Seattle mayoral primary to be test of progressive movement

SEATTLE – A year after racial justice and anti-police protesters took over part of the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle, there are queues outside restaurants in and around the former protest zone.

Pickup soccer games and dog owners playing fetch dominate a park that used to be occupied by a tent camp. In a community garden laid out by the demonstrators, corn, kale and zucchini flourish next to the letters “BLM” made from lengths of hose.

But issues that emerged from the Capitol Hill Occupied protest – police, justice, disorder and homelessness – are enlivening Seattle’s mayoral election today, a competition that highlights a political divide between activist left voters and more moderate progressives.

The election comes weeks after the Democratic primary voters in New York’s mayoral campaign elected a centrist ex-police officer who resisted calls from the left to “weaken the police.”

The question is whether voters in overwhelmingly liberal Seattle will also support moderate candidates who reject requests to cut police budgets, or candidates who support the agenda so vigorously advocated by protesters during last summer’s rallies.

Many residents are frustrated, large swaths say the city is on the wrong track. Six years after the city first declared homelessness an emergency, Seattle is still in the throes of a humanitarian crisis with campsites and outdoor drug use being a feature of many neighborhoods.

As gun violence increases in Seattle and other major cities, the Seattle Police Department has seen so much wear and tear that it takes officers several hours to respond to non-priority calls.

“These people need to get down to business and clean up the mess in this city,” said Joe Howard, a 48-year-old black financial trader who lives on Capitol Hill and denounced the “unorganized nonsense” of the protest zone. “I understand that you want to open up society, you want a fair and just society, but just talking about the things behind a liberal ideology will not achieve that.”

Fifteen candidates want to run for the November elections. The elections in Seattle are impartial. The top two-vote getters on August 3rd will compete against each other in the general election.

Mayor Jenny Durkan, who was heavily criticized for handling the protests last summer, cited the need to focus on the city’s pandemic response as a reason not to seek a second term.

Those vying for her successor include Bruce Harrell, a former city council member who is backed by the business community; City Council President M. Lorena González, a civil rights attorney who has strong support among workers’ groups; Colleen Echohawk, the youngest executive director of the Chief Seattle Club, a nonprofit that builds affordable urban housing for Native Americans; and Jessyn Farrell, a former state lawmaker who is a leading advocate for urban transportation.

Some have compelling personal stories. Harrell grew up in Seattle’s Central Area, a red-line neighborhood; his father was a black transplant from Jim Crow South and his mother’s family were Japanese and interned during World War II. As a lawyer, he served three terms on the city council, advocating police accountability before retiring in 2019 amid difficult re-election prospects.

Echohawk, whose grandmother fought for her family’s right to livelihood inland Alaska for decades, is Pawnee and Upper Athabasca. She has served on the city’s community police commission and would be one of the first Native Americans to be elected mayor of a major US city.

González’s parents were migrant agricultural workers in central Washington; As a child, she picked cherries before becoming a lawyer representing victims of police brutality. As council president, she has helped enforce a payroll tax for large companies like Amazon to pay for city services, as well as worker protection like a safe planning law.

But González, and to a lesser extent Harrell, could suffer from their links with the Council.