Man, whats with this scowling brown lady? I dont like scowling at all! I think scowling is ineffective. She and her scowling must be the reason for all of the citys problems.
Man, what's with this scowling brown lady? I don't like scowling at all! I think scowling is ineffective. She and her scowling must be the reason for all of the city's problems. Screenshots

The photos above show three separate ads paid for by People for Seattle, a PAC that boasts several major Republican donors. The two ads on the left are online GIFs supporting District 6 candidate Heidi Wills and District 4 candidate Alex Pedersen. They both start with Seattle City Council Member Kshama Sawant's face and then cycle through to the face of the other candidate. The ad on the right is the initial frame from a cable TV commercial supporting District 7 candidate Jim Pugel. It starts with a scowling Sawant and then transitions to a smiling Pugel.

These deceptive ads suggest that Sawant is somehow running against three different candidates in three different races. But, of course, that's impossible. Sawant is only running against Egan Orion, whose campaign has drawn a handful of Trump donors, in District 3.

However, this PAC, which is run by former interim Seattle Mayor Tim Burgess, is betting you don't know that. This PAC is betting you are dumb.

The conservative bloc conspiring to flip the city council has probably seen polls showing that Sawant has the lowest approval rating on a council that appears to have a fair approval rating. So, if this PAC makes Sawant the face of the current council, they think the conservative candidates they support will have a better chance of winning.

They think this strategy will work because politicos believed it worked in the primary. In a series of mailers, People for Seattle tied D3 candidate Zachary DeWolf and D4 candidate Emily Myers to Sawant, and neither DeWolf nor Myers earned enough votes to make it through.

But if they think this strategy will work in the general election, then People for Seattle is betting on a number of things.

They're betting you don't read much about the city council, so you don't really know who your council member is or what your council member has done to advance your interests.

They're betting you have heard of Sawant before, since she has the highest profile on the council, but they're betting you also don't know what she's done.

If you've heard of her, they're betting you've heard she's "divisive," and you've heard "divisiveness" among national and local politicians is the reason for all of our problems, rather than, say, a lack of revenue from progressive sources.

They're betting you think, for instance, that Sawant's "divisive" Amazon rhetoric was the reason the "head tax" failed, and not the fact that Amazon originally agreed with the terms of the compromise proposal from Mayor Durkan but then went ahead and funded the repeal campaign anyway.

They're betting you think something should be done about the homeless crisis. But since more people are entering homelessness than exiting homelessness at the moment, they're betting you blame an "ineffective" city council for that, i.e. Sawant, rather than rapidly rising housing costs, shredded safety nets, and inadequate health care systems.

And—though I hesitate to say this, at the risk of being divisive—they're betting a photo of a scowling brown woman will make lily-white Seattleites react in a negative way, and that a photo of a smiling white face will make lily-white Seattleites react in a positive way.

They're betting all of this will work. And they're betting a lot.