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.
Good write-up – I’m hopeful Rinck can deliver on her campaign promises (she seemed a capable technocrat – I suspect voters just want to see results)
Another possible takeaway is that taking an unpopular candidate who could never win the office on her own strengths and simply anointing her as the candidate through an opaque process of intraparty backroom wheeling-and-dealing does not result in a candidate who can win a general election.
Concerns about public safety aren’t flourishing in Seattle because it’s a “populist moment.” They are flourishing because downtown has become a lawless shithole experiment in anarchy, the city had record homicides last year, it’s basically legal now to steal, and we have one of the lowest-staffed per capita police forces in the country. Even in 2019, the progressives running for office (Herbold, Lewis for example) ran on increasing policing. But they were lying and jumped on the glorious revolution bandwagon as soon as possible… and then got deservedly replaced. When people find out that AMR is lying about concern for public safety, they will replace her too.
If you want to use city government as a corrupt redistribution tool as Seattle progressives do, you need to bite the bullet and keep the streets safe and clean. Voters will then let you have your feeding trough for taxpayer dollars.
This is some revisionist analysis. Progressive Seattle had been anti-sweep, anti-police, share-our-public-spaces-with-unhoused-neighbors and anything-goes-antisocial-public-behavior for a very long time until it became untenable thus a wave of reform candidates rode that in to office in 2022. Of course any successful candidate will go where the vibe is and campaign on that. It didn’t help that Woo had very little energy and also did very little (or failed to demonstrate what she did) while in office.
Goodness, I hope the progressive liberal orthodoxy fever has broken with this last election. We’re not doing ourselves any favors by spinning our failures as compassion or righteousness anymore.
“ downtown has become a lawless shithole experiment in anarchy”
Were you looking for the comment section of The Seattle Times, or perhaps the Facebook page of KIRO, dear? Because your histrionics would be right at home there.
LOLZ, as the kids say.
@5 Nah. I live there. It’s a lawless shithole experiment in anarchy. Even just this week, a triple shooting down the street on a corner that I walked past only 15 minutes prior. No property is safe. And I’ve encountered dead bodies multiple times this year. Witnessed multiple assaults (and have been assaulted) and police do not respond (kind of the definition of anarchy?) And the shit part is not only figurative either.
If you don’t live there, please don’t comment about things you have no knowledge. You beclown yourself. LOLZ at your ignorance.
Would be very curious what laws you believe are being enforced and by whom downtown to dispute the “experiment in anarchy” characterization. 🙂
and as for the “shithole” part, it’s literal. walk past any alley and breathe deeply if you don’t believe me.
@7, I work downtown. Yeah there are some shi**y blocks, but Enumclaw also has some unsavory elements outside the grocery store. Let’s get a little more sophisticated about changing our community than anonymously dropping expletives in the comment section.
@8 It’s literally anarchy now, and has been since 2020. No laws are really being enforced. Some private businesses are taking steps to protect themselves (which is what happens in anarchy). But the city has essentially abandoned the field at this point.
Don’t believe me? Next time you witness a crime downtown (easily be a dozen times a day), call 911. You will not get a response. It’s the definition of anarchy. You are on your own.
Justme1, dear, you’d best stay home and hide under the bed. Maybe push the dresser in front of your bedroom door before you climb under the bed. Better safe than sorry.
And anyone who has just now discovered that people poop in the alleys downtown must be very very new to downtown, as that’s been going on as long as we’ve had alleys. No wonder poor Justme1 thinks it’s “anarchy” (that, or they were home-schooled, and that wasn’t on the vocabulary list)