It’s 7 o’clock on August 5, the night of the Seattle primary election. Most local candidates are hosting their election night parties at industrial-style bars and breweries across Capitol Hill or Ballard, but not mayoral hopeful Katie Wilson. This room in Beacon Hill looks like it was set up for Bingo Night, or a particularly hype, politics-themed children’s birthday party.
And it actually is a particularly hype, politics-themed children’s birthday party. Wilson is sitting at a table, pinning the tight bun her hair is always tied into, when someone carries over a little girl in a cotton floral dress and sets her down. Josie is celebrating her second birthday tonight, watching the scene from the floor, wide-eyed and a little over it.
Balloons are taped to the wall and tied to the backs of plastic chairs. Streamers hang haphazardly by her yellow campaign signs.
Campaign staff, volunteers, and a handful of other candidates for city office mill around the open space, snacking on hummus and veggies and cashing in their drink tickets for beer and wine. A truck outside is selling pizza, a nod to an early campaign video about why a slice can be as much $8 in Seattle now. It’s all so scrappy, just like her.
At 8 p.m., the packed room quiets. The ballot count will drop any minute. For months, Wilson was fighting a narrative as much as she was fighting incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell. He was entrenched, unbeatable, the institution. She was the progressive upstart without a shot. Early polling showed that voters liked her message, but were barely familiar with her name. Refreshing the King County election website on their phones, the room was eager to know if that narrative was right.
At 8:05, a woman yells: “Katie’s number one!”
The crowd erupts.
Wilson walks to a podium at the back of the community center through a chanting crowd that’s already closing in around her. Her bag is still on her shoulder and she’s wordlessly looking toward her team in the crowd.
When the cheering quiets down, she brings the mic to her mouth, and looks over to her campaign staff. “Are we really at 46 percent?”
The crowd roars.
“Wow, that’s a lot better than I expected,” she says.
The general rule of Seattle politics is that older moderates vote early, and younger progressives vote right before the deadline. The first ballot drop skews conservative. An hour earlier, Wilson told me she hoped to be a few points behind Harrell that night, catch up in the next few days, and overtake him in the end.
She didn’t expect to be almost a point and a half up.
“Okay, so we’re headed to the November ballot,” she says to the room.
In the end, she took more than 50 percent of the total vote, leaving Harrell almost nine points behind her.
***
The Friday after election night, I met Wilson at her campaign office in the Smith Tower: a room of mostly empty desks that’s 20 by 20 feet, at most. She’d shared this office with city attorney candidate Rory O’Sullivan and city council candidate Jamie Fackler, but neither of them got through the primary. She’d spent the last four days catching up on the 150 “congratulations” texts from everyone she knew, and quite a few people she didn’t know. Frontrunners are more interesting than upstarts.
Sitting at a desk, looking toward City Hall Park, she started from the beginning.
Wilson was raised in Binghamton, New York, in a home steeped in academia. Both of her parents were evolutionary biologists. Her mom, Anne Barrett Clark, studied birds, and she specialized in redwing blackbirds when Wilson was in grade school. “I have a lot of memories of tramping around her field site, helping her to put little bands on baby birds, or weigh them, measure them,” Wilson says. Today, her mom is focused on crows’ social behavior.
I ask about her dad.
“He’s actually quite well-known,” she says, uncomfortably.
In the 1970s, the biologist Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, a blockbuster pop-sci hit that argued that our very genes, the genes of animals, of plants, all strive for immortality. Living things are completely governed by our own self-preservation. And as a result, everyone and everything is selfish by design. His arguments have been co-opted by every libertarian and cheating ex-boyfriend to explain their rugged individualism for the 50 years since.
Wilson’s dad, David Sloan Wilson, made his career arguing against Dawkins’s theory.
Essentially, he developed a counter-theory that altruism—rather than selfishness—can be a product of natural selection. His publications on the subject span from 1980 to 2022. And in his 2011 book, The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time, he helps find practical ways that evolutionary biology can be applied to the world around you.
“The thrust of my dad’s work is showing that, from a scientific, biological point of view,” Wilson says, “noble, moral motivations are real. And that there’s an evolutionary basis for that.”
It’d be easy to try to draw a connection between Wilson’s dad’s work and her own politics. A household driven by the belief that community-mindedness is inherent to our biology seems like it could create little leftists straight out of the womb.
But when I ask Wilson, she tells me I’m off base. Yes, her household shaped her politics. but not in the way I thought.
She took three essential gifts from her parents, and in spite of them: a refusal to trust authority just because it’s authority, an ambivalence to the ideas of status and money, and a refusal to follow her parents into the world of academia.
From her vantage point, her parents seemed so separated from their subjects, and she wanted to make a tangible impact. “They were genuinely in it because they want to understand how the world works,” she says, but “they were in this ivory tower, right? They’re thinking about things, but there’s a lot about the world that I think they didn’t understand. And that I didn’t understand either, because I hadn’t been in it.”
In high school in Binghamton, she started to get involved in the anti-consumerist, anti-globalist movements of the ’90s, the way that teenagers do when they have a strong sense of moral justice and nowhere to put it. When she was 15, she cofounded a local chapter of Food Not Bombs, a sort of freegan, and vegan, soup kitchen that made free meals for the community.
That’s where she met her now-husband, Scott Myers. At the time, Myers was a self-described punk, with a touch of rockabilly. “My hair was greased up like Elvis or something.” And the chapter was serving food at an animal rights protest against a circus that was coming through town. His first impression of Wilson? “Well, she was wearing Birkenstocks and socks,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘This is a weird person. I’ve never met someone like this.’”
When I ask Myers if, in any way, she’s still the same person he met that day, he, like anyone who’s known someone for 30 years, struggles to find an answer that could fairly capture decades of growth. But he’s easily able to paint one clear throughline from that teenager at the circus: “If she’s ever ambitious,” he says, “it’s never for her own reasons. It’s always about trying to do the most good for the most people.”
The two went to different high schools, but that meeting started a relationship between the unlikely pair that would last, off and on, through their adult lives. (Wilson and Myers describe their teen romance as “a complicated, adolescent relationship” and “tortured, teenage, fits and starts,” respectively.)
At that point, Wilson still appeared to be on the same academic track as her parents. She graduated from Binghamton High School as the salutatorian, and headed straight to Oxford University to study philosophy and physics (“to get to the bottom of things,” she says). But when it came time to graduate, Wilson considered her parents’ ivory tower again. She didn’t want to be “looking down on the world and trying to understand it,” she says. “I wanted to get my hands dirty.”
And this is where her rejection of her parents’ careers in academia came to a head: Six weeks before graduation, Wilson dropped out of college.
“As I got toward the end of my time at Oxford—that’s the time when people are thinking about what they do next, right? Are you gonna go and apply for graduate school or get a job with McKinsey? And so as I got into my final year, as I was having those thoughts, it was like, ‘Well, I’m not doing any of that.’” And so she decided to make sure that that wasn’t an option.
“I have to admit I was at least a little bit of a bad influence on her,” Myers says, sheepishly. While Wilson was in college, he’d gotten his GED, moved to the Bay Area, and gotten deeper into the protest movements of the early 2000s. His life looked drastically different than hers: He was busking on the BART and volunteering at an Indian reservation. “I’m happy it didn’t wreck her life,” he says. “She had to work jobs that she probably wouldn’t have worked, and get a different perspective on life, and on how a lot of people live and make a living. It might look less prestigious, but I think it’s shaped her a lot… But if my daughter did it, I would be like, ‘Don’t do that.’”
“No regrets,” Katie tells me. “And my parents have forgiven me for it, at this point,” she says, in a way that makes me wonder if it really did take until she was in her 40s.
***
Dropping out of college did exactly what she wanted it to do. Like flipping a railroad switch, she veered away from a life that seemed to be inevitably barrelling toward prestige and academia, and into the life of someone who wasn’t raised for Oxford from birth.
Wilson and Myers got married in 2004 and took what they call a “Greyhound Honeymoon,” busing from city to city to decide where they would start their new life. That city, it turns out, was Seattle.
They landed here because, at the time, it was affordable, and because it had an accessible university library system where they could continue their education on their own (which Wilson describes as sometimes “inefficient and weird,” but also a valuable way to fill in some of the gaps that her two majors left).
Their youthful self-education was driven by a central question: Why did the political movements they were a part of in the ’90s and aughts die in the water, and what did it take to make a social movement successful? They’d been involved in the Wolrd Bank protest in 2000, the anti-war movement after the invasion of Iraq, “and we were both somewhat disillusioned with the results of those movements,” Wilson says. “And so we made a joint decision to figure out, ‘How do we change the world?’”
They knew the key was organizing worker power. “We were inspired by the labor movement of the 20th century and the Civil Rights Movement,” she says, “but the world today is not like it was in the 1930s and the 1960s.” What was 2004’s organizing principle? Could they organize Walmart and other big box stores? Could they organize service workers?
But in the meantime, they had to make a living. In Seattle, Wilson’s first job was as an office assistant at an environmental science laboratory, followed by a brief stint at the Seattle Yacht Services, buffing hulls, painting boat bottoms, and repairing yachts.
But her mainstay for a few years was construction. She started out as an apprentice carpenter with a general contractor in Eastlake, renovating apartments. “This was a shady fucking worksite,” she says. The building itself was probably made as a hotel for the World’s Fair in 1962, she says, and then converted into apartment buildings. This time, their crew was turning studio apartments into one-bedrooms and flipping the building. “They were so cheap, they didn’t even buy us ladders,” she says. “So if we were doing work on the ceiling, we had to stand on five-gallon buckets.”
Looking for a construction job that felt less like a death trap, she emailed Mike Cain, a local contractor who had posted an ad on Craigslist looking for a construction laborer. She wrote:
I have some experience with framing, and I am proficient with both a hammer and a nailgun. I did a lot of drywall (both new and repairs), taping, mud, spray texture, painting (spray, roller, and brushwork), cheap flooring, and window trim and baseboard installation. I did demolition and, in general, a lot of carrying heavy things from one place to another… I am strong and competent and I am a hard worker. I learn very quickly, and I have a sharp eye for detail when necessary.
She ended the email: “I have my own tools – a cordless drill, a small skil-saw, a carpenter’s belt, lots of hand tools, and personal safety gear. I have a drivers license, but no car. I commute by bike and I live in North Seattle, which is within easy biking distance from University Village. I am very punctual and reliable…I would be available to start work immediately.” She asked for $15 an hour, but she’d take $12 “for a trial period.”
When I ask Cain what he remembers most about her, he tells me about their face-to-face interview, at the job site. He knew she’d recently moved across the country, and he remembers asking her what she was doing in Seattle. “I’m going to unionize Walmart,” she told him. “That was so cool,” he says. “‘You got the job,’ [I told her], just on the basis of that. Just her spirit and her spunk and everything. I was like, you look like you can lift 50 pound things over and over and over again all day.”
Wilson ended up working for Cain for six months. And she didn’t unionize Walmart. Instead, it took many patient years before she found an entry point to start organizing worker power in Seattle. In 2011, after the Great Recession pushed King County to take up austerity measures, the county was planning to cut Metro bus routes—a direct hit on working people.
“It was personal to us,” Wilson says. “We didn’t have a car, so it legit affected us. And then we just thought, ‘Okay, let’s organize transit riders.’”
Wilson and Myers would eventually run a number of successful campaigns, working within the complex ecosystem of city budgets, policy makers, and communities. When these two now-seasoned organizers talk about their first campaign, they can only see the mistakes they made with that first effort. At the time, “we didn’t know the details of real-world politics,” Myers says. “The political stuff we were in when we were younger was like: make a banner, go to a protest, make a pot of food. We didn’t know anything about taxes and revenue and any of this stuff, so we just dove into it.”
For the “Save Our Metro” campaign, Myers says, “we spent a whole week just flyering down on Third Ave.—the big bus corridor—putting up posters and talking to bus riders. We didn’t know how to organize or anything, so we just thought, ‘Oh, we’ll do this, and all these people will show up to our rally.’ And then like 30 people showed up.”
They hadn’t even learned to collect contact information from protesters yet (“We thought that was cynical, or something,” Myers says). But some of the protesters wanted to keep fighting for their transit system. “It was a lot of figuring it out as we go,” Myers says. “It took us a year to figure out how to write a constitution and bylaws.”
And that’s how the Transit Riders Union was born.
***
For someone who has been in politics, but not a politician, for years, Wilson is rather private. The Transit Riders Union is where Wilson’s story starts for Seattle’s political left. Her brainy family, walking away from prestige, her blue-collar jobs, the long journey of political discovery—it’s not just less a part of her campaign than pizza, it’s not part of her campaign at all.
The first glimpse I got of just how much we didn’t know about Katie Wilson was at a political forum called Candidate Survivor. Hosted by The Stranger and the Washington Bus, the forum includes a talent portion, where candidates are asked to perform. Wilson walked on stage with a guitar over her shoulder and a harmonica in a holder around her neck. She used to busk at Pike Place Market, she told the crowd. It’d been 10 years, though, she said, “so give me some grace here.” And she dove into a bluegrass standard.
How could someone running for Mayor of Seattle go months without telling voters that they’d been a busker at Pike Place Market? It’s the kind of narrative that politicos fall over themselves for. The stories that tell voters that this person really is a real person, not just a pile of ambition in a suit.
That’s a choice. Wilson has been running her campaign like she’s campaigned for minimum wage, progressive revenue, and renter protections. They were never centered on a person or personality, because that wasn’t the point. It was to build coalitions, find where groups had common goals, and pull power out of people by showing them that they agree with one another. That’s her special sauce. When her campaign broke out into the national media, The Nation magazine said she “launched her campaign like a social movement,” an exercise in “new progressive pragmatic political power.”
And it’s certainly not the only way she breaks from the Seattle mayoral tradition. Former mayor Jenny Durkan owned a $7.5 million mansion on Whidbey Island. Harrell bought his Seward Park home in 2011 for $1.4 million. Ed Murray owned his home on Capitol Hill and a vacation home on the Peninsula. Wilson and Myers rent a one-bedroom apartment in Capitol Hill. When they moved there in 2018, it was the first time in years they didn’t have housemates—a luxury they were only able to afford because that year, the Transit Riders Union was able to start paying her for her work. The apartment has four rooms: a kitchen, a living area, a bedroom, and a bathroom. Maybe four and a half, if you consider the small living room nook where Josie’s toys and clothes are tucked away.
Her building was built in the 1920s—a three-story walkup that was meant to help address a severe housing shortage at the time. It’s full of simple, original details: arched doorways, natural wood trim, and a built-in linen closet. And that’s just the bones. Myers was laid off during lockdown, and he used that time to single-handedly turn the apartment into an old-world, maximalist dream—ornate wallpaper cornstarched to the walls, painted ceilings, saturated velour couches. Their kitchen has two refrigerators and two ovens because Myers regularly makes homemade bagels and pizza. It’s all DIY and secondhand. And it works.
But it’s also so small. Two people can’t be in the kitchen together without getting tangled. Their mattress sits on the floor. Josie sleeps in a Pack ’n Play in their bedroom until they go to sleep. Then when it’s time for them to go to bed, they carefully move her, Pack ’n Play and all, into the living room, where she sleeps for the rest of the night. They haven’t figured out what happens when she outgrows the Pack ’n Play, but they’re confident they will. They do a lot with a little.
The same can be said of Wilson as an organizer. She knows that understanding the world—whether in academia or in politics—is about knowing what she doesn’t know. And she follows that by finding the one person who knows the most about that thing, and makes them a part of her coalition. That’s how she got the city to buy in to subsidized Orca cards, renter protections, raising the minimum wage—every seemingly pie-in-the-sky victory that the Transit Riders Union won.
Until her mayoral campaign, she’d never had a team—even a small one—that was fully dedicated to the cause. “You need to herd cats, to get them all doing their thing. And when it’s a coalition, then there’s lots of organizations who are being paid to do the work as part of their time,” she says.
The challenge, then, was taking the sliver of attention that that incredibly talented group of people could give to her cause, and making it as effective as possible. And it worked. Like she told me the day before she announced her campaign for mayor: “I would be happy to put my legislative record up against Bruce Harrell’s any day of the week.”
Wilson decided to run for mayor after Harrell opposed the social housing proposition that ultimately got almost two-thirds of Seattle’s vote. Wilson saw it as the biggest fumble in his term, and a clear sign that Harrell was out of touch with the voters in Seattle. And maybe that meant he was vulnerable to a progressive challenger. She went home that night and told Myers what she was thinking. “I told her, ‘If you run for mayor, I’ll divorce you,’” Myers says. “But we stayed up all night long talking about it, and by the end of the night, I told her, ‘If you don’t run for mayor, I’ll divorce you.’”
“Honestly, I’m more worried about my ability to put together a mayoral wardrobe than I am running the city,” she told me, gesturing at the combination of Goodwill finds she was wearing that day. “I know so many highly skilled, competent people, people who’ve worked in City Hall for decades. I’m so confident in our ability to assemble this team, and really excited about it.”
The people she’s worked with over the last decade reflect that same confidence. When she launched her campaign, scores of people who’d worked with the Transit Riders Union sang her praises. And of course, Cain, the contractor, gave her the most glowing endorsement of all. “Katie Wilson is smart, tough, running for mayor…and a former Mike Cain Construction employee,” he wrote on Facebook after she announced her campaign. “She was outstanding at moving heavy stuff around job sites.”
When I talked to Cain, he talked about Wilson’s intelligence, her spunk, and how interested he was in how she found herself working in construction in Seattle. “Especially since she’d just dropped out of Oxford,” I added. The voice on the other side of the phone was silent. “I actually didn’t know that,” he said, with a note of surprise.
There’s a lot to be surprised by from Katie Wilson. Her ability to play guitar and harmonica at the same time. Her taste in home decor. That her favorite movie is Orson Welles’s 1965 Chimes at Midnight. I’m confident her parents and her Oxford professors have been floored by her at least once.
When I first arrived at her apartment, she popped her head out of the doorway and waved me in. Her hair is usually tied into a careful knot at the back of her head with a series of bobby pins. But when I got there, her hair was still down. To my surprise, when it wasn’t wound into her signature bun, it fell almost all the way down her back.
While I watched her pin her hair up, I was reminded of the final impression Myers wanted to leave me with when we spoke. “I don’t pay very close attention to all the media. She might seem, on the exterior, staid and unflappable,” he says. “But inside, she’s a really passionate person,” he says. And she’s coming for the mayor’s office.
A daughter of scientists. How is that an accomplishment?
An Oxford dropout. How is that an accomplishment?
A former construction worker? How is that an accomplishment?
And an organizer? I guess that’s an accomplishment most plebeians could say.
I hope The Stranger’s puff piece on Bruce Harrell will be puffier.
a Real Human Being?
not some corporate
automaton doing
corps’ bidding
Entrenching the
Status Quo ever
& ever Deeper
whilst “the bottom”
90% struggle and
Never Catch up?
Hard Pass.
I Vote for the
Real Human Being
(subject to Eligibility).
This Gal
ROCKS.
@1: “A former construction worker? How is that an accomplishment?”
Have you worked construction?
I have.
It’s hard g-d work.
Voluntarily dropping out of any college — let alone Oxford — six weeks before graduation is stunningly bad judgment. It’s so totally insane that I find it hard to believe that there isn’t more to this story.
‘But when it came time to graduate, Wilson considered her parents’ ivory tower again. She didn’t want to be “looking down on the world and trying to understand it,” she says. “I wanted to get my hands dirty.”’
Um, her mother actually did “get her hands dirty,” in academia:
‘“I have a lot of memories of tramping around her field site, helping her to put little bands on baby birds, or weigh them, measure them,” Wilson says.’
‘…a life that seemed to be inevitably barrelling toward prestige and academia,’
That’s not what all of her fellow students were moving towards:
‘”…or get a job with McKinsey?”‘
That’s not ivory-tower academia, that’s jumping into the upper whorls of global capitalism! There are many, many things outside of academia that one can do with a degree from Oxford. Not getting a degree from Oxford is far more limiting than getting one.
Her story isn’t adding up.
@3: Donald Trump worked construction as well. Daddy Fred had him on his construction sites as a kid.
@6
yeah, right!
Evicting the Negroes.
Well it’s at least more of a history about her than the Seattle Times has printed, so thanks for that.
So she worked construction for six months in 2005 or 2006, then in 2018 she started getting paid by the Seattle Transit Union. What type of jobs did she work for the next 12 years?
She’s around 45 years old now and this article suggests she didn’t start making a regular income until she was 38.
Were her parents subsidizing her from her mid 20s to late 30s?
The City of Seattle has an annual budget of approximately 8 Billion dollars and employees of 14,000 employees. From this description it sounds like Katie has never managed more than a handful of volunteers and never a budget of greater than 5 figures.
Her experience to be Mayor is similar to Loren Culp’s experience to be Governor.
In 2020 Democrats were dismissive of Culp’s qualifications to be Governor, and rightly so, as he was completely unqualified. A high-school drop out who had managed himself in a 1-person police department is not qualified to be executive of the State of Washington.
But now only 4 years later Seattle Progressives are asking the people to elect Katie Wilson, a college dropout who managed herself in a 1-person non-profit, to be the executive of Seattle.
That’s beyond hypocritical, it’s just flat out insane.
“In the 1970s, the biologist Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, a blockbuster pop-sci hit that argued that our very genes, the genes of animals, of plants, all strive for immortality. Living things are completely governed by our own self-preservation. And as a result, everyone and everything is selfish by design.”
That interpretation is simply wrong. Not incomplete, not mistaken, not partially correct. Simply and totally wrong:
‘Now, though—according to the Dawkinsian scheme—the all-consuming ambition of a gene is to maximize its representation in the gene-pool, it needs to be remembered that a gene exists in many copies, sitting in a number of different bodies, and relatives will have a higher-than-usual proportion of their genes in common. By singling out its relatives for particular kindness or cooperation, or even by self-sacrifice in their favor, a gene may be increasing the evolutionary “success” of the set of genes it belongs to. This, though brought about by gene selfishness, would have the appearance of individual altruism.’
(https://www.threepennyreview.com/altruism-selfishness-and-genes/)
So, “… a counter-theory that altruism—rather than selfishness—can be a product of natural selection,” isn’t a counter-theory at all, but exactly what Dawkins had actually concluded.
It’s not possible to be any more wrong about this, and so again, her story isn’t adding up.
@9
“Well she did drop out of college so….
She was studying Philosophy and Physics which isn’t as unusual as is implied but also makes it unlikely that she would be heading to McKinsey after graduation.
Both Philosophy and Physics are the kind of undergraduate degrees that point towards graduate school. Deciding to not go to to graduate school after four years of undergraduate is not uncommon at all.
Deciding to drop out a few weeks before graduation however is an extremely questionable decision even for a person in their early twenties.
It makes one wonder who paid for her elite education. Her parents? Boy they must have been pissed? Does Oxford offer a full ride scholarship and are there no provisions or penalties if a student drops out after 42 months?
This article reads like a celebrity profile, light on anything but Katie Wilson’s hair. Can we get a piece that examines her ideas and how they would be funded and implemented? If we can’t get a serious piece about her, how about the people she’s excited to bring into her mayoral office? Would they bring inexperience and no plans or experience and know how? Would we just get another Mike McGinn with a bun? Please give us better journalism.
This lifestyle article raises more questions than it answers. Example: Is there a trust fund or parent checkbook covering her expenses? What was the real reason she quit Oxford? Was she just unready for her final exams and knew it? The mayor’s job is tough, so where’s the evidence she’s ready? Shouldn’t she have run for the council where her lack of administrative skills would not be so alarming.
Cmon everyone we’ve all seen this movie before. Act 1 a candidate big on feels but short on execution is pumped as the change we need. Act 2 they win and things get worse as their lack of experience and inability to compromise and build alliances is brutally exposed. Act 3 blame “late stage capitalism, big business cabals and secret hordes of republicans lurking in Madison Park” for rhe failures. Act 4 insist everything would have worked if we had only been more extreme and leaned in harder. Unfortunately Seattle voters love this movie and like to watch it over and over so buckle up for 4 years of declining revenues, increased social disorder and pointing fingers.
Personal bits presented to the masses for anonymous nibbling — electrons are today’s Genoese vessels bringing goods and destruction.
Looks like Katie supported Rinck’s proposed amendment to the Comprehensive Plan that would have ended government mandates to build offstreet parking with new development.
“Dear Katie,
I would appreciate your judgement on the proposed amendments of the Seattle
Comprehensive Plan, as they have been passed or dismissed at this time. I’m
upset Rinck was the only member who supported Amendment 7…” I didn’t bring up any other amendment.
Katie wrote:
“I am supportive of abolishing parking mandates, so was also disappointed to
see the lack of support for Councilmember Rinck’s amendment.”
@6 you actually believe this
All hat, no cattle.
She looks almost as creepy, fake, and inbred as Ron Davis does.
People still wear useless “covid masks” here lol! Look at me! I’m more “progressive” than thou!
I see libprogs wearing masks while driving alone in their cars every day, and of course their cars almost always have at least one to several stickers promoting “progressive” bullshit and platitudes. It’s almost always some goofy white woman.
“Sitting at a desk, looking toward City Hall Park”
Wow what an amazing view of pants-shitting junkies.
Crazy to think we lived through a pandemic where millions of people died and millions more are suffering chronic symptoms we still don’t understand and taking measures to avoid getting sick is considered a political statement by the dimmest bulbs you’ve ever met because their favorite podcasters said so
@20 – found the goofball who wears a mask in the car while driving alone
Nah i just understand how things work
@22 If you think masks were effective in preventing people from getting Covid-19, then you don’t understand how things work.
Do you think they just invented “covid masks”? There are different kinds of masks that have existed for decades that are certified to meet the appropriate standards, meaning they are required to work exactly as advertised for purposes that extend far beyond not getting sick or spreading disease, dumdum.
Then by your own chosen definition, the woman (hope I’m not “misgendering”) in the photo with the Liberal Problem Glasses is wearing a mask that literally does not work for purposes that extend “far beyond not getting sick or spreading disease”, or even for not getting sick and preventing disease. It’s a useless cloth mask with dumb “LOOK AT ME!!!” jewelry on it.
https://media2.fdncms.com/stranger/imager/u/xlarge/80265666/3q8a4279_copy_2.webp
Looks like she is wearing a kn95 to me but in any case I’m sorry she did this to you
Binghamton, New York is 14% black. It’s not very “progressive” of her to move to Seattle, which is only less than 7% black. If she truly wants to “uplift” people and be “progressive”, why doesn’t she move to some black-majority civil-rights-icon city that is now mired in violent crime and civic corruption, like Birmingham or Selma Alabama?
I’m pretty sure I know the reason.
If you are a white “progressive”, and you aren’t sacrificing your very life to Dismantle your White Privilege and Abolish your Whiteness, then you are a total hypocrite, like Katie Wilson.
“And this is where her rejection of her parents’ careers in academia came to a head: Six weeks before graduation, Wilson dropped out of college.”
LOL
What a great role model. Almost like Tammy Morales!
While one of my biggest problems with Harrell is the one she mentioned as her reason for running (opposition to the housing proposition) I think it is very likely that the primary change that the majority of Seattle residents noticed when he took office was that the favela in their neighborhood city park was dismantled and, regardless of what good ideas Katie Wilson might have, if one of her plans is to ‘stop the sweeps’ (correct me if I’m wrong but pretty sure it is) let’s be clear about what this is basically a euphemism for: the favela in your neighborhood city park will be back. I think her answer here is something like ‘we’re going to end homelessness’, which is something that a rational adult should know is not going to happen, or at least a rational adult should know making it happen is way beyond the power of any single municipal government. So, another one term mayor, and possibly one that would generate such a backlash this time around that Tim Eyman will be elected 4 years from now.
I did a bit of research and there is no evidence that Katie Wilson ever attended Oxford. I think the residents of Seattle need an honest answer whether she actually attended, and if so, how long she was there and why she dropped out. I also want to know how the heck she got in there (if she did). Voters need some answers before we mistakenly elect a grifter.
@31 That seems like a big lie for Wilson to tell, and if Bruce Harrell and his team have yet to discover it, then he’s too incompetent to be mayor.
Wow, so many dickish responses. I guess if you look into anyone’s history you can find fault with it. But we knew that after Kerry got swift boated. Dude volunteered to fight in Vietnam even though he could have easily used his privilege to stay out (like, uh, Bush). But he didn’t get a desk job. Nope he served on a Swift Boat in the fucking Mekong Delta. After it was over he had the balls to protest it. A hero both ways in my opinion. So what did the Republicans do? Talk shit about his service.
The attacks here similar to those made by Karl Rove. It starts with bullshit strawmen. Are you really that stupid @1? Do you really not know the difference between a personal history and an accomplishment? Here is a hint: FDR had Polio. It made him the man he was. But it wasn’t a fucking accomplishment, dipshit.
Then there is @5. There is more to the story. Why would anyone leave Oxford? That would be like leaving Harvard after a year and starting your own company. Why the fuck would you do that? Because you really like computers? How the fuck are you going to make money? Shiiiiit.
Somehow she is trust fund baby even though she went to public school and her parents are in academia. Get real.
Then there is @11. Who cares about history — you want policy! Except with even the slightest bit of effort you can find shitloads about policy. Her whole campaign was about policy! The entire campaign against her is not about policy, but her background.
Such bullshit. Look, everyone with any sense knows she is right on the vast majority of issues. We also know she has not held public office before. It is quite reasonable to be skeptical. Has she ever done anything? Well, yes. She isn’t just the head of the Seattle Transit Union, she helped create it. Yeah, sure, but is she some ivory tower Karen that doesn’t know how real people make a living? She did construction, asshole. OK, OK, but is she a deep thinker or she is just one of those people that gravitates to the public eye because it is weirdly appealing? Obviously it is the former.
But hey, nice story and all. But can she actually handle the job of being a real politician? Many existing politicians think so (https://www.wilsonforseattle.com/endorse).
@31 – “I did a bit of research and there is no evidence that Katie Wilson ever attended Oxford.”
That is very believable, The city of Des Moines Iowa literally hired a guy to be the Superintendent of the De Moines public school district (Ian Andre Roberts) who was already an illegal alien, and who already had a charge for illegally possessing a firearm, and who was then later (just like a week ago) recently caught by the police, attempting to flee with another illegal and loaded firearm, and who was ALSO illegally registered to vote in Maryland, and then it turned out that he didn’t really have a degree from MIT, as he claimed, and hadn’t actually been honored by the George Washington University as its District of Columbia “Principal of the Year”, as he claimed, and he didn’t really receive a doctoral degree in “urban educational leadership” from Morgan State University, as he claimed.
It turned out that a bunch of stereotypical naive goofy white-guilt ridden elderly liberal “progressive” women on the Des Moines school board hired him because he was SOOO HAWT and CHARMING and a SNAPPY DRESSER.
It’s a never-ending comedy, how stupid and naive you white-guilt Seattle “progressives” are.
“MIT, George Washington dispute Ian Roberts’ claims about academic credentials, honors”:
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2025/10/01/dmps-superintendent-ian-andre-roberts-did-not-attend-mit-university-says/86454972007
“DHS releases list of charges, convictions for ex-Des Moines Superintendent Ian Roberts”:
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2025/10/03/dmps-ian-roberts-des-moines-public-schools-former-superintendent-criminal-history/86503527007/
Make me laugh some more, naive white-guilt Seattle “progressives”.
Oh yeah, Ian Andre Roberts was also illegally registered to vote in Maryland, that thing that “progressives” claim NEVER EVER HAPPENS! I understand if you are a goofy naive white-guilt “progressive” and never heard about this because you get all your “news” from Slog:
“ANNAPOLIS, Md. (7News) — His arrest by ICE was bombshell news. Ian Roberts — the superintendent of Des Moines, Iowa schools, formerly a long-time Maryland teacher and an employee of DC schools — is accused by ICE of being in the country illegally, fleeing a traffic stop and being in illegal possession of a gun.
ICE claims the native of Guyana overstayed a student visa issued in 1999 and he’d already been ordered deported following a prior weapons charge. ICE said he had no legal right to hold a job, let alone be a superintendent of schools. The Des Moines school system is facing questions about how he could have been hired and now there are new concerns in Maryland.
Delegate Matt Morgan of the Maryland Freedom Caucus said he discovered that Roberts was also illegally registered to vote in Maryland. Morgan said that raises serious questions about Maryland’s voter rolls. Citizenship is a requirement to take part in elections.”
https://wjla.com/news/local/ice-arrest-maryland-teacher-raises-voter-rolls-illegal-immigration-elections-ian-roberts-ice-traffic-stop-des-moines-education-iowa
“She isn’t just the head of the Seattle Transit Union, she helped create it.”
LOL you don’t understand how what you wrote is totally stupid and embarrassing hahahaha
I am sensing a “pattern”
https://mynorthwest.com/kiro-opinion/katie-wilson-endorsement/4129925
Allegations of Seattle mayoral candidate Katie Wilson falsifying an endorsement could have the potential to derail her campaign.
Wilson stated that she was endorsed by Claude Burfect, a prominent civil rights activist who was the first vice president of the Seattle-King County National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). However, Burfect told Frontlines he never endorsed her.
Burfect also accused Wilson of photoshopping a picture of him for her campaign and tagging it with the word “endorsed.”
“She used me to elevate her,” Burfect said in the report. “She’s dishonest.”
“I have some experience with framing, and I am proficient with both a hammer and a nailgun. I did a lot of drywall (both new and repairs), taping, mud, spray texture, painting (spray, roller, and brushwork), cheap flooring, and window trim and baseboard installation. I did demolition and, in general, a lot of carrying heavy things from one place to another…”
Anyone who isn’t an invalid or an idiot can do that. How is that any kind of qualification to be Mayor of a major city in the USA? Literal illegal aliens who don’t speak English do that. I have done that. Hire me for Mayor of Seattle lol
@33: Ross, you’re normally a lot more calm and rational than this. I can see by the URL that you’re a strong supporter of Wilson for Mayor. That’s great — may the best candidate win, and you truly believe Wilson is the best — but I think you’re letting your enthusiasm run away with you here.
“Then there is @5. There is more to the story. Why would anyone leave Oxford? That would be like leaving Harvard after a year and starting your own company. Why the fuck would you do that? Because you really like computers? How the fuck are you going to make money? Shiiiiit.”
Yes, both Bax @4 and I believe there may be more to the story, and if that is true, then it likely does not flatter Wilson. You’re the one erecting a straw man here, though. You’re clearly alluding to the founders of Microsoft. There’s at least two very large differences:
First, it’s one thing to attend college for a year or two, deciding it’s not a good fit, and then moving onto a new opportunity. I know persons who’ve done that successfully (albeit maybe not as successfully as your example!). Dropping out with six weeks to go, then apparently doing very little of anything for the next decade-plus, is very much another thing. The former shows ambition not aligned with that school at that time. The latter shows something far less supportive of becoming Mayor of a large city in its time of crisis.
Second, dropping out early doesn’t require much in the way of explanation; college simply isn’t for everybody. I started at a school with a ~33% dropout rate, and then transferred to one with a 50% dropout rate, obtaining my engineering degree regardless. I’ve long worked with engineers who needed to make more than one attempt at engineering school, and they perform as well as we who did it continuously. By contrast, dropping out with six weeks to go — especially when both parents are happy and successful academics! — is not anywhere near to understandable, and voters do not make an outrageous request when they ask if there is more to the story. A successful Mayor will need to show a great amount of persistence over four full years, on a large variety of issues. Why hire someone who most definitely did not show such persistence?
“Somehow she is trust fund baby even though she went to public school and her parents are in academia. Get real.”
You’re alluding to @11, which you explicitly address in your next paragraph. But @11 did not say she was a trust fund baby; rather, @11 asked where Wilson got her money in the many years after she abandoned her formal education. That’s another excellent question, because a successful Mayor must show resourcefulness to advance her agenda for the good of the city. If Wilson chronically skated by on other persons’ incomes, that’s not a good look for someone who wants to be taken seriously as a fellow adult, let alone one who wants significant power over an entire city.
“Except with even the slightest bit of effort you can find shitloads about policy. Her whole campaign was about policy! The entire campaign against her is not about policy, but her background.”
No, please read @30 again. That commenter wants to know if her policy would allow homeless encampments to resume appropriation of shared public spaces, once again denying use of those shared public spaces to all other residents of the city. That’s a huge question of equity and social justice, yet Wilson has not responded — at least, not in any manner of which I am aware. Please let me know if I am wrong about that.
“Look, everyone with any sense knows she is right on the vast majority of issues.”
No, that is what voters now attempt to determine, because they take their citizenships seriously, and wish to vote for the best candidate they can. Castigating voters simply because they want answers to sensible questions is not a good look. You might want to slow down, take a beat, and ask yourself why you’re doing such a thing.
Oh gawd she had stereotypical “White Progressive Woman Trauma Bangs” haha
you really can’t make this shit up
https://media2.fdncms.com/stranger/imager/u/original/80265669/saveourmetro.png
I used to busk at Pike Place Market, paid the (then) $30 for the permit (now $35).
Hire me for Mayor of Seattle hahahaha
See, I’m just as qualified as she is (except I didn’t drop out of Oxford).
‘For the “Save Our Metro” campaign, Myers says, “we spent a whole week just flyering down on Third Ave.—the big bus corridor—putting up posters and talking to bus riders.”
That wasn’t dog shit they stepped in
“They hadn’t even learned to collect contact information from protesters yet (“We thought that was cynical, or something,” Myers says).”
It’s always hilarious how Seattle “progressives” ultimately reveal how naive and twee they are
“Their kitchen has two refrigerators and two ovens”
I also own two refrigerators and two ovens (sounds like they don’t really own them though). Hire me for Mayor of Seattle!
She went home that night and told Myers what she was thinking. “I told her, ‘If you run for mayor, I’ll divorce you,’” Myers says. “But we stayed up all night long talking about it, and by the end of the night, I told her, ‘If you don’t run for mayor, I’ll divorce you.’”
Great marriage dynamic! I bet $100 they will be divorced within 6 years either way. Who is in?
“I know so many highly skilled, competent people, people who’ve worked in City Hall for decades.”
It would be really hard to come up with a more damning quote that exemplifies why she is not qualified to be Mayor of Seattle than that one.
““Especially since she’d just dropped out of Oxford,” I added. The voice on the other side of the phone was silent. “I actually didn’t know that,” he said, with a note of surprise. “
LOL
Investigations are underway
“There’s a lot to be surprised by from Katie Wilson. Her ability to play guitar and harmonica at the same time. Her taste in home decor. That her favorite movie is Orson Welles’s 1965 Chimes at Midnight.”
Goofy ass shit. Seattle liberals are so stupid and naive
Have you cum yet?
@49: Nah, Biped’s saving the juice for this trip down the Stranger’s Memory Lane: https://www.thestranger.com/search?q=Sticker+patrol
@50 – LOL good one. I actually respect you the most out of all the regular Slog commenters, besides Catalina.
@49 – DOUG, no I have not cummed yet. Maybe you could get Will in Seattle or Fnarf to chime in? That would really put me over the top.
Katie is the combination of Jesus and Lady Gaga. Got it. Thanks.
@33 — “ The attacks here similar to those made by Karl Rove”
Come on. The Swift Boating of John Kerry was part of a tradition of relentless lying by conservatives. Saying that it’s nuts to drop out of Oxford six weeks before you graduate is not at all similar, because nothing in that statement is a lie.
The possibilities are that:
Wilson is telling the truth, and that she dropped out of one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the world less than six weeks before graduation for no real reason. Which means that her judgment is absolutely terrible and she has no business being mayor of a large city.
She’s lying about Oxford in some fashion. What could be a lie is Katie Wilson’s story, because it’s totally nonsensical. To be clear, there’s no evidence (yet) that she’s lying. But it sure seems like a bizarre story, and usually completely bizarre stories wind up being lies. And if she’s lying about this, then she obviously has no business being mayor of a large city.
The problem is that The Stranger has adopted an editorial posture over the last several years that lying constantly — i.e. the conservative Swift Boat model — is awesome and should be emulated by leftists. So when someone like me sees a statement by Katie Wilson that makes no sense and seems like to any rational person could be hiding a lie, red flags go off because it’s in a hagiography by The Stranger, and they’ve decided that lying is totally awesome. When there’s the whiff of a lie in a paper dedicated to spewing lies to its readers, alarm bells should be ringing.
It feels like a situation where The Stranger is going to relentlessly defend her through the campaign, she wins the election, and then it turns out that she was in fact lying about this and becomes a national embarrassment who makes Seattle into a joke on the world stage.
@33 — “ The attacks here similar to those made by Karl Rove”
Come on. The Swift Boating of John Kerry was part of a tradition of relentless lying by conservatives. Saying that it’s nuts to drop out of Oxford six weeks before you graduate is not at all similar, because nothing in that statement is a lie.
The possibilities are that:
Wilson is telling the truth, and that she dropped out of one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the world less than six weeks before graduation for no real reason. Which means that her judgment is absolutely terrible and she has no business being mayor of a large city.
She’s lying about Oxford in some fashion. What could be a lie is Katie Wilson’s story, because it’s totally nonsensical. To be clear, there’s no evidence (yet) that she’s lying. But it sure seems like a bizarre story, and usually completely bizarre stories wind up being lies. And if she’s lying about this, then she obviously has no business being mayor of a large city.
The problem is that The Stranger has adopted an editorial posture over the last several years that lying constantly — i.e. the conservative Swift Boat model — is awesome and should be emulated by leftists. So when someone like me sees a statement by Katie Wilson that makes no sense and seems like to any rational person could be hiding a lie, red flags go off because it’s in a hagiography by The Stranger, and they’ve decided that lying is totally awesome. When there’s the whiff of a lie in a paper dedicated to spewing lies to its readers, alarm bells should be ringing.
It feels like a situation where The Stranger is going to relentlessly defend her through the campaign, she wins the election, and then it turns out that she was in fact lying about this and becomes a national embarrassment who makes Seattle into a joke on the world stage.
@33 “Such bullshit. Look, everyone with any sense knows she is right on the vast majority of issues.”
This right here is why Wilson will win next month but also why she is destined to fail. It doesn’t matter if you are “right” on issues. What matters is can you execute. Bruce tried to communicate this but did not do it tactfully when he stated “This is not the time for hope”. Hope is great. Dreams and aspirations are what campaigns are built upon but no one (most especially The Stranger) is asking how realistic are these hopes.
There are zero people in this city who would argue against any one of Wilson’s policies. Provide treatment to the addicted, help the unhoused by getting them into treatment, build thousands of units of subsidized, social housing, provide legal services and support for immigrants being targeted by the federal government, make public transportation safe and affordable, fix the roads and infrastructure, make child care affordable etc etc etc. Who wouldn’t want all these things?
The problem is Wilson does not have the revenue to pay for any of it. As I have stated several times, the city is facing a budget deficit in excess of $100M. Voters no doubt will approve the changes to the B&O tax on large business in November as well as the Families and Education levy on the ballet. Those things won’t provide additional revenue for Wilson, they probably won’t even fully bridge the gap on the deficit. So where is she going to get more money? In her platform she wants to pass a local capital gains tax. Ok, according to estimates that wil raise $16M-$50M. The state has already seen the capital gains tax bring in less than anticipated (https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2024/05/21/capital-gains-tax-receipts-in-washington-tumble/( because it is highly volatile and people will move to avoid (see Bezos, Jeff). Even if it obtains the full amount that is mere pittance for what Wilson wants to do. Her next proposal is to lift the lid on the property tax. She doesn’t have the ability to do that and as we saw in the last session that is a very, very unpopular idea. She also supports the wealth tax. If she thinks that state is going to give any of that to the city (should it pass which is not likely) she is not dealing in reality. The rest of her tax policies are just piling on the already high state taxes (vacant land tax, vacancy tax, excise tax on professional services, local estate tax, digital advertising tax). Many of these are beyond the cities authority to enact and will receive pushback as well as negative consequences (business will leave the city). So this leaves her with really only two levers, continue to increase taxes on business via the B&O tax and property tax levies. In both cases the city is on the borderline today of a massive revolt.
Bruce is not perfect. His comment on repeat offenders last night was clearly pandering to the progressive crowd and made him look like an idiot. Wilson though will be a disaster for the city. The city will survive of course but once again it will take years to undue to the damage she will bring to the community.
@39 her platform states her position on encampments as follows:
“Rapidly resolve the most unsafe and persistent encampments.
Incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell claims that his “Unified Care Team” connects homeless people with shelter and services, but in fact it chases them around the city — at great expense to all of us. We can do better.
During the COVID emergency, after months of local government inaction, the JustCARE partnership came together to effectively resolve the large encampments that formed in Pioneer Square, the Chinatown-International District and the downtown core by providing shelter that actually worked for those living on the streets.
This successful and widely supported model was forced to wind down when COVID relief funding ended, and Harrell’s administration has not prioritized re-establishing it. Indeed, Harrell stood by while the state’s version of JustCARE, which resolved encampments on state property all around Seattle, ran out of money this spring. I will restore and scale up that model.”
Its very clear she is following the housing first model the city has pursued over the last 15 years that has done nothing to move the needle while wasting billions of dollars with activist groups. So if you want to know whether encampments will proliferate under Wilson the answer is a resounding yes. I’ve made my peace with a Wilson administration along with a more progressive government as Nelson/Davison probably lose as well however I am a pragmatist and I don’t think for a second Wilson will be able to accomplish a fraction of what she is proposing. Progress is never a straight line and many times when you leave a toxic ex there are backwards slides, Wilson will be one of those backward slides for Seattle. In four years we’ll be left with a city with more homeless addicts, higher tax burdens that make things less affordable, fewer amenities as the retail core continues to absorb the fall out from the cities policies, lower employment from job losses (this doesn’t even count the coming AI apocalypse for devs) and an administration telling us that if we just lean in harder, just pay more taxes they’ll get it right next time. Hopefully then we’ll be ready to dump our toxic ex for good.
I appreciate this more humanizing portrait of Katie Wilson, as we begin listening to the debates and approach ballot-time. I didn’t know – and I am delighted to hear – she was raised by evolutionary biologists. It makes total sense to me, given the way she very objectively and pragmatically handles information and problem-solving … and refreshingly so, given the sad state of American politics.
I participated in a science discussion forum years ago, much of which focused on evolutionary biology, and I’m not a scientist, but I have great respect for science, and I remember discussing some of her fathers views on altruism, which I favored. Also .. I’m a casual birdwatcher, including an interest in crow intelligence … so, for me, all of this bodes favorably for Katie.
@27 According to wikipedia, Binghamton is 77.6% white, while Seattle is 65.7% white. So there goes another lie of yours, in this case, that Katie Wilson allegedly moved to Seattle to be in a whiter population.
@ 58 – I got my numbers from the US Census, not Wikipedia. Also, nothing you wrote changes the facts (according to the US Government, at the US Census) that Binghamton, New York is 14% black and Seattle is less than 7% black.
Learn to math lol
Binghamton NY population total in 2024 = 46,773
Seattle WA population total in 2024 = 780,995
I understand that math and “per capita stats” are REALLY HARD for libprogs to understand, but at least try to put in a little effort.
@37 “See a pattern?”
That story of yours is being promoted by Turning Point USA (Charlie Kirk’s organization).
https://x.com/FrontlinesTPUSA/status/1965457268075626988
So, do you “see a pattern?”
Follow the money, is what I say. I think they should discuss the funding for both candidates in more depth.
Katie kind of looks like Wallace Simpson, Duchess of Windsor.
@60 I’m using the same system of population percentages as yourself.
@62 Except that Katie would be better for renters, the current mayor’s food deserts, and the cost of living for ordinary folks.
@59 “I got my numbers from the US Census, not Wikipedia.”
Who knows where you got yours. The US Census board isn’t functioning due to the inflated orange balloon’s lapse in federal funding, and besides which, wikipedia’s figures for both cities are derived directly from the US Census.
So you lose again, TPUSA Spam-Clown.
You can literally access the US census website still. It gives you a message that says while the government shutdown is in effect, it won’t be be updated, but then it still gives you the current stats. Moron
“TPUSA Spam-Clown”
LOL
I’m not even a Christian. The Bible is fucking stupid shit for slaves. Try again, idiot.
@57: But the Stranger reports that Wilson’s father has a completely wrong understanding of Dawkins’ “Selfish Gene” theory. “Selfish genes make selfish individuals” is not merely wrong, but simplistically wrong. (Please see my comment @9, above, for details.) We don’t know if that wrongness originated with the elder Wilson, or if Ms. Wilson misunderstood her father’s work, or the if Stranger simply didn’t understand any of it, but it is wrong. (Has the Stranger ever employed a full-time writer with a STEM background? I cannot recall one.)
“the current mayor’s food deserts”
LOL “food deserts” are caused by criminal scum robbing stores until the stores are forced to close/move. Naive goof
@57: “I didn’t know – and I am delighted to hear – she was raised by evolutionary biologists.”
The Stranger’s own Charles Mudede has tediously denounced evolutionary biologists as being “racists” many times, lol.
Hey how about that Neanderthal DNA that Africans don’t have? How about that Denisovan DNA that Asians have? How about that up to 19% DNA admixture of an extinct hominid (probably Homo erectus) that West Africans have?
“rAcE iS jUsT a SoCiAl cOnStRuCt!!!” – some naive white-guilt libprog
@67
“LOL
I’m not even a Christian.”
My turn to laugh. As if TPUSA is?
Enjoy your garbage heap, spam-clown. You’ve been outed, along with Harrell’s campaign.
“Outed”??? LOL
oh no I’m oUtEd
Thanks for this personal piece on Katie Wilson. It was nice getting to know a bit more of her backstory. I look forward to her being our next Seattle mayor.
@72 FTR, I’m being satiric, though it goes way over your head. TPUSA must delight in making muck in Seattle, you being a great example, I’m sure they (and probably yourself, since you don’t have anything to promote about Harrell) can’t stand either candidate. And how could the Harrell people see your spam as representative of their campaign?
Katie has her drawbacks, for sure. Announcing an endorsement by (what some describe as an) Islamic organization – and on October 7th – is unbelievably insensitive, and, yes, I would say, anti-Semitic, coming no less, from her privileged NY WASP background. And on the eve of a peace deal, no less.
Harrell is also clearly stronger on the police dept and preparation for handling any issues with Trump sending troops in; he has better working relationships with political allies at higher levels, far greater insight into the immigrant experience, with his own mother having been interned as a Japanese-American during WW II, and has far superior insight into the experience of people of color, and with his father being African-American. And he’d never do something as offensive and stupid as her acceptance of an endorsement like that on Oct. 7th.
The problem is his funding from the real estate community. But how much would she really do/perform in terms of renters’ rights and interests? And how much of her funding comes from Hamas? They don’t care about renters’ rights; this is just a way-in for their overall agenda.
We donated to her campaign, but I regret it at this point seeing her nasty Oct 7th endorsement announcement. It’s not even the endorsement, either; it’s how she chose to present it, and as a rejection of the Jewish community. That is not inclusiveness.
Next time, we’ll be far more careful who we give our democracy dollars too. Not being wealthy, we don’t have the same lived experience in being disappointed and betrayed by those we give our money to, but we’re learning fast.
Bye Katie. We know you won’t miss us, either.
@74 editing correction “what some describe as an Islamic organization” – excuse me – what some describe as an “Islamist” organization. Who knows, but the nature of this timing with the endorsement and announcement (which was obviously planned by both parties to land on Oct 7th) suggests to me that the description is likely accurate. WASPY Katie is pandering to the anti-Semites.
NOTE: I do not NEED to be associated with any political labeling or to belong to anyone’s “group.” So if someone is saying, “They’re not really left” or whatever – I don’t care.
Katie is not being honest. She didn’t “drop out of Oxford in rebellion at the system”, she failed her final year because it’s incredibly hard and prestigious British universities are a pass/fail thing with literally no concept of retaking a class. It’s not that uncommon, but it’s crushing. Far less common is for an American high-schooler to enter Oxford in the first place: acceptance is 100% academic merit, and the US system is different enough that you need additional classes planned a couple years in advance (e.g. Binghamton High doesn’t even offer Physics at AP or IB HL, or Math at AP B/C or IB HL, both prerequisites for any British physics course) in addition to already being in some fraction of top 1% of students. So she was a classic striver with high expectations of achievement – until it finally got too hard, she burned out at 22 and went home shamed, and proceeded to give up and do nothing very challenging at all for someone of her background, for the next 19 years, until deciding to be mayor. It feels like there’s a career-shaped hole in that timeline.
The stuff about her father arguing against Richard Dawkins is just silly. David Sloane Wilson sought to generalize Darwinism beyond evolution, a collection of subtle ideas, not a vain battle between Obi-Wan and evil Darth Dawkins for truth. Oxford has over 30 undergrad colleges, and Katie picked Balliol…the same 400-undergrad college where Richard Dawkins did his bachelors 40 years earlier. Give me a break.
Wikipedia has had pages for her father, grandfather, and great-grandfather since before she entered the public eye. They’re an establishment family with a long and interesting history of achievement, and if Katie had spent 20 years working hard instead of feeling sorry for herself then maybe she’d be ready to lead too. Instead of suddenly trying to catch up in a single leap to what she thinks she’s entitled to, because she used to be a smart teenager and others in her lineage made a name for themselves.
You can see this entitled naïveté in Katie’s platform. She has lots of good ideas: good, obvious, ideas. There’s nothing original in there, nothing that mayors haven’t tried before, or earnestly promised to try before. It’s execution that matters: doing things in the real world, where nothing is simple and everything is a trade-off, is much harder than shouting them as slogans on a flyer or at a Socialist Worker rally.
She might win! If she does, she’ll either tack toward the center on the cold fresh wind of reality, pissing off her impassioned base on the way. Then, it’ll be a pity she didn’t get more experience first. Or she’ll stay true to her word, achieve a few high profile wins that make the national news but really change nothing, and get frustrated. And in that case – just as she couldn’t finish a 4 year challenge in Oxford and ran away from her failure, I think she’ll run from Seattle in less than 4.
Bruce Harrell isn’t a great mayor. There are no great Seattle mayors, the problems are too complicated and the office’s powers too limited to solve the various big things people want. But he is competent, he’s not driving the bus off a cliff, and he’s on-track to be the first elected major in 16 years not to resign early in shame. Yet periodically we keep electing underqualified dreamers who promise the moon they don’t even seem to realize (or care?) they won’t be able to deliver. What a show to see, yet again.
This is a finely crafted piece, thank you.
I’ve worked with Katie Wilson for many years on Transit Riders Union campaigns. Based on what I knew from personal experience about her abilities and values, I was immediately 100% behind her candidacy for Mayor. This is widely true of everyone she has worked with, including, as the article points out, the person who hired her as a construction worker. (That’s not surprising; when you have a work ethic like Katie’s, every place you ever worked would hire you back.)
What I didn’t know was her ‘back story’ and I greatly enjoyed learning about it here.
It’s sad to see numerous people trolling this pleasant bio and saying things like “Her story isn’t adding up.” “Were her parents subsidizing her” “What was the real reason she quit Oxford?” “no evidence that Katie Wilson ever attended Oxford” “how much of her funding comes from Hamas?” Hamas, really? Seems so spiteful, I don’t get it.
Well gonna go vote for Katie now, got my ballot today!
@77: None of the concerns you quoted count as trolling; as explained by the commenters who raised them, those concerns naturally arise from the article, and the lack of answers can give a voter (not you, obviously) pause.
“This is widely true of everyone she has worked with, including, as the article points out, the person who hired her as a construction worker.”
As the article itself noted, that person had never heard about Wilson having dropped out of Oxford, suggesting she hadn’t yet started using that ‘explanation’ when she arrived in Seattle. So liking her might not be the best recommendation in voting for her?
And specifically, I stand by my assertions of her story not adding up. As others noted, it strains credulity to say she dropped out of school with a few weeks to go. Far more likely she failed her final year, as @76 claims, than for the child of two academics to quit Oxford at the last minute over some vague opposition to academia. (And, as @76 also noted, the claims made in this article about Dawkins are simply nonsense.)
@77 “”how much of her funding comes from Hamas?” Hamas, really? Seems so spiteful, I don’t get it.”
Oh really? The point is HER spitefulness in accepting that kind of endorsement on Oct 7th. Do you happen to know what happened on that date? The exact point of both the endorsing group and the candidate accepting an endorsement on that exact date was the very definition of spitefulness to the entire Jewish community of Seattle. Either that, or you have to be a total idiot, politically, in outer space. So which is it? And is either o.k.? Oh boo hoo, I’m the one being “spiteful?”
If they landed in Seattle and did that to you and your family, including your children, and since you pay taxes to do stuff to people who live in Gaza, just as the Israelis do, many of whom, kidnapped or slaughtered also being liberals, progressives, and peace activists like yourselves, would that be o.k.?
She wants to divest. Does she still have that position? And what is that position exactly? She’s awfully general and vague. Does that mean UW has to stop working with Israeli universities on research in medicine and health? No Israeli artists or performers are allowed in Seattle? Because she’s not specifically addressing the weapons manufacturers — which would, of course, alienate any Boeing base, right? So it’s just about anti-Semitism. And yeah, some of you are allergic to the mere mention of the term, but newsflash: it does indeed, and she and Scott Meyers don’t know that it actually exists, maybe they don’t belong in political power.
So “spitefulness” because I’m challenging her blatant spitefulness? If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Where is Katie on all this stuff? Besides attacking people for asking her?
I was actually reconsidering the vote … but thank you for reminding me why I shouldn’t.
You know, Harrell’s civil rights background and understanding is not such a bad thing when you’re looking at the cracko-left on Israel. It must be very hard for some of you to see an actual peace deal going through. And how do you like Hamas executing Gaza residents in the streets right now?
And remember – I didn’t start this conversation. She did, with her X account, on Oct 7th.
@79 Not to mention, it’s TOTALLY legitimate to ask about her funding and whether any of it comes from Hamas. Nothing is random in that kind of endorsement to anyone who has been around the block. And again, Hamas doesn’t give a damn about our rent. It’s just a pathway in for their sole cause.
@80 And BTW Mamdani addressed the Jewish community in NYC. He actually has 75% of the Jewish vote in New York, last I read. He didn’t, like Katie, just say, “Fuck you, I’m not talking to my city’s Jewish community, and I’m honoring and paying tribute to Operation Al A-Aqsa Flood on Oct 7th.”
Jewish community leaders have reportedly reached out to her campaign, to no avail, and have released statements that she refused to engage in any way whatsoever. Although she did – on Oct 7th.
This is exactly what is called “spitefulness.” And it’s also what’s called anti-Semitism, as allergic as some of you are, in the cracko-left, to that term.
@79 Harrell’s civil rights background – TRADITIONAL civil rights background
He understands the actual concepts and how they’re applied.
She obviously doesn’t.
“the cracko left” – meaning the cracko division of the left. Just as there is a cracko division of the right, and they reach out and shake hands with one another from time to time.
@70 Her parents’ background as evolutionary biologists would be a plus for me, but ultimately, it’s about her positions. And besides which, she rejects her parents’ background as academics. She has this very shallow view of teachers as being divorced from the real world. Hey, teachers, including at universities, belong to unions and need to think about the bread and butter in their lives, as well.
When I was in a discussion forum (this was a long time ago, so I don’t remember the details much) I don’t recall any conversation about her father and Dawkins being at odds with one another. I just remember separate discussions about her father’s views in and off themselves, and likewise, with Dawkins. At that time, there was a lot going on legally with the cracko-right challenging the teaching of evolution in the schools … and with this “intelligent design” pseudo-scientific religious front group (which I believe has a Seattle chapter) trying to muscle their way into the schools, and circumvent the first amendment separation of church and state. And they were even overruled by conservative judges (at that time). Dawkins was more controversial because he was a radical atheist. But all the real scientists including Dawkins and her father, IIRC, were all on the same page with these public school issues. And the issue of “race” for any of them was basically that it doesn’t exist. It’s mostly a false construct (except some issues in medicine). The most genetically diverse place on the planet is in Africa, for example.
Anti-Semitism, however, is considered the oldest racism. And I recall the former head of the NAACP, Ben Jealous, who was in the Bernie campaign, talking about how, in his view, you can’t really tackle the subject of racism without understanding or recognizing anti-Semitism, and because that’s where, in his view as both a scholar and civil rights activist, it all originates.
@77 If you don’t want people to ask about funding from Hamas, then why is your candidate dog-whistling them on Oct 7th via her X account? Virtually trumpeting Al Aqsa Flood? That is very definition of “spitefulness” plus anti-Semitism. It’s not “spiteful” to challenge her on that. I’m not running for public – she is, and she’s supposed to answer to the public, and not personally attack voters, as you’re doing, for asking her legitimate question. I’m sure you’re a great example of how she would continue to respond to any questions in office, just as her mailings have been one vicious attack ad after the next, and I have only received pro-active campaign ads from the Harrell people. So you’re not in a position to point fingers about “spitefulness.”
And to the editors at The Stranger. You have no basis for blocking my comments. I’ve certainly read enough dribble here on these boards to know that you have no standards for censorship whatsoever. This is the first time I’ve ever seen it. If you win the election, I give your phony candidate one month on the renters’ issues. It will be on your newspaper’s head.
BTW too @77 She put a lot of people in a bad position when she posted her dog whistle tweet on Oct 7th to prove her loyalty to Islamist anti-Semites and her rejection of recognizing anyone Jewish who was slaughtered, including children, women, and the elderly during their Operation AAF.
There are entire unions that backed her, political leaders who had stepped forward to endorse her. In addition to the people who gave her donations and defended her in debates with total AHs who called them all kinds of names. And where does that leave them? It speaks very loudly to what can only be her own selfishness and lack of experience and insight and sense of professionalism.
Though it should be just a matter of common human decency, and towards the Jewish community, that she wouldn’t have done that, to begin with. It’s one to say you oppose civilians being bombed or starved in Gaza. It’s quite another thing to say, “I support the Hamas slaughter of Jewish civilians in Israel. It was justified. I support Operation AAF.” (wink wink)
Because this was part of the deal. She had to accept her endorsement ON Oct 7th to send that message.
Not. Born. Yesterday.
@86 And whoever that organization was … I now know exactly where that group coming from, they just showed everyone very loudly. And their money would most definitely be coming from Hamas if they made that requirement with their endorsement. And then … it goes to Katie Wilson. For her demonstration of loyalty on Oct 7th, to the glory of Operation AAF.
If the shoe fits, wear it. It’s called the truth.
@87 Maybe Katie could go rip down some posters of hostages too to really really prove herself. Maybe Katie should go offer herself and her child as a hostage, hm?
@85 I’ve seen no evidence that AMAC is an extreme group, but choosing to announce their endorsement on Oct 7th is bizarre: either an unsubtle dog whistle to a dogmatic demographic, or a genuine coincidence that AMAC didn’t plan and Wilson didn’t notice. Both alternatives are bad…very politically divisive, or very politically naive.
@77 Trolling is deliberate antagonization and offensiveness, and that not what I read (or write) here. There are genuine reasons for concern about Wilson’s readiness for executive office. The absence of experience in the public sector, or a sizable organization of any type; her ability to stick at difficult things and weather setbacks and defeat; the scale of her vision, which reads as ambitious to her supporters, yet somewhere between idealistic-but-unachievable and shortsighted-to-the-point-of-harm to her opponents.
Your insight as someone who has worked with Wilson is valuable, but it also skews your perspective. TRU is small, it’s a lobby for a particular class (either a very small one, or it’s not been very successful at attracting the support of those whose interests it promotes) and this would be a slim resume for meaningful legislative office. For mayor, it’s no preparation at all.
@90: “TRU is small, it’s a lobby for a particular class (either a very small one, or it’s not been very successful at attracting the support of those whose interests it promotes) and this would be a slim resume for meaningful legislative office. For mayor, it’s no preparation at all.”
Expanding on what you noted @76 (and thank you for writing all of that; excellent points all, and made well), if she’d spent the time between Oxford and now working for, and then running, ever-larger non-profits, that would make a good resume for a mayoral candidate. Working wonders on always-inadequate budgets, marshaling disparate interests toward a reachable common goal, consistently delivering verifiable results, etc. As you wrote, there seems to be a career-shaped hole in her actual biography; had she filled it with valuable experience, she might now be ready to lead.