The classic advice in sales is that the moment the buyer says “yes,” you shut up and let them sign on the dotted line. Anything you say after “yes” can only screw things up.
That’s sales, of course. Politics is different.
Progressives won big on Tuesday night—I know, because I saw the conga line at Stoup after the results came in. As of Thursday’s ballot drop, Katie Wilson is leading incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell by about four points. Erika Evans is leading incumbent City Attorney Ann Davison by 17—the same margin Dionne Foster enjoys over Council President Sara Nelson. Alexis Mercedes Rinck got 77 percent of the vote—63 points ahead of her nearest rival.
The temptation is to count the votes, pop the bubbly, and move on to bigger and better things: Hari Kondabolu is coming to town this September; that Ai Weiwei exhibit is still on at SAM; it’s sunny for a few more weeks. Why should the “why” matter when Seattle progressives are experiencing their first genuinely good vibes since last November? Shut up and take the W.
The “why” matters a lot. There’s a big difference between progressives winning because voters want progressive ideas, and progressives winning because voters think the incumbents are terrible and are itching to toss them to the curb. Don’t get me wrong—the progressives who jumped to big leads in a low turnout election on Tuesday ran excellent, disciplined campaigns. But the breadth of the sweep they are a part of suggests to me that there’s a broader trend here worth paying attention to.
Four years ago, Bruce Harrell and Sara Nelson swept into office because voters felt the city was going in the wrong direction. and they wanted a change. Four years later, after those two leaders failed to deliver on their core pitch to voters—less homelessness and better public safety—voters want a change again—for someone they hope will actually deliver.
That makes it really important that progressives do deliver. And that will be very difficult. The basic problem is not that progressive ideas are bad, it’s that progressives generally want to do things, and we’ve got a system that makes doing things incredibly hard. As my friend Gordon Padelford from Seattle Greenways is fond of pointing out, it’s taken Seattle longer to build a single Rapid Ride line in Eastlake than it took the Kennedy administration to put a man on the moon.
The broken Seattle Process™️ prevents elected officials from delivering for constituents, and helps fuel cynicism in local government.
— Gordon Padelford (@gordonofseattle.bsky.social) August 6, 2025 at 9:39 AM
If Harrell’s challenger Katie Wilson wants to open 4,000 units of shelter in four years, she’s going to need to move faster than that. If City Council candidate Dionne Foster wants to scale up the CARE team to lower tackle public safety, she’s going to need to move faster than that. If City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck wants to finish building our city’s decade-old bike master plan, she’s going to need to move faster than that.
All these things will take time, and there’s a lot of process in the way—tedious rounds of review, endless community input, paperwork and checklists and RFPs to scope RFPs. Four years later, will voters care about the details of why things haven’t gotten built faster? Or will they throw the new bums out in search of someone, anyone else.
To prevent that from happening, Progressives must focus on sweeping away structural barriers to delivering on progressive priorities in 2026. Alexis Mercedes Rinck has proven that delivering wins is possible even from the minority. Should these progressive candidates win, come January, it’ll be on them to tackle not just the symptoms of our broken system but structural, paralyzing features of our system of governance—the thousand veto points in our system, each innocuous on their face, that means that we need 20 years to deliver light rail and 13 years to deliver a bus lane (we could start by building up the city’s capacity to do more of its own construction and delivery work in-house.)
Call that whatever you want—abundance, sewer socialism focused on efficient municipal services, the Get Shit Done Party—but it’s key to our collective ability to keep living out our progressive values—not just from 2026-30, but for decades to come.
Rian Watt is a local housing advocate.
What’s the difference between a liberal and a progressive?
lOcAL hOuSiNg aDVoCaTe
The biggest problem the progressive candidates are going to have if they win is coming up with the revenue to deliver on their promises. The city is already facing a massive budget deficit, and if voters approve the “shield“ tax (very likely) that will make it very difficult to raise additional revenue by taxing “big“ business. The solution of course, is to grow the pie. By the pie, I mean overall revenues which means encouraging businesses to expand and grow in Seattle by adding more jobs. Since progressives like to treat businesses as an adversary to conquer via taxation, I really don’t see how or why any of the cities larger employers would expand their footprint under a progressive administration.
A progressive will give housing to a drug addict and think they’re saving the world.
A conservative will give treatment to a drug addict and know they’re saving their life.
A progressive will give housing to a drug addict and think they’re saving the world.
A conservative will FORCE treatment to a drug addict and know they’re saving their life.
I’m fine with that to and I am a progressive.
It’s such a one-word oxymoron.
Great opinion piece!
The third avenue bus lane is a perfect example of the need for structural reform that is required to get projects on track in a reasonable time frame. SPU dug up 3rd to replace the water lines last week, tearing up the entire Street in what would be the perfect opportunity to re-envision 3rd with a center lane, plantings, and improvements that have been planned for years. Unfortunately, Bob kettle and car dependent s** think they are entitled to parking they’re jalopies in the public thoroughfare so put the kibosh on this. Another example is unifying the trolley lines, the car-dependent entitled wackos argues our city needs to compete with the private parking providers so trolley tracks on 1st avenue got the kibosh. This despite the obvious need and that the unified system will have more ridership than the entire Sound Transit line to West Seattle.
There’s still a lot of boot the bums out that needs to be done before Seattle can deliver on many of the projects that would make our city much more livable. This primary is only a start. The structural reform is the heavy lifting that must be done in parallel with supporting projects that make Seattle more livable.
Regarding structural improvements, let me add that this new system of gifting money to the seven districts as independent fiefdoms has got to go. What a stupid idea, sectioning Seattle up into these different areas with the council member acting as an independent mayor of their district to distribute these funds. If an area wants a specific improvement then they can put together a business improvement district and fund the damn thing themselves.
A conservative would say they will put all drug addicts in treatment then vote to defund healthcare.
A progressive would say they want universal healthcare and get called a communist who wants to give away taxpayer money to deadbeats who don’t deserve it.
Then being a moderate is a good compromise.
“those two leaders failed to deliver on their core pitch to voters—less homelessness and better public safety”
In Ballard, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Before Harrell and Nelson, there were two basically permanent homeless camps, in the Ballard Commons park and the Leary Triangle. Plenty of violence and crime came from those camps. From August 2021:
https://komonews.com/news/project-seattle/growing-homeless-encampment-at-ballard-commons-park-turning-violent
From that article: “In just August alone, there’s been a shooting that left a woman hospitalized, an unhoused resident living his van at the park was attacked and an outreach worker was nearly stabbed.”
But since Harrell and Nelson took over, the park has been cleared and kept clear, you don’t see the boarded up windows on recently robbed local businesses, and you don’t have the violence and drugs in the park. Instead, there’s a new nautical themed playground, they have summer movies and yoga classes, the spray fountain is open again, and things are basically back to normal.
We’ll see what happens in the fall, but in Ballard things got much better with Harrell and Nelson running the show.
The compromise would be for conservatives to put their money where their mouth is and vote for the progressive policies they claim to support. But conservatives would need to come to terms with their own self-congratulatory bullshit first and we all know that will never happen. Why change when you can get everything you want then blame progressives and “blue cities” for the obvious shortcomings of your terrible policies.
Self-congratulatory bullshit is not exclusive to conservatives or progressives.
Ok but right now we’re talking about conservatives’ self-congratulatory bullshit where they claim to support progressive policies, safe in the knowledge that they will never be implemented, while acting like the real reason we don’t give free healthcare to homeless people is because progressives prefer to see people dying in the streets.
14: But when you say “progressives prefer to see people dying in the streets” is yet another self-congratulatory BS because you’re declaring that only progressives have the moral high ground. You’re safe in your opinions, but you’re not safe in the facts.
I am declaring no such thing, i am just accurately describing a dynamic presently on display in this thread. I am making no claims about any other topic besides free health care for homeless drug addicts, nor broad generalizations about progressives and conservatives, only that conservatives are ideologically opposed to the social safety net and only pretend to support it in zero-stakes situations like internet comment threads.
15: No, you really did declare it in the last clause in @14. And you can’t wiggle out of by saying it’s describing a dynamic. Pretty clever attempt, I must say.
Next, you contradict yourself without out even realizing it. You claim you’re not making broad generalizations but then say conservatives are “ideologically opposed to the social safety net and only pretend to support it in zero-stakes situations like internet comment threads”.
Nevertheless, these debates are practically impossible without some degree of generalizing and extrapolating which I heartily confess to.
That’s not a broad generalization, it’s a very specific critique that is based on 40+ years of public policy, from reagan’s welfare queen to the fight over the aca to trump gutting medicaid. The entire conservative brand is that the government services make people weak and unproductive, especially “free health care.”
You can whine and nurse your wounded feelings all you like but you only feel that way because you know it’s true.
The difference that matters isn’t between liberals and progressives. It’s between fighters and fakers. And while not all self-described progressives are fighters, nearly all self-described liberals are fakers.