King County Executive-elect Girmay Zahilay told The Burner he’s grateful to his constituents for raising concerns in a recent community letter  about his decision to prop up Microsoft President and Vice Chairman Brad Smith as one of four co-chairs on the team guiding his transition to office. Zahilay joined them in condemning “the facilitation of human rights violations in Gaza,” but he did not commit to the chief demand of the letter: Removing the big tech boss they accuse o

After progressive challenger Katie Wilson’s victory, some national outlets are straining to manufacture an anti-Israel storyline in Seattle’s mayoral race where none meaningfully exists. Wilson herself was notably quiet on the issue, despite riding a wave of (admittedly over-generous) comparisons to New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who spoke much more openly and strongly in support of Palestine. The whole narrative is just the latest example of Wilson’s detractors in

In this episode of The Right Wing Made Up A Mayor To Get Mad At : President Donald Trump called Seattle Mayor-elect Katie Wilson a “liberal-slash-communist” as he threatened to move the FIFA World Cup out of Seattle, implying Wilson may make Seattle less safe. While the president has made these threats under the current administration and he didn’t call out a specifically worrisome policy of Wilson’s, his comments fit cleanly into the right-wing narrative that Katie Wilson is

Your Iced Sugar Cookie Latte is going to have to wait. Thursday morning, Starbucks’ baristas went on strike and they won’t be back to business as usual until the company comes back to the table and finalizes a fair union contract with Starbucks Workers United (SWU). Until then, workers ask customers to find a new regular coffee spot — workers are “prepared for this to become the biggest and longest strike in Starbucks history.” According to SWU, workers have waited “nearly a

Election day has come and gone, but the race for Mayor of Seattle isn’t over yet. In a small ballot drop on Thursday, progressive challenger Katie Wilson started to close the gap between her and Mayor Bruce Harrell. With plenty of votes left to count, she could still win, but the difference between four more years of Harrell and a full progressive sweep of City Hall lies in just a handful of ballots. That’s why challenger Katie Wilson is still in campaign mode, now organizing

Young people: You have one more day until an election day that could land Seattle a new, lefty Mayor, a City Attorney who's not a Republican, and a more progressive City Council. And it looks like you’re holding onto those ballots until the last minute!  According to   King County Elections ballot return statistics , only 16.18% of registered voters have cast a ballot so far. Of course, that number will continue to climb until election day. For instance, almost 40% of ballots

Earlier this week, Gov. Bob Ferguson directed almost $2.2 million in state funding per week to provide additional support to Washington’s food banks as working families brace for their federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to freeze due to the ongoing, Republican-driven shutdown of the federal government.  That’s cool. It’s not enough.  As Ferguson acknowledged in his press release earlier this week, about 930,000 Washingtonians receive SNAP benefi

The Kids Table  (TKT) –– a new Seattle-focused PAC advocating for “pro-Jewish” candidates and against antisemitism, “illiberalism,” and “radical voices,” –– is pouring unusually large sums of money into the Seattle school board election, races that typically do not see outside spending. If their candidates win, TKT will have achieved their stated goal to introduce “risk for candidates who condone (explicitly or implicitly) or endorse [antisemitism or radicalism]” — candidates

Over the weekend, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s campaign sent a text to Seattle voters overblowing a few lines in a KUOW post to frame his progressive challenger Katie Wilson as some kind of overgrown trust-fund kid cosplaying poor while mooching off her parent’s New York money. This morning, Wilson’s campaign clapped back, calling Harrell out of touch for mocking how families help each other scrape by in an expensive city. Early last week, KUOW posted a profile  of Wilson titled “K

Young people: This is fucking serious. The 2025 election could be a huge shift in the balance of power at City Hall — voters could kick out our MAGA Republican City Attorney, banish the most incompetent council president in the City’s history, and elect Seattle’s first progressive Mayor in over a decade. All the challengers taking up the left lane beat the centrist incumbents in the primary, but they only win the whole thing if you show up by Nov. 4 at 8pm. And so far, a litt