• Kshama Sawant. At press time, the Socialist Alternative candidate was losing to Seattle City Council incumbent Richard Conlin 46 to 54. Sawant may have fallen short of winning a cushy leather seat at the city council dais, but there's no question that she framed the public debate. For all the hype over her socialist label, Sawant's greatest strength was her focus on policy, putting forth a specific lefty agenda that helped her build momentum among union members and even some Democrats—two denominations that normally vote en bloc for whomever their overlords recommend. She protested with striking fast-food workers. She waved signs with picketing taxi drivers. She got arrested while protesting bank foreclosures in South Park. In focusing on platforms instead of platitudes, she also managed to inject her primary cause—a citywide $15 minimum wage—into the mayor's race. In the end, Conlin out-fundraised Sawant two-to-one. He also had 16 years of name recognition to go on. But 46 percent of the vote is an amazing number for a fucking socialist. If you think this is the last you've heard from Kshama Sawant, then you haven't been paying attention.

• Minimum-wage workers. SeaTac's $15 minimum wage initiative won with 54 percent of the vote, changing the political conversation in Washington and all but guaranteeing a higher-than-state minimum wage will soon come to Seattle.

• Districts. By nearly a two-thirds majority, according to election night results, voters passed a measure that requires the city council to be elected by seven districts and two at-large seats.

• Mike O'Brien, the nicest, most liberal politician in Seattle, beat his block-headed challenger Albert Shen 64 to 35. Frankly, we'd be happy if O'Brien was running the whole goddamn city.

• Big media corporations, whose local TV stations raked in around $30 million in I-522 advertising alone! We should run a GMO- labeling initiative every year, if only to keep TV news journalists employed.

• Sue Peters, who was beating corporate-funded Suzanne Dale Estey 51 to 48 at press time, even though a rich-as-fuck outside PAC that put all its corporate-reform eggs in Suzanne Dale Estey's basket ran a $100,000 dishonest smear campaign against Peters.

 

• Tim Eyman. With most counties reporting, the Make-It-Easier-for-Tim-Eyman-to-Run-Initiatives Initiative 517 was soundly rejected by a 60 to 40 point margin.

• Mainstream campaign polling, because McGinn would've lost by a cavernously huge margin if the last handful of nearly identical polls—some showed him losing by more than 20 points—were any reasonable measure of the electorate. Instead he lost against state senator Ed Murray by 13 points.

• Seattle poors, who lost out on public campaign financing (it failed 46 to 54 percent), which would've helped dispel the influence of big money in local elections. Maybe if all of us poors learned to work harder—thereby earning more money—we could buy political influence like real Americans!

• The Stranger Election Control Board, which lost virtually every race we gave a shit about. That's it—we're all going into investment banking so that we can actually have some say in these money-soaked elections.