It's hard to keep abreast of your South Seattle district and to make it to Seattle city council meetings commuting from Bellevue*. God damn traffic on I-90!

*worst kept secret in Seattle politics, where Harrell actually lives in non-election years

The deep dive--not mentioned here, is that the Wyble/McGinn machine anointed Morales as a progressive in the last six weeks of the campaign. She isn't that much different than Harrell in many respects and has more appeal to white millennial hip voters who can't vote for a person of color over 40. She is profoundly ignorant of District 2, and spent time sucking up to NIMBYs who can't stand non white-collar professionals living next door. Morales is a former employee of Impact Capital, who has been pushing the Urbanist agenda and the BIAs across the city, and is aligned with (former) Sally Clark in the U District. Harrell indeed has his problems, but the new found love for Morales has more to do with the pound of flesh desired by Sawant supporters, who wanted to get even for his support of Pam Banks, and her sudden coming to Jesus moment on McGinn et al's hyperlocal neoliberal agenda; which, incidentally, the Stranger unquestioningly supports.

@2
Morales is a person of co, and if she's not over 40, she's close enough for her age not to make a difference to those who won't vote for someone "old."

As for Harrell, a close election means he treats his victory as a mandate to do fuck-all he wants while he lines up lucrative consultancy and lobbying opportunities for 2019 in case he doesn't win the next election.

@3
Person of color, of course, not person of co.

@2 "white millennial hip voters who can't vote for a person of color over 40."

This explains why Obama lost the last two elections.

I know Ed Murray gave him the nod, but please God, don't let this doofus become our next Mayor.

Damn, Heidi. Not enough to switch the endorsement but you have to spit on the almost grave as well.

@2 "hyperlocal neoliberal agenda" -- Huh?

Sorry kids, but Harrell won. He gets four years in office and Morales gets to go back to being a "food access consultant," whatever that might be.

#2 "Innocent Bystander" is spot-on. Tammy Morales only moved to D-2 a couple of years ago, and lives in a giant house just yards from the waterfront. She not only doesn't know squat about the district - or its history - but she only knew a few people who headed organizations constantly on the dole for government grants. The same kind of government grants that her for-profit "food activist" company obtained.

Harrell suffered the wrath of the Pramila Jayapal/Kshama Sawant industrial complex. Bruce endorsed Pramila's opponent last year and he endorsed Kshama's opponent this year. This isn't about policy (they all support the same things 95% of the time), it is about who gets to get the attention as the top POC.

Tammy Morales, on her own, was a horrible candidate. An essentially nice human being, she was nonetheless invisible on occasions during the primary because the third candidate, Josh Farris and his vociferous "Farrisites" (as coined by Erica Barnett), was so volubly vicious.

Let's not forget the role that McGinn played in all this: Tammy Morales, like Jon Grant, Brianna Thomas and other losing candidates, was recruited by Mike McGinn. They all had the same consultant, John Wyble. Wyble, BTW, has been the consultant on every campaign against Bruce Harrell. But it is McGinn whose fingerprints are all over this race. Let's not forget that Harrell and McGinn are not friends. And that McGinn slaughtered Ed Murray in the General Election mayors race. McGinn wanted to take Bruce out, and that McGinn's outstanding campaign manager became Tammy's outstanding campaign manager says everything about why this race became close at all. McGinn's campaign manager knew D-2, had won D-2, and used that experience effectively.

Working in conjunction with The Stranger and their other Socialist-leaning blog allies, Pramila/Kshama/McGinn had a race to win and a Black man to take out.

The race wasn't about Tammy.

@11 - Clarification: McGinn slaughtered Murray in D-2 in the Mayor's race. Not, obviously, citywide.

It's time for a newly elected non-white female President of the City Council, IMHO.

Harrell is by far the wealthiest member of the Seattle City Council member. It's an open secret that he and his wife, Joanne, own a residence in Bellevue and often stay there because it eases her commute to Microsoft, where she works as a Director in addition to her gig as a UW Regent. The Harrells' official $2,000,000 luxury grade residence in the 5000 block of Seward Park Ave S has a killer view of Lake Washington, and is on a very different socioeconomic planet from the where the homies Harrell claims to represent live down in the valley.

During his campaign Harrell claimed to have supported muni broadband, but he didn't show up two days ago to cast his vote either for or against the proposed muni broadband pilot project on Beacon Hill. That project would have connected Seattle's existing fiber under Beacon Hill to create a blazing fast, gigabyte speed, moderately priced Seattle broadband utility within a small geographic area that would have allowed Seattle to assess the feasibility and subscriber adoption rates of a potential new citywide broadband utility. The pilot project also would have provided its customers with good customer service, and directly benefited some of the people in D2, Seattle's lowest income district with the highest percentage of people who lack broadband service.

On the other hand, if Harrell HAD voted for that project it would have got him sideways with CenturyLink, for whom he sponsored a new TV and cable franchise ordinance that passed unanimously last June. Harrell used to worked as a corporate attorney for CenturyLink in its former incarnation as U.S. West (which became Qwest, which became CenturyLink), so he was happy to nail down another franchise for the guys in his old corporate hood.

http://seattle.legistar.com/LegislationD…|Text|&Search=118411

As shown here...

http://www2.seattle.gov/ethics/eldata/fi…

Harrell also received $1500 in campaign contributions from America's second most hated company, Comcast, and employees of Comcast, one of whom isn't named in the contributors list. Comcast broadband may be thoroughly hated by Seattle residents and businesses for its increasingly frequent outages, execrably bad customer service, mediocre speeds, and the fact that it plans to impose data caps on customers in three test cities before rolling out data caps nationwide, but in his usual tone deaf fashion, Harrell isn't shy about shilling for Comcast, because, as shown by his silly ass grin in this photo, he thinks it makes him look good.

http://wacomcast.com/2014/03/19/comcast-…

Unlike Tammy Morales, Jon Grant, Kshama Sawant, and Mike O'Brien, and Nick Licata, who as stuck back at City Hall that day, but phoned in to convey his solidarity, Harrell was nowhere to be seen at the slumlord Carl Haglund protest in Columbia City a few weeks ago, where tenants in his district complained about their rents being jacked up hundreds of dollars a month and having to live with rats, roaches, black mold, broken appliances and dangerous electrical code violations. A couple of years ago when the rental inspection program was being debated by Seattle Council Members, Harrell argued that inspections should occur only once every 10 years instead of every three years, the bare minimum interval needed for the ordinance to have any effect. In the end, Harrell got pissy about the whole thing, and disqualified himself from voting on Ordinance 124312, presumably because he is a landlord himself, or maybe because he just doesn't give a fuck about poor people being exploited by corporate slumlords. The way things are going with Seattle's residential and small business rental markets, folks who live in Haglund's buildings won't be able to afford to live in Seattle much longer, and even people with Section 8 vouchers can't find landlords who will accept them as tenants. Nonetheless, Seattle's affordable housing crisis isn't cause Harrell to lose any sleep.

I feel bad for the residents of D2 because their new rep pretends to be of and for them, but is too lazy to show up at work when he doesn't feel like it, or even receive staff briefings, which he has gone on record as saying are mostly a waste of time. Hopefully Tammy Morales or another worthy candidate will take him out next time so people in D2 can have some actual representation instead of just hot air.

This argument seems to be about the "Establishment" vs "Progressive" candidates. I've always thought Harrell fell somewhere in between, a sort of wildcard.

What it comes down to is that Harrell has a track record on concrete policy outcomes that were years ahead of there time including the City's Great Student Initiative, "Ban the Box" legislation, and most recently the funding of Police Body Cameras. Two of which President Obama's administration have just picked up on.

Now, there is talk about Harrell re-structuring the council's committees as Council President with more of a focus on youth incarceration and the youth-to-prison pipeline - an issue which will define local politics for decades to come (especially with the rate the U.S., in general, imprisons people.)

I'm tired of hearing radical leftist rhetoric @14 being thrown around like it means something. You're the tea-party of liberal America. Just because someone is wealthy or successful doesn't mean they can't represent people who aren't. It's like saying just because someone isn't a person of color they can't understand racism.

I think the City of Seattle is lucky to have a City Councilmember like Bruce Harrell. A world where Tammy Morales is able to make multi-million dollar decisions for the City of Seattle is a nightmare that I don't want to be a part of.

Congratulations on your victory, Bruce.

Really?! Sharon fucking Maeda?! What horrible journalism on the Stranger's part. She isn't disappointed in Harrell. She is pissed he didn't vote for her to replace Sally Clark. She was all too okay with supporting him until she got butt hurt. You would think Heidi could at least point this out instead of portraying Sharon as someone who switched alliances based on the job Harrell was doing.

Harrell has always been portrayed as some type of political bogeyman by the stranger and this article only adds to that legacy. Also, for those commenting who claim that he lives in Bellevue you are talking out of your @%^ and your credibility is zero from that point on. Bruce has accomplished many things while in office. Why wasn't ban the box, body cameras or his decisive vote on the aggressive panhandler vote mentioned. All very solid achievements. Last, with such low voter turnout, I do not think it is possible to write a post mortem on this race and claim that the vote is an expression of A or B.

Details about Harrell's property are available to the public using King County's iMap website. You can take a look in iMap Street View, although previous photo dates are recommended since a big fat utility truck is parked in front in the most recent view. The iron gate just needs a pair of rearing stallions to flesh out the full "Jefe House" look.

@16, Harrell is anything but a "wild card." He has talked openly about how vigorous defense of poor people constitutes "class war." Based on his past track record of self-righteous windbagery, he'll be a stolid and reliable member of the Kshama-hating bloc that includes Burgess and Bagshaw. With respect to the new $210,000,000 youth jail and his proposal to add 100 unreformed cops to D2, I sat right in front of him at a candidate forum last summer in which he said, "some brothers NEED to be locked up;" hopefully someone videoed that. You can learn a lot about his garrulous, contradictory opinions by watching the large number of vids of him cached at the Seattle Channel's website.

Newcomers Juarez and Gonzalez are the real wild cards because we don't know yet whether they will become establishment toadies, or actually stand up and represent marginalized groups including homeless people, working people who are barely hanging on by their fingernails, and our city's rapidly dwindling middle class.

Good riddance to Clark, Godden and Rasmussen. These large chunks of dead wood stopped making positive contributions years ago, though Clark is still very a busy bee her new role as Booster-in-Chief of the massive U District upzone, a bulging developer's Halloween candy bag cloaked as a "Tech Hub," with displaced low and middle income residents and gridlock be damned.

We've been lulled into thinking the plethora of cranes, and the avalanche of Chinese investment money pouring in to snatch up skyscrapers worth hundreds of $ millions at a pop is the new normal, but anyone who is paying attention won't be surprised when the economy crashes again, probably sometime next year. The next crash will trigger another wave of illegal foreclosures and evictions and tens of thousands of homeowners will be pushed back underwater. These are the same folks that Harrell, the perpetual Big Man on Campus, ignored the last time, and he will similarly them again because they are mere fodder for the next massive wealth transfer into the pockets of the people Harrell actually works for. If you want to know who they are, look at the long list of his corporate campaign contributors and assorted Seattle multi-millionaires.

So what if Harrell has done well. Better to have a successful person than a loser. D2 agrees.

The Stranger tried to take Bruce down but couldn't.Same for Sawant and her bullies

D2 gave Bruce the crown because he did a great job on the at large role for 8 years. We trust him going forward.

Josh Faris is too narcissistic and Tammy too inexperienced. The win margin just means Bruce is a WINNER.

Get on this train or you're going to be left behind. The man is powerful and that is good for D2.

@20, why don't you just go full Donald Trump and hand out his cell phone number if you have it as well. I don't think it's cool to provide directions how to research and find his personal residence address. Whether the politician is Bruce or Lindsey Graham, a public servant should have some expectation of keeping their personal life just that.

Harrell is a cold blooded opportunist who is there for himself like the majority of council members who work for the man.