Four-term Seattle City Council member Richard Conlin is still clinging to a 1,237 vote lead over Socialist Kshama Sawant, but the post-mortem is already in progress. So on what does Conlin blame his electoral woes?

Conlin, who was considered a staunch liberal when he first joined the council in 1998 and had never won less than 60 percent of the general election vote since, has a less ambitious theory.

He argued that asking voters for a fifth term is always a stretch.

“I think I started off with that kind of handicap,” he said, adding that “relentless negative campaigning” by Sawant’s cheering squad at The Stranger also hurt him.

Hey, thanks for the call out, Richard. It's always good to feel relevant. But while I'm no stranger to mud-flinging (in fact, David Irons, Doug Sutherland, Rob McKenna and others can attest that I'm pretty damn good at it), what I'm proudest of in our coverage of this race was how relentlessly positive we were. Sure, we collectively took a few swipes at Conlin. But that was never our focus. No, if we were relentless about anything it was in making the case for Sawant.

While others dismissed Sawant as little more than an electoral novelty, we saw in her a smart, thoughtful, and passionate voice for economic justice, with some surprisingly impressive political instincts. And while few insiders considered Conlin to be genuinely vulnerable, we watched with growing respect as Sawant and her organization both tapped into voter discontent and transformed it into electoral support.

If we were a bit obsessed with this race it was because of all the candidates running this cycle, we saw Sawant as offering the most political upside. Just coming close would be a big win for the economic agenda Sawant was pushing: A living wage, affordable housing, and progressive taxation. But winning—well, that would not only improve the council by providing a little ideological balance (you know, somebody to boldly and cogently refute supply-side economics), it would send political shockwaves nationwide.

Knocking down Conlin would've been easy; you don't even need the truth on your side to run an effective negative campaign. But the real challenge was building up Sawant. That's why our primary focus during this campaign was attempting to share with readers the Sawant that won us over, and in doing so help mainstream Seattle voters get beyond their reflexive response to Sawant's "Socialist Alternative" label. Personally, of the thousands of words I wrote on this race over the past six months, almost all of them were relentlessly positive words about Sawant and what she would bring to the table. And if Conlin misreads that as “relentless negative campaigning," then it only confirms my suspicion that sometime during his 16 years of incumbency, Conlin lost the ability to distinguish the difference between himself and his office.