Everything Is Political in South Seattle: Harrell in a Tough Spot

After the first ballot drop, last week's primary election results looked really, really good for left-leaning candidates. In many races, like city attorney, City Council District 9, and City Council District 2, the candidates in the left lane were clear favorites for the general. In the mayoral race, challenger Katie Wilson was also in the lead, albeit only slightly.

Not anymore. There are more votes to be counted, but at just shy of 40% turnout, the people have mostly said their piece. And 50.71% of them have said they want Wilson to be our next mayor. Only 41.24% of them felt the same about incumbent Bruce Harrell. Electorally, he is in very hot water.

The primary is not the general, of course, and if there is one thing we can expect from Harrell and his supporters, it's lots of spending between now and Nov. 4. While Wilson is sitting at a total of $625,730.98 in fundraising to Harrell's $533,383.06, he's sure to have some support via independent expenditures — basically our local version of Super PACs.

In 2021, a committee called Bruce Harrell for Seattle's Future, largely funded by Vulcan Inc. and other real-estate interests, raised $1,365,205 and spent it pretty evenly on mailers, newspaper ads, and TV spots against then-opponent Lorena González and for Harrell. That committee has already raised $364,677.58 this year, again sourced from real-estate developers and other powerful business interests.

But will that same strategy work now? Harrell's consultants and political committees did an excellent job in 2021 portraying González as a radical who wanted to defund the police. But you can't run that same playbook in 2025, and you certainly can't run it against Wilson. While she wants to better fund police alternatives, she has made it pretty clear she isn't interested in any reductions in staffing or budget.

It's looking like Harrell will have to campaign on his accomplishments this time around. But what are they?

Let's take a look at one of his recent mailers.

Before we even get to the bullet points, the mailer claims that Harrell was partly responsible for Seattle's groundbreaking $15-an-hour minimum wage policy during his time on the council. His former colleague, Kshama Sawant, posted the mailer alongside a screed absolutely slamming Harrell for, as she wrote, "one of the most breathtaking lies I've seen to date."

Instead of supporting the minimum wage increase, she said, "Harrell strenuously opposed the minimum wage increase when he was on the City Council. Even until the very last moment, when everyone knew the legislation was going to win, Harrell was faithfully fighting hard on behalf of the bosses to try and introduce as many loopholes as possible into the bill."

While Sawant brought receipts on the minimum wage, there are plenty more receipts to dig up as you go down the mailer.

His stats on homelessness, for example, exhibit similar levels of cognitive dissonance. I worked as Real Change News' associate editor for two years in the middle of Harrell's biggest push to clear out unauthorized homeless encampments. I don't know what methodology he is using to come up with the 80% number, but I can tell you that what he is addressing here is visible homelessness, not actual homelessness. I'll grant that there may be 80% fewer tents where people can see them, but there are not 80% fewer people experiencing homelessness — and all the horrors that come with it — in our city.

Furthermore, touting "thousands of shelter referrals" is maddening. Much of my reporting at Real Change focused on how the city conducted encampment removals, more commonly known as "sweeps." I attended many of them in person, and in nearly every instance, there was not adequate or appropriate shelter available for the people being swept. A shelter referral is also not shelter. An enrollment, in which a person stays in a shelter for at least one night, is some kind of shelter. Those say nothing about whether that person exited homelessness or even managed to stay off the street for longer than a day, but even so, enrollments have never numbered in the thousands.

On crime, which has fallen sharply, Harrell is also eager to claim credit, touting increased police hiring. However, crime is down in major cities across the country, and the link between police staffing and reductions in violent crime is dubious at best. According to a 2019 study by The Marshall Project, violent crime fell nationwide during a period when police staffing per capita also fell.

As everyone attempts to read the tea leaves that have settled since the first ballot drop, I find myself returning to only one conclusion: Voters finally saw through it.

Around the time that Harrell and his backers got the exact council they wanted, largely because they promised to empower him to turbocharge police hiring, crack down on drugs, get tough on tent dwellers, and clean up the streets, I said to myself, "There's no way they can do what they're promising to do."

Homelessness, to take just one aspect of the mailer's bold claims, is a sticky issue. I've documented the many, many mayoral plans to put a stop to it, but it's not something that you can write a 10-year plan and put to bed. It's certainly not something you can police out of existence. So I saw Harrell and Co. gearing up to try exactly that and knew that even if they played their hearts out, it was still a losing game.

Sweep one encampment, it pops up down the road. Sweep the new one, it pops up in the original location. Put up fencing or put down boulders, an encampment will find its way somewhere else. People have to sleep somewhere. Just yesterday, I drove by an encampment on Royal Brougham that I covered when it was swept in 2015.

I absolutely have to give Harrell credit where credit is due: Many large encampments have been removed from public parks. But homelessness, including the type of visible homelessness that his administration seems so focused on, persists. Anyone with eyes can see that.

Anyone with eyes can also see that we haven't made much progress on affordable housing. More people in this city are rent-burdened than ever before. People can also see that we haven't even begun to build a functioning transportation system to accommodate our ever-increasing population. Take a look around, and you'll see that traffic sucks, our streets are crumbling, and the bus is often late.

On crime, no one I know feels like the cops keep us safe. Property crime is the predominant form of crime in Seattle, and my experience has been that the more people experiencing poverty there are in my area, the more I have to worry about whether my shed will get ransacked or my car broken into. I'd feel safer in a less unequal society, not a more policed one, and I think that tracks for a lot of working people.

But really, it's not so much that this is obvious. It's that voters are smart. Sure, scare tactics and propaganda about how we defunded the police (we didn't) worked in 2021. But you can't run the same ruse twice. If you promise people an improved city and make no meaningful progress on the top three issues — homelessness, affordability, and crime — people will hold you to that promise.

Got something *political* I should know? Tell me about it: Tobias.CB@SeattleEmerald.org.

Tobias Coughlin-Bogue is a writer, editor and restaurant worker who lives in South Park. He was formerly the associate editor of Real Change News, and his work has appeared in The Stranger, Seattle Weekly, Vice, Thrillist, Thrasher Magazine, Curbed, and Crosscut, among other outlets.