent offenders exacerbated recidivism. Criminalizing minor drug possession was overly punitive. Meanwhile, DUI cases are piling up, and domestic violence charges are lagging behind. People could be killed. And we haven’t seen hide nor hair of Davison on the campaign trail. But we haven’t checked the pockets of conservatives. They’re very deep.
Erika Evans, a former Assistant US Attorney, has prosecuted hate crimes, drug traffickers, wage-thieving business owners, and a few January 6 insurrectionists from Puyallup. Not wanting to wage lawfare on democracy, Evans quit her job a few weeks after Trump’s inauguration. Hell hath no fury like a district attorney scorned by a fascist ex-boss.
Evans says she’ll stand for this city when the federal government descends like a wannabe Wehrmacht and take care of shit on the homefront: speeding up those DUI and DV cases, bringing back community court, prosecuting wage theft, and pushing electeds to improve the police union contract to allow for more policing alternatives. Judging from the intensity and thoroughness she’s treated every aspect of this campaign with (she brought exhibits to our endorsement meeting), we trust Evans is capable.
Vote Evans.
City Council District No. 2
Eddie Lin
The city’s most diverse district deserves a driven, empathetic leader who’s focused on tackling the plagues of unaffordable and nonexistent housing, gentrification, pedestrian safety, and gun violence. That’s Eddie Lin. He may not be able to ollie or grind like his skater competitor Adonis Ducksworth, and we’re okay with that.
Skateboarding and antiquated names are cool. But you know what’s cooler? A résumé. At the City Attorney’s Office, Lin worked with the Seattle Office of Housing. He’ll steer affordable housing projects toward a path where they’ll actually exist. He’s also in support of pursuing multiple forms of progressive taxation. He recently proposed replacing a regressive sales tax with a capital gains tax to fund public safety. That’s initiative!
Lin and the SECB had a slight dustup. In our primary endorsement meeting, he said he voted for social housing, but did not clarify he voted for the shittier of two options, Prop 1B, which plundered the Jumpstart fund rather than establishing a real funding mechanism for the project. Lin worried that option 1A would barely pass, leaving it vulnerable to an old-fashioned dismemberment at City Hall. The voters proved Lin wrong, and he says he’s on board with them now. Before would’ve been better, man, but we believe your earnest Instagram reels. And we will make you look like a fool if you change your mind again.
Lin is on the path to win. His primary victory was a Ducks hunt Worth remembering. And what of Adonis Ducksworth? He says he’s the transportation guy because he coordinated a few big projects at the Seattle Department of Transportation and is Mayor Bruce Harrell’s senior transportation manager. Either Harrell isn’t listening, or they both have bad ideas.
Adonis also touts his work on the 23rd Avenue East redesign. We wouldn’t. That street still fucking sucks. We don’t want him in office, and judging from his unenthusiastic post-primary campaigning, he agrees. We do hope someone builds that skate park he wants in Rainier Beach, though. Lin will make sure no one runs over the kids.
Vote Eddie Lin.
City Council Position No. 8
Alexis Mercedes Rinck
Look, this race is a no-brainer. It’s between a strong progressive sitting city council member and a weird MAGA Republican who believes we should ship people with mental illness and drug dependency out of Seattle and bring in the National Guard. If that’s all you need, move on.
But Rachael Savage is just so … fascinating. She’s one of Seattle’s mythical “small business owners” who has a new-age shop on Capitol Hill, runs a meditation program that makes promises it surely can’t keep, and believes that her experience getting sober from a meth addiction makes her an expert. Sounds like identity politics to us! In our primary endorsement meeting, she told us words are never violent and hate speech doesn’t exist. She was the only candidate who spoke at the Charlie Kirk rally at Westlake Center.
Right now, Alexis Mercedes Rinck is the one staunchly progressive member on city council, and it could have made her an island. She’s often the lone “no” vote on bad policy. She speaks her mind, loudly, when the council harnesses their power to do baseless, harmful things like expand police surveillance when ICE is here and the National Guard could join them and try to roll back the council’s ethics code right before voting on renter protections.
But in the last year, she’s also proven that she’s not just a cardboard cutout of progressive values. She’s good at this job. She shows up where her constituents are. At the Mayday USA rally, she was instrumental in getting the city to shut down the event before police escalated even further. She finds common goals with her conservative colleagues and actually gets progressive shit done, like working with Harrell to help small businesses and fund essential programs with the Shield Tax. She’s been doing all of this as a progressive caucus of one, and we’re excited to see what she can do in January if (when) she’s not fighting against the monolith of this conservative body.
She already got more than 70 percent of the vote in the primary. Let’s make it 80 this time. Vote Rinck.
City Council Position No. 9
Dionne Foster
Dionne Foster rules. Sara Nelson drools. We hate to sound like schoolchildren, but it’s that simple. Our democracy, sense of decency, and collective sanity all depend on us wrestling power over city council out of Nelson’s perfectly tailored grasp.
Dionne Foster has been portrayed as the new kid on the block. She’s been on the block. Foster worked as a policy advisor at Seattle Public Utilities. Managed grants at the Seattle Foundation. While leading the Progress Alliance of Washington, she fought for a state capital gains tax—and won. She wants to pass another capital gains tax at the local level, something that a Nelson-controlled council would never, ever do. Comrade Cathy Moore tried in November 2024. It failed.
We could sing it from the rooftops: Sara Nelson is going to lose this election. This war is over. The general is negotiating the terms of surrender. No one mourns the wicked, and you know what, we’re going to take her ruby slippers and waltz down the open streets where there’s not a fucking eco block in sight. But, knock on wood. Or, whatever.
Not to count our chickens before they hatch and eat the political establishment alive, but Nelson suffered an embarrassing primary loss at what was supposed to be the height of her power in city council. Given that Nelson earned 35 percent of the vote to Foster’s 58.4 percent, the August primary was a referendum on how awful Nelson is and was. As the stars circled her head, she delivered an inspiring rallying call to her donors via Zoom: “I’ve been told I need to bump up my sort of anti-Trump rhetoric, or acknowledge that we’re under attack, or whatever.” In this real authoritarian political climate, she voted to expand a real-time police surveillance program ignoring serious, reasonable concerns that the council was handing the federal government a powerful tool for whenever the flaming Eye of Trump inevitably focuses on this provincial hamlet. In debates, Nelson has blamed the uselessness of her “stay out” zones on the mayor. She loves to blame shit on the mayor. But she’s City Council President. She’s responsible, too.
When criticized, Nelson has a go-to line: Who do you want representing you? A person with experience who knows how to fight and win tough battles, or some upstart? We’ll take the “upstart,” who has far more political experience than Nelson did when she failed forward into this position and took advantage of public opinion turning against the progressive city council of yore.
Prior to her victory in 2019, she was a city council aide and a serial IPA peddler, an actual crime in the opinion of at least half of the SECB. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be a genius to run a successful business.
We need someone who understands the machinations of local government, but isn’t a machine herself. Foster is smart, is empathetic, loves bad JLo movies, and can actually listen to the electorate. Based on those primary returns, the electorate agrees.
Vote Foster.
Seattle School District No. 1, Director District No. 2
Kathleen Smith
Microsoft data scientist Kathleen Smith will do a fine job on the school board. She is skeptical of school closures and putting cops in schools. She has promised to advocate for more school funding in Olympia and is against the flawed Student Outcomes Focused Governance model that reduces the board to an unresponsive, disorganized mess, even if the right people are sitting on it. Smith’s platform centers on what she knows: gathering data and progressive politics. She’s light on specifics compared to her opponent, but she does not have her opponent’s flaws.
Sarah Clark should by all means be the frontrunner in this race. She is the incumbent, and in the 18 months she’s been on the board, she stood strong against school closures and organized against cops in schools. But, even after a followup endorsement interview, we cannot forget our lackluster impression of Clark in our first meeting. In that room, Clark was entirely unaware of the state-level anti-LGBTQ Parents Bill of Rights. At the time, she blamed her lack of knowledge on a recent knee surgery. In our more recent meeting, she blamed the gaffe on having “trouble articulating myself due to trauma.” It is even more disappointing because Clark does support trans kids.
More alarmingly, Clark failed to respond to the Washington Education Association’s—the teacher’s union—endorsement questionnaire. Before the primary, she blamed it on campaign staff. But according to the teachers union, Clark never followed up with them about that missed endorsement. This lack of political will to work with the union is in and of itself a red flag for us. Even more, Clark earns a living as the policy director for the Seattle Chamber of Commerce. She insists there’s a firewall between her day job and her work on the school board. However, we cannot get over our distrust for someone who chooses to work with the most deeply regressive political body in our region. Vote Smith.
Seattle School District No. 1, Director District No. 4
Joe Mizrahi
The schools are in a bad way. We need someone to fix them as external forces whittle away at the existence of public education.
There’s only one option for Seattle School Board Director Position 4. Yes, it’s Joe Mizrahi. No, it’s not because of all that glorious hair. NO, it’s not just because he brought us cake costumed as apples—quit saying that. It’s because Mizrahi has a handle on this whole thing. As the secretary-treasurer and co-executive director of UFCW 3000, Mizrahi knows his way around a big, beefy budget. He’s an experienced organizer, regularly lobbying the legislature to stop fucking over workers and to support issues that make all of our lives better like the $15 minimum wage and paid family medical leave. We trust him to grovel in Olympia if he needs, or, even better, yell at those pencil pushers to quit sitting on their asses and fund education. Thanks in advance, Joe.
On the district level, Mizrahi is on the right side of the school closure debate—as in, we shouldn’t close the schools. He’s against cutting budgets and school programs to pinch pennies. Mizrahi is dedicated to boosting SPS enrollment, retaining those students, and keeping cops out. He hasn’t had a lot of time to accomplish these goals since filling a vacated seat last spring, so let’s give him the chance to. Then we can all say, “We did it, Joe.” Vote Mizrahi.
Seattle School District No. 1, Director District No. 5
Vivian Song
Vivian Song is an obvious choice to sit on the Seattle School Board, especially as it deals with a deficit from the darkest corner of an accountant’s unimaginative mind. Song has financial analyst chops and experience on the board. She’s done the job before and only resigned after some drama we’re tired of rehashing. We’ll do it one last time, though. While going through a separation, Song lived elsewhere and ran for the board in that district. She patched things up with her husband and moved back into a different district. She resigned over that mistake. But she never stopped working to better the schools.
In her absence from the board, the school closure clusterfuck took center stage. Instead of avoiding that heap of shit, Song, who is hearing impaired and has a hearing impaired child, fought to keep an alternative school with deaf and hard of hearing programs alive. Behind the scenes, she fought against the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association’s trans girls sports ban. Song’s not afraid to elbow her way into the room even when political rumors are swirling.
The word austerity makes her want to punch a wall. She’s well connected with other progressive leaders in the area and promises to work with them to help fund the schools. She’s a former ESL student and has plans for protecting immigrant families against the Trump administration.
We like Song’s opponent, Janis White, who is dedicated to improving special education district-wide. But we prefer Song’s track record. Vote Song.
Seattle School District No. 1, Director District No. 7
Jen LaVallee
This is an election between a senior UX designer at Amazon and a Gates Foundation alum. We don’t love either candidate, but we’ve got a binary choice here, and we’ve chosen Jen LaVallee.
LaVallee is an organizer who pushed back against the woebegone school closure plan. She helped orchestrate the “Billion Dollar Bake Sale” protest in Olympia to put the legislature on blast for their consistent failure to live up to their constitutional obligation to fully fund public education. The organizers wanted an additional $4 billion a year for education. Their point was this couldn’t be baked into existence, and districts couldn’t stuff this gaping budget wound with tax levies, or suture it with cut programs, forever. Real legislative solutions are needed.
In these financial conditions, a school district needs to be held accountable for managing its resources and connected to what the community actually wants. LaVallee is a conduit for parents, she cares about equity, and, like her opponent Carol Rava, is for stricter budget auditing.
Rava beats LaVallee on experience. She’s been in the education policy game for 25 years. She’s not a zealot for the Gates Foundation. When we asked for the foundation’s single worst education policy, she gave us an honest bushel. There’s an argument her arcane knowledge could set this district straight.
Experience is one thing, outlook is another. Rava was too soft on School Resource Officers (SRO) and dodged our question about whether the teachers’ union was a “reliable partner” or “encumbrance to education.” Meanwhile, when we asked LaVallee if she would choose enrollment or serving the students in the district, she recognized that the district doesn’t have to choose. We trust LaVallee to think through these questions without limiting the district’s options for sheer lack of imagination. Vote LaVallee.
Seattle Proposition No. 1: Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise Levy
Vote Yes
Make like a village and support Seattle Prop 1, or the Family, Education, Preschool, and Promise Levy (FEPP), a modest education tax levy to fund daycare, preschool and student health, and academic and safety support from kindergarten through senior year. Without proper care and feeding, some kids will rip through the social safety net and tumble into the abyss. Most of the SECB is childfree, but we prefer your kids cared for. Unless Paul Allen buried treasure before he died—and you have the Ouija board to find it—the billionaires are not going to rescue us.
Voters approved the same six-year levy in 2018. It’s as much a no-brainer now as it was then, but bigger this time. The median Seattleite has paid about $250 in property taxes a year for this levy. If we approve this one, they’ll pay around $650 a year, a significant increase to fill a more than $1.2 billion pot of money over the next six years.
Seattle would more than double the number of slots for subsidized childcare. It’d add 600 daycare slots. Seattle would put $275 million toward programs in school, after school, and over the summer. Another $66 million would fund Seattle Promise, a program that allows SPS graduates to attend city colleges tuition-free. The good stuff.
The program is imperfect. Success has been uneven: while the gap in kindergarten preparedness shrank, some specific demographic groups are less prepared now than they were in 2019. But there’s a little thing that happened in 2020. It’s impossible to disentangle the levy’s potential shortcomings from the insane disruption of a global pandemic, which upended daily life for children, their families, their teachers, and their voter-approved education levies.
The alternative is not funding the good stuff. That’s unacceptable. The school board won’t find the cash to make up for it under the couch cushions in the teachers lounge. The teachers have scoured them already.
Critics of the FEPP levy worry about the proposed measure’s increased funds for safety. Those well-intentioned worriers fret that the levy will use $46 million allocated for prevention and safety supports—about 3.5 percent of the total budget—to fund cops in schools. School Board Director Joe Mizrahi says this isn’t the case. The current FEPP levy already spends about $30 million on safety, but that doesn’t go toward police. Instead, it funds policing alternatives. The district already voted against putting a School Resource Officer (or, a cop) at Garfield High School. Without a board vote, cops can’t be in the schools. Mizrahi remains confident the next FEPP levy will not pad SPD wallets and instead will continue to support policing alternatives.
Help the kids swim, don’t make them sink. Vote yes.
Seattle Proposition No. 2: Changes to the Business and Occupation Tax
Vote Yes
If you know anything about us at the SECB, you know we are always banging the regressive tax system drum. We are always yanking the “Pull in Case of Funding Emergency” lever to no avail. But now, in a turn of events not even our most astrologically-plugged-in member saw coming, Mayor Bruce Harrell and City Council Member Alexis Mercedes Rinck teamed up to propose the Seattle Shield Tax. This proposition would change the B&O tax rules so small businesses pay less, big businesses pay more, and the Seattle general fund earns an extra $80 to $90 million to put toward necessary programs and fill gaps in our budget as the federal government unceremoniously rips grant after grant out from under us. In an even bigger plot twist, our council of progress haters approved the tax to allow the voters to decide.
The Seattle Shield Tax raises the filing threshold from $100,000 to $2 million in gross receipts and adds a $2 million standard deduction, effectively erasing the tax for about three-quarters of small businesses and lowering it for roughly 90 percent overall. That higher threshold is intended to protect small margin businesses like restaurants. Critics, of course, still fret about the tax burden. They worry about recessions and about businesses packing up and leaving. But those critics couldn’t rustle up any fervent opponents to speak against the tax. Instead, a tired, grumpy man named Eugene Wasserman is going to war. He is not a compelling debater, but is very good at crossing his arms and looking displeased.
One valid concern is the grocery stores, which have high gross sales but tight margins. We’ve seen that Kroger will shut down a store whenever it becomes inconvenient to operate. But the benefits outweigh the risk.
Raising the exemption threshold to $2 million and introducing a universal deduction means that the small businesses that actually texture the city—the cafés, bookstores, mechanics, and daycare centers—can finally breathe. If done right, the tax could create permanent relief for the people keeping neighborhood economies afloat, financed by a temporary surcharge on the corporations most able to withstand it. It’s hard to pay your fair share, isn’t it? Vote yes on Prop 2.
King County
King County Executive
Girmay Zahilay
The King County executive race has a beautiful problem. Two good politicians are running for the seat. Sadly, there can only be one mayor of the county. And darn it, it should be Girmay Zahilay.
For a decade and a half, King County elected and elected and elected Dow Constantine. What was it? His glorious silver locks? That no one knew what the King County executive was? Dow Constantine is not on the ballot. He’s dead. And by dead, we mean Sound Transit CEO, a role we think should be Claudia Balducci’s job, but unfortunately she wants Dow’s old job.
Zahilay and Balducci are both on the county council, Balducci since 2016 and Zahilay since 2020. They’ve aligned on almost every fucking thing. Their voting histories are so, so similar.
If they weren’t both running, we’d be game to endorse either one of them. But Zahilay, council chair and head of the budget and finance committee, is a hair better, though he has none. In his short political career, he’s been a leader and an advocate for targets of the Trump administration: Black and brown people, poor people, immigrants, transgender people, the list goes on. The county hasn’t been rounding them up like the Feds have, but it has systematically oppressed them and ignored the South King County communities where they’ve lived for generations.
It’s not like we’d expect Balducci to abandon those people, but there’s no way Girmay will. He came to this country—specifically, South King County—as a child refugee and has done good work as their representative.
He sponsored a $2 million community-based gun violence program and a $1.2 billion property tax levy to fund mental health treatment centers. And while a recent financial report on the $1 billion Regional Workforce Housing Initiative bill he sponsored was not so good, Zahilay is still optimistic he’ll find a funding source for his county-level mirror of Seattle’s social housing developer. And we need someone who’s hungry for housing to solve the region’s crisis.
Do we like his Jail4Kids? No, not very much at all. But Balducci directed King County’s Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention.
Balducci is and has been a maestro of behind-the-scenes politics, especially on transit. She deserves flowers for pushing Sound Transit to open the East Link despite delays and lobbying to open the Federal Way stations ahead of 2026. However, since falling behind Zahilay in the primary, Balducci’s more moderate vein has been popping. The suburbs are calling and she’s picking up the phone. In response to Kroger grocery stores closing due to “shoplifting” across the region, Balducci proposed using new sales tax funds to start a regional task force on retail theft. C’mon, that isn’t why those stores are closing. She knows this. We know she knows this. But it appeals to the moderates and she wants to win.
That sensible, pragmatic strategy also rears its head in her new Sound Transit platform, where she has proposed eliminating a second downtown tunnel to save mounting costs. The transit nerds are not happy about this. We aren’t thrilled either. Balducci has been taking the safe route after the primary, and it’s only affirmed our decision to go with Girmay. Vote Zahilay.
Metropolitan King County, Council District No. 3
Sarah Perry
Incumbent King County Council member Sarah Perry is running for reelection. Her district, which spans from Bothell to Duvall, Carnation to Snoqualmie, and everything in between, is historically red. But it’s been turning bluer. So blue that she flipped the district three years ago when she took the seat from Republican incumbent Kathy Lambert. The seat is technically nonpartisan, but nothing really is.
Still, Perry is a Democrat in a moderate district. Her top priorities include maintaining roads and bridges, creating more housing, keeping water clean, adding more transportation, and beefing up public safety. She’s hesitant to say whether she supports more taxes to fund these things, but she won’t say she’s against them either—like we said, she’s a Democrat. In her time on council, Perry added funding to the sheriff’s office to increase staffing, she supported funding for more criminal justice efforts, and she’s critical of the recent audit of the Department of Community and Human Services. It’s all very status quo, normie stuff. But Perry says she won’t bend to federal overreach on immigration and will do everything in her power to protect the immigrants in her district.
Her only challenger is Snoqualmie City Council member Rob Wotton, who is a Republican. He’s anti-tax and pro-business. He also strongly disagrees with Perry’s voting history where she sides with the majority “99% of the time,” he claims. Most of the King County Council members are on the left side of the political spectrum. We get it, you’re a dick. Vote Perry.
Metropolitan King County, Council District No. 5
Steffanie Fain
You dumbasses. You had one—one—legitimately good candidate running in this race to fill Dave Upthegrove’s vacant King County Council seat and you blew it. She came in third, and got left behind in the primary. Now, we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. A fake Democrat and a fake Democrat. To put how bad our choices are into perspective, evil mayor of Burien Kevin Schilling has endorsed both of these yahoos. It’s lose-lose here and we are furious that we have to make a pick instead of throwing our hands up in the air and saying, “I dunno! Not my problem! Staying out of it!” We miss you, Kim-Khánh Văn.
Sigh. In one uninspiring corner, we have Steffanie Fain, an attorney, a member of the Harborview Board of Trustees, and wife of alleged rapist and confirmed Republican Joe Fain, who left office after those sexual assault allegations. Steffanie Fain is an uninspiring moderate at best.
The conservative-backed Jobs PAC is throwing money behind her through an IE called Coalition for Pragmatic Leadership because what else would it be called? They’ve spent $15,000 so far to get her elected. Why would they want a Democrat elected? Unless, of course, they know something about Fain we don’t. It raises alarm bells for us. And so does her terrible husband. Look, we’re not saying that he’s going to assert his own political will if his wife is elected, but we do have those concerns. Then again, she didn’t do those terrible (alleged) things. Her husband did. It’s just that we don’t want him anywhere near a position of influence, not even on the board of KUOW, the station that reported the allegations about him.
So, it seems like we’d be absolutely fucked in the head to choose Fain. Except you haven’t heard about who’s lurking in the other corner. ENTER: SeaTac City Council member Peter “Definitely a Republican” Kwon (not his legal name).
He received the Slade Gorton Rising Star award in 2020, a commendation from the Republican Party for a commitment to furthering conservative principles and contributing to the party. The 47th Legislative District Republicans actively recruited people to support him at a forum. Despite this, Kwon has consistently described himself as “a true nonpartisan” and “truly nonpartisan” in his voters’ guide statements in 2019 and 2023, respectively.
This cycle, he sought out the King County GOP’s support by submitting the 2025 Primary questionnaire and was labeled “Best Choice” by the King County Republicans. Since the primary, they have taken his responses and his recommendation down, after he started rightfully getting called out. In the survey he said, if given the opportunity, he would actively prohibit trans kids from playing sports with kids of the same gender. Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates un-endorsed him for this.
He’s been on SeaTac City Council since 2016, but his fellow council members have never elected him to serve as mayor. The current mayor endorsed Fain. Like us, he wanted Van. To beleaguer the point about how bad Kwon is as a council member, during the pandemic, when we really needed some leadership, Kwon voted against things like: the eviction moratorium, funding more homeless shelters, using federal COVID-relief dollars to give kids internet access while they toiled away in virtual school. He has consistently voted against taxes and against humanity, propping up camping bans and homelessness sweeps.
We don’t think Fain will legislate well. We know Kwon won’t. His ass is all the way out. Hold your nose. Vote Fain.
Metropolitan King County, Council District No. 7
Maya Vengadasalam
Look, we’d eat our hats if Maya Vengadasalam actually won her King County Council race. She’s challenging the rarely challenged elder statesman Pete von Reichbauer, whose grasp on this district has lasted for more than 30 years. He has a road named after him. To challenge this man is to march on Moscow. That’s why Democrats have basically ceded this territory until he retires. So we admire the courage of a fool free-thinker willing to fling $25,000 in campaign funds at a giant in a $250,000 plated cuirass. As David found out, and Goliath found out more, anything can happen if your aim is true. Though Vengadasalam wouldn’t win even if she scooped up every single primary vote from the third-place candidate.
Vengadasalam is not exactly our ideal pick to replace von Reichbauer. Ready your groaning throats (groats?), she’s an “Independent Democrat” with a hard-on for fiscal responsibility. She served as a school board director in Kent and currently works as a leadership development consultant for the Washington State School Directors’ Association. Her five-prong four-prong platform of government transparency, economic growth, expanding affordable housing, and advancing education and safety (that’s two, Maya), is fine. Her austerity-driven solutions are misguided, but she’s honest about them. There’s no pretense with Vengadasalam. What you see is what you get. What you get is someone who sees going paperless as her chief accomplishment working on the finance side of the Tacoma Housing Authority before COVID. It came in clutch, tbh. Vengadasalam wouldn’t even say a bad word about Reichbauer, because she didn’t know the guy. We don’t have the same hangup. Where Vengadasalam thinks “camping” is a ridiculous term for people forced to sleep outside, von Reichbauer once called the homeless people sleeping outside the King County courthouse “animals.” She may think we can educate our way out of a housing-driven homelessness crisis, but we’re on the same page about humanity.
Vengadasalam probably won’t work out, so here’s a free idea for an enterprising candidate in 2029: Pull a von Reichbauer. In 1973, Reichbauer landed in the Washington State Senate as a Democrat, switched parties years later, in the middle of a legislative session, and handed the majority to the Republicans. What a bastard! This “new Valentine’s Day Massacre” led to a recall that von Reichbauer survived and lived happily ever after. So beat him at his own duplicitous game. He couldn't even be mad. The voters … they’d be … pretty mad. In the meantime, we encourage your protest vote. Vote Vengadasalam.
Metropolitan King County, Council District No. 9
Jude Anthony
Reagan Blackburn Dunn is one of the very few Republicans on the King County Council. He will not let go of his seat unless he achieves higher office—and that didn’t work out for him very well last time he tried, when he conceded to Dr. Kim Schrier in the Congressional District 8 primary. Much like Pete von Reichbauer, five-term Dunn is glued to his seat. His district must like how he votes no on sales taxes, traps safe consumption sites in limbo, scrutinizes mental health centers, spends $100,000 of county money putting homeless people on buses and sending them somewhere else, and his general ~cOmMoN sEnSe~. Please, please won’t someone run against him and put us out of our misery? Ideally, a sharp dresser.
Jude Anthony, a fedora-rocking software engineer, answered the call. Except, before Anthony filed, he didn’t even know who Dunn was. He just knew there was an upcoming race with room to challenge a Republican incumbent. We trust Anthony’s commitment. He’s worn a fedora since high school, style trends and assumptions be damned. “People are going to think I’m an incel,” he told us. “I have a wife.” (And multiple kids who are all “members of the Alphabet Mafia.”) “No, no,” we said, placating. “We love Indiana Jones’s fedora.” Is that a fedora? Anthony says that the fedora is back in fashion now thanks to the recently revived 2007 show Phineas and Ferb’s fedora-wearing platypus secret agent character. If he had his druthers, Anthony says he’d commission a Phineas and Ferb campaign ad. He sang us a snippet, doing an impression of one of the characters, the bad-at-being-evil Dr. Doofenshmirtz.
Anthony and his fedora (tan with a pink cloth attached to it because men “shouldn’t be afraid to wear pink,” as Anthony says) have solid platform positions: He wants food access for all, universal health care, and to create more affordable housing. He doesn’t have political experience, but he is done with Dunn—now that he knows who Dunn is. He wears many of his priorities on his sleeve—wait, no, his fedora. He has many buttons on there. Vote Anthony.
King County Proposition No. 1: Medic One – Emergency Medical Services Replacement of Existing Levy
Vote Yes
We here at The Stranger are pro-life. Wait, not like that. We love to be alive. To continue to be alive anywhere in King County, we’re voting to reapprove a six-year property tax levy to fund Medic One, the county-wide emergency medical service. Next time you call 911, remember to thank taxpaying landowners before blacking out in a pool of your own blood. They’ve funded this service for around 50 years. Call us crazy, but we think they ought to keep doing that.
Life is on the table, or the kitchen floor, or the toilet, or wherever the paramedics find you flopped over and in need of assistance. Plus, there’s no other realistic funding option.
We’re going to assume you understand why 911 is vital to the 2.3 million people who live in our county’s 2,130 square miles. But Medic One isn’t just necessary. We’d go as far to say that King County is a primo location for your next heart attack. You’re two to three times more likely to survive here than other areas of the country. There are a number of reasons why. We’ve got speedy response times (5.2 minutes on average). Dispatchers are trained to send the appropriate aid for the situation at hand. One of the leading reasons for the high survival rate is because 70 percent of cardiac arrests in the region receive bystander CPR before EMTs arrive. The Medic One levy helps fund CPR education programs. It’s why we know what the fuck we’re doing—not just because we watched a lot of Grey’s Anatomy, or ER, or The Pitt, or Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace.
They’re also not afraid to try new shit—like equity. Response times are consistent across the county, and race is not a prognostic indicator of surviving a cardiac arrest. The program gives out naloxone and buprenorphine to the community. It started a taxi voucher program because some people wouldn’t go to the hospital if they had to pay for the ambulance. Five years ago, they started bringing blood to hemorrhaging patients—instead of rushing them to the blood—improving survival rates.
Obviously, paramedics respond to more than heart attacks and bleeding-outs; 911 is a catchall for almost every need across social, behavioral, and medical lines.
This levy is like a painless shot. Homeowners are already paying it, and if we approve the levy, they’ll actually pay a little less than they pay today. If the levy doesn’t pass, the county would be left to scramble for an alternative funding source. We know funding everything through property taxes is sucky and regressive as hell, but that’s for the legislature to take up with our broken-ass Washington State Constitution.
With no other choices, we think it’s good and should continue existing because we want to live. And, heck, we even want you to live. Vote yes.
State of Washington
Legislative District No. 5, State Senator
Victoria Hunt
Victoria Hunt is an urban planner with a PhD in computational ecology. She is a scientist. She served on the Issaquah City Council before being appointed to the Senate in 2024 after Sen. Bill Ramos died of a heart attack on a trail run. He was 69. RIP, Bill.
In her short time in the Senate, Hunt passed a bill modernizing Washington’s Clean Energy Transformation Act. She sponsored a bill to ensure baby changing stations are in public buildings, successfully securing the coveted baby vote. She also fought for a public notification system for sewage spills—and won! Poopy water, you’re on notice. There’s more to it than poop, though. Hunt’s other priorities include affordable housing, gun safety, and even more stuff about the environment. Sounds like a scientist to us.
One of Hunt’s crowning achievements while in the Washington State Senate was when 2024’s bomb cyclone played Cat’s Cradle with powerlines. FEMA said, “Sowwy, no emergency money for Washington.” Hunt stepped up and won state disaster recovery money for cleanup, repairs, and financial aid.
Chad Magendanz (pronounced like Häagen-Dazs) is not what you’d call “a Chad.” You would call him a Republican. He was a state representative in the same district between 2013 and 2017. He even became the ranking Republican on the House Education Committee. He dreams of charters. His Icarus moment came in 2016, when he ran for this senate seat and lost to Sen. Mark Mullet. Magendanz is also a bit like Sisyphus, because he cannot fucking stop running for office and losing and running again. This man is honestly deranged. He paid his own company to generate biased polling data about his own races multiple times. To make matters worse, the company is called Voter Science, a concept he seems to hate.
The race does not appear to be going well for him, despite his own projections. “Frankly, I’m already taking a lot of flak from the conservative base for earning my 8th endorsement from the Seattle Times,” He told us in an email. “I won’t be pursuing an endorsement from The Stranger.”
We could endorse him to hurt his chances, but we know too many of you just read the cheat sheet. We have the analytics. That’s science. Vote Hunt.
Legislative District No. 33, State Representative Position No. 1
Edwin Obras
Edwin Obras might be new to politics, but in just a year, he’s already established himself as a labor champion. He sponsored (and passed) a bill that establishes protections for isolated workers like housekeepers and janitors from sexual harassment and assault. He slapped some much-needed worker protections on Uber and Lyft. He proposed a bill that would keep companies from passing the cost of credit card processing fees to their tipped workers. He has a knack for spotting vulnerabilities in our most invisible workers and doing something about them.
We love to see it, and we’d love to see it no matter who he was running against. But in this case, he’s running against Burien Mayor Kevin Schilling. Who sucks.
Schilling calls himself a Democrat, which was a dubious claim even before his biggest funder became the Cascade Party of Washington—the centrist party founded by Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic. For progressives, Schilling is the Grinch. No good policy for Burien this Christmas! This year, Schilling’s administration sued to try to overturn Burien’s raised minimum wage. As deputy mayor, he turned down $1 million in King County funds for a tiny home village when it conflicted with the interests of one of his major donors. He had a public fight with the King County Sheriff’s Office after he tried to force them to impose a camping ban in the city. It should come as no surprise that conservative commentator and Trump darling Brandi Kruse considers him one of her favorite Democratic mayors. She only loves people with hearts two sizes too small.
Obras won the primary with 47 percent of the vote, with Schilling limping behind with a measly 31 percent. But a Republican who didn’t make it to the primary hoarded another 20 percent of those primary votes. Schilling could scoop those up. Based on Schilling’s record, we suspect the little bubble beside his name will be screaming “DINO” to those voters. We need a labor champ like Obras in Olympia. We don’t need the Grinch. Vote Obras.
Legislative District No. 41, State Representative Position No. 1
Janice Zahn
Janice Zahn, a Democrat, the assistant majority whip in the House of Representatives, and a member of committees on housing, energy, budget, and local government, is up against John Whitney, a Republican with a real estate background running on the motto “Common-Sense Leadership Rooted in Faith, Family, and Service.”
Zahn was raised by a single mother. Her family immigrated to the US from Hong Kong when she was 10 years old. Her uncle, a podiatrist, sponsored their green card. She and her husband moved to Bellevue 30 years ago, where they raised two adult daughters.
A few of our favorite facts: She was a certified aerobics instructor with the American Council on Exercise for six years, and she spent over seven years on the Bellevue City Council and four years on the City of Bellevue Transportation Commission—the last as chair. For 11 years, she was a Girl Scouts troop leader, so she knows a thing or two about honor. And cookies. She also collects rocks. This made us smile.
Zahn seems like she had a busy first year in the House. She passed a slew of bills like one helping improve data collection to understand homelessness and one strengthening accountability for out-of-state health care providers. Other accomplishments Zahn boasts: supporting universal health care legislation, investing in public education, and reforming recycling. Above all, Zahn is proudest, perplexingly, of her work improving our cultural ties with Canada.
Whitney is all about Christ, lower taxes, “community safety,” supporting law enforcement, “parental rights,” restoring “efficiency to government,” and Christ. His campaign is mostly self-funded, with a little help from money lender Intrust Funding and the Washington GOP that supports the National Guard rolling into Seattle. Christ did not donate. Vote Zahn. She… rocks.
Legisl
