The catastrophic results on election night at the federal level mask a different, more durable, and deeply consequential result here in Seattle: Voters chose a public safety candidate from the left.
For close observers, the result was no surprise: Alexis Mercedes Rinck, running on a strong message of smart, sensible, and progressive public safety and stability, won her primary handily, led in the polls in the lead up to the general election, and easily defeated an incumbent councilmember citywide with more votes than any city council candidate has ever won in a Seattle election.
The critical takeaway is how she won. Rinck conceded to the obvious but difficult-to-navigate reality that Seattle voters view public safety as the single most important issue in local elections and, importantly, that those views actually reflect a material reality that bears serious public attention and public work. The campaign made no effort to downplay voter concerns about public drug use, visible homelessness or a sense of disorder on our streets. Instead, she met them where they were with policy and empathy.
Unlike her opponent, Rinck’s policy proposals to tackle voters’ biggest concerns are evidence-based. She supports deep investments in affordable housing—and is willing to raise revenue to pay for it. She’ll work to expand mental health treatment opportunities for those who need it. She’ll fully fund critical municipal services that connect people to resources before they fall into crisis. And she’ll work to build more housing everywhere.
Rinck told the Seattle Times she wanted to hire police officers—paired with accountability measures. She supported enforcement of public drug use laws—paired with expanding diversion programs. She supported a ban on sweeps during extreme weather—but argued for expanding the successful state-level Right of Way encampment resolution. It wasn’t abolition—and it wasn’t enforcement-only, either.
Woo’s campaign, meanwhile, felt rudderless and contradictory to itself. She was at once painting herself as an outsider seeking change, but also as an incumbent who got progressive results. But in facing a charismatic, competent opponent who conceded that Woo’s main issue was central but ran on doing something about it that might actually work, Woo’s campaign collapsed.
At the beginning of the year, a campaign based on public safety seemed like fertile ground for Woo and her colleagues on the city council who won their elections hammering the same themes against a left that failed to counter pandemic-era attacks about defunding the police.
Rinck’s progressive campaign neutralized those attacks by aligning, intentionally or not, with a fundamental liberal principle: that when public spaces become private domains—whether through encampments or public trade of drugs—they deny public amenities to the many while inadequately serving the few who are unhoused or in crisis. The solution most people want, as Tuesday’s results suggest, lies not in costly incarceration or aimless sweeps but in moving people from crisis to care.
The public’s fixation on safety and stability in this election should not surprise us. Fears about safety flourish in populist moments, in cities divided between haves and have-nots, and in places grappling with widening inequality. As zoning laws continue to strangle our ability to build, crisis care programs are starved for funding, and democratic institutions strain under populist pressure, voters gravitate to a basic need for physical and psychological security.
Rinck’s campaign offers us a model and a playbook for organizing with hope and meeting people where they are — even if that is initially a place of fear and contradiction. Her campaign, and those we hope will follow it in winning back the City Council for progressives, offers abundance in the face of scarcity and hope in the face of despair.
We’re facing bleak times as a country. Perhaps it’s precisely because things are so bad right now that we can't give in to despair, whose pernicious power is its ability to narrow our attention to narratives that only encourage more despair. Its impact results in our inaction.
As implausible as it seems, this moment demands hope, and specifically, hope as action. We must remind ourselves and each other of our own agency, and our ability to imagine a better future, a better system. Despair calls on us to retreat. Hope asks: what if we win? Then demands we go out and make it happen. On Tuesday, Rinck did just that.
Kamau Chege is a democracy reform advocate.
Rian Watt is an economic justice advocate.
This story has been edited to include additional context.
