OP ED: The Stranger’s New Management Blew Its First City Election Endorsements

The following is a guest editorial by a longtime fan of The Stranger who also once sat on their endorsement board. They have a different job now (duh) and want to rant without their new boss getting emailed.

Seattle progressives have a time-honored tradition of bitching about the choices made by the most influential endorsing body in our city elections, the Stranger Election Control Board (SECB). But in the first set of endorsements since unceremoniously cleaning house of the paper’s dedicated editorial staff, the new crop of kingmakers in Seattle didn’t just choose the wrong candidates. They failed to make convincing arguments for the relatively moderate candidates the SECB rubber-stamped.

Sadly, Seattle’s progressive movement can’t afford for the SECB to abdicate its role in screening candidates vying for power in this city. Without truly effective public financing for elections like the program in NYC that allowed Zohran Mamdani to raise $8 million without compromising his leftist agenda, earning The Stranger’s approval is the only real path through a primary election for a Seattle progressive. There’s simply no replacement for the hundreds of thousands of pageviews and thousands more copies in print that comes with the blessing of the SECB.

The singular importance of these endorsements, particularly in down-ballot races with multiple qualified candidates, is why many viewed the paper’s sale last summer to a new ownership group helmed by Brady Walkinshaw with a hefty dose of skepticism. While there’s no evidence the failed Congressional candidate who couldn’t earn the SECB’s endorsement when he last appeared on a ballot directly interfered with these endorsements, the staff he installed delivered some wildly incoherent and factually inaccurate arguments supporting their chosen fighters in two key races on your primary ballot. 

So, before you blindly copy their cheat sheet, let’s participate in that time-honored tradition and take a tour of some of the worst mistakes made by the latest iteration of the Stranger Election Control Board.

City Council District 2

To be clear, there are perfectly valid reasons for endorsing the candidates chosen by the SECB in both of the races we’ve singled out. The choice of Eddie Lin to be the progressive standard-bearer in District 2 is defensible, but not in the way the SECB chose to argue for his candidacy. 

District 2 is the only city council district where white people are not a majority of the electorate. There is and has been a real problem of the CID being ignored in City Hall decision-making, most recently in Mayor Bruce Harrell’s emphasis on “cleaning” Third Avenue resulting in the predictable surge in unsheltered homelessness in the historically Asian-American neighborhood.

Ratifying the consensus progressive pick of white guy Jamie Fackler would be a strange choice for a paper frequently–and correctly–criticized for its lack of consideration of the importance of diverse representation in politics. Picking Lin, an Asian-American who reportedly spoke up during the SECB’s endorsement interview for the plight of unsheltered people in the CID expected to find sobriety without a safe place to sleep, would be a defensible and logical choice to counter that troubling trend. But that’s not an argument voters will read in The Stranger.

Instead, the SECB failed to fact-check the central claim that served as the crux of their endorsement of Lin as a supposed champion for affordable housing and progressive revenue: his contested vote for Proposition 1B, a Chamber of Commerce-backed alternative to Proposition 1A on February’s special election ballot. They incorrectly stated Lin did vote for 1A despite his reservations, and although the online endorsement now includes an editor’s note apologizing for the error, it’s unclear how readers of the print edition will avoid the sloppy misinformation. 

This would be pedantic nit-picking if Lin’s reluctance to support a new progressive revenue stream didn’t raise questions about the sincerity of his commitment to taxing the rich to solve the ever-worsening housing crisis. 

The SECB parroted Lin’s support for an income tax (constitutionally fraught), a vacancy tax (too small and legally dubious), and a city-level capital gains tax (frankly, table stakes for any progressive) as reasons to believe his change of heart. But if he failed to summon the courage to embrace a new progressive revenue stream (that the SECB itself endorsed!) when it actually had a shot at funding more affordable housing, it seems like his excuses might deserve a touch more scrutiny than the drive-by dismissal in this endorsement. 

If only there was a local progressive news outlet that had been covering the minutiae of progressive revenue in Seattle for the last few years that could have informed these newcomers to city politics! Well, there’s always next year to #GiveaFack about these kinds of pesky details.

City Attorney

Nowhere was the new SECB’s deferral to the mainstream Democratic establishment more apparent than in their endorsement of prosecutor Erika Evans as their champion to unseat loathsome Republican incumbent Ann Davison. 

Again, there’s a perfectly fine argument to be made in Evans’ favor. If you’re inclined to think that someone who grew up in a historically over-policed community and chose to spend their career upholding that same system of oppression brings a “lens” to administering that system that’s been missing, then perhaps her “prop comedy” of a binder of headshots of white guys that have preceded Davison in office would be persuasive. 

But aside from a single shoutout to that “corny” bit, the SECB didn’t make an argument for how Evans’ upbringing or identity as a Black woman would shape her approach to managing an office where 90% of the people they prosecute are poor enough to qualify for a public defender. Evans was a city prosecutor in an office that almost exclusively targeted impoverished people of color, with Black defendants, to quote one City audit, “particularly overrepresented.” Evans’ campaign has avoided acknowledging the harm she and other City prosecutors did, and the SECB could barely be bothered to acknowledge it. 

Nor did the SECB succeed in pressing Evans to defend her prior vote for The Stranger’s top public enemy in Mayor Bruce Harrell, despite giving him money to support his re-election. They couldn’t even extract a commitment to vote for the obviously better progressive choice in Katie Wilson, someone the SECB believes in so strongly that they gave her a platform in the lead up to her campaign for mayor.

Instead, they spent the majority of their endorsement hand-waving away these concerns while hiding behind endorsements from City Council Member Alexis Mercedes Rinck and State Rep. Shaun Scott – without explaining what made Evans so compelling that these two young politicians who happen to rely on the same consulting firm as Evans and Harrell.

If Evans were the only viable candidate to take down Davison, then going along with the establishment’s circling of the wagons around her would be defensible. But that’s simply not true.

The SECB incorrectly argues that Evans and her two progressive competitors, public defender Nathan Rouse and employment law attorney Rory O’Sullivan, will “split the left vote” in the primary and allow for Davison to have a chance at keeping her job in a head-to-head matchup with the progressive choice in the general election. That’s just not how elections work.

Even the Wikipedia post on this race could have informed the SECB of reputable polling showing that voters overwhelmingly favor just about any non-Republican with a pulse over Davison in a head-to-head matchup. If they chose to actually read the poll, or even just scan it for Davison’s name, it would be clear that the Republican incumbent’s major policy choices have been significantly unpopular.

But even with the SECB’s backing, it does take money to win, so perhaps Evans has a significant fundraising advantage over O’Sullivan and Rouse? Nope. All three are currently lapping Davison as of the latest public disclosures from each campaign. Evans has a slight edge in total dollars raised, but lags behind both O’Sullivan and Rouse in number of contributors, leaving the fundraising-as-viability analysis a wash. 

So why choose someone the SECB had to spill so much ink defending instead of a candidate they “wished” they could endorse in public defender Nathan Rouse? 

They don’t explain, aside from asking him to “get more experience” despite the fact that Rouse has been an attorney for longer than Evans and has a wider variety of experience in both civil and criminal law, and clerked for multiple federal judges. He’s also been far more detailed in his platform than Evans, who refused to define what a “peaceful” protestor is after committing to refuse to prosecute them. 

Perhaps they’re snake-bitten by their predecessors’ endorsement of abolitionist Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, which many in the Seattle Democratic establishment blame for edging incumbent moderate Pete Holmes out of the general election in 2021. If The Stranger cared more about viability, the argument goes, Davison would have been crushed by a 12-year incumbent who couldn’t mount enough of a campaign to defeat either first-time challenger in that August’s primary. 

But again, that’s not an argument the SECB made, probably because it simply doesn’t hold water. The similarities between Rouse and NTK end at their common profession as public defenders, as Rouse carries none of the social media baggage that NTK’s opponents exploited in the 2021 general election. Also, Seattle voters had no hesitation in following the SECB’s recommendation in 2022 to back a relatively unproven public defender in Pooja Vaddadi when she defeated then-Chief Judge Adam Eisenberg to win a seat on the Seattle Municipal Court. 

Hey, at least it’s not like there’s any recent history of a woman of color whose sole legal experience was working in prosecutors’ offices duping progressives into supporting her, and then turning around and adopting the same approach as the loathsome Davison to punish bullshit property crimes, right? Right?