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