It's Election Day

UPDATE II: There's a fair amount of  "Woe is me!" among Sawant supporters this morning based on last night's primary election returns. I say, "Fear not." Kshama will not be beaten by a Chamber shill. DeWolf's supporters will flow to Sawant; Murakami's, to Orion. Voters for Nguyen and Bowers are more likely to go with Kshama than Orion. It's going to be closer than 2015, but Kshama will still come out on top.

City of Seattle, Council District 3

Logan Bowers:  7.04% (1,347 votes)

Zachary DeWolf:  12.54% (2,401 votes)

Pat Murakami:  14.20% (2,719 votes)

Egan Orion:  23.74% (4,545 votes)

Kshama Sawant:  32.75% (6,270 votes)

Ami Nguyen:  9.50% (1,819 votes) 

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UPDATE: Sawant's campaign sent this out to her supporters this afternoon --

Did you see that the corporate cash flooding in against us from Amazon has made national news? Yesterday, The Guardian published an article titled “Is Amazon taking revenge on the Seattle socialist who took on the retail giant?” It certainly seems so. Fifteen of Amazon’s top executives and closest advisors have donated directly to at least one of our opponents. The Amazon corporation itself put $250,000 for “anybody but Kshama Sawant” into the Chamber of Commerce's corporate PAC (CASE), which is spending more money against us than on any other race in the city. Polls close tonight. We have an urgent message. In the final days of this election, CASE has dumped even more money against Councilmember Kshama Sawant, spending over $10,000 on a final round of attack mailers! CASE’s chosen candidate, Egan Orion, was quoted in The Guardian as saying: “Kshama Sawant is the worst partner for our large businesses. You know, a bologna sandwich would be a better partner.” As Kshama has made clear time and again, she is running as an unambiguous representative of working people, not the corporate elite, because you can’t serve two bosses. We’ll leave it to the bologna sandwiches to serve big business. Despite Orion’s campaign being propped up by nearly $200,000 in corporate PAC money, in a shocking display of hypocrisy and outright falsehood, Orion has been plastering District 3 with these posters:

This would be laughable if it weren’t so outrageous. When confronted about it on social media, Orion claimed that the corporate PACs just “happen to be supporting him.” This is a lie.  In reality, Orion had to directly apply to the Chamber of Commerce corporate PAC by submitting their questionnaire. Orion even stated that he was “honored” to have received their endorsement. And now this corporate PAC has spent more money on Orion than on any other candidate in the entire city. We’re proud that we just hit our fundraising goal for the primary election of raising $280,000, which cancels out the big checks written earlier this summer by Amazon and luxury developer Vulcan! But this last minute CASE PAC money-dump is an emergency.  We’ve printed a final round of posters and leaflets so our volunteers can go all out on the doors these final hours to counter the corporate propaganda and get out the vote. We need to raise $5,000 more today to cover these additional expenses for this crucial election.  We need your help. Donate $15, $50, $100, or more right now to stand with Councilmember Kshama Sawant against this corporate propaganda.Today is the final day of this election — there is no time to waste. And please join us TONIGHT at our Election Night Party, 6pm at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute, to celebrate all our hard work and prepare for the next stage of our struggle.  Solidarity, Eva Metz Vote Sawant 2019 Fundraising Director

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It's primary election day in Washington State. ("Tuesday’s primary marks the first election that Washington’s same-day voter registration law will be in effect.") The municipal voting district in which I reside, Seattle's District Three, features six candidates, all of whom, with the exception of Zach DeWolf, have raised over $85,000.

This city council race is about one thing: the re-election of socialist Kshama Sawant. The local plutocracy wants her out sooner rather than later. But Kshama will easily survive the primary. She has a broad following in the district, a sterling reputation as a fighter, and a strong campaign operation.

In 2015 the plutocrats tried to take out Kshama with Urban League CEO Pamela Banks, in many ways a more formidable opponent than any Sawant now faces, and Kshama beat her by 12 points in the general.

Banks unsuccessfully tried to split the black community. District Three includes Seattle's historically black Central District. I distributed Sawant yard signs in the CD with a friend on Saturday. The amount of new residential construction is eye-popping. If Seattle has been steadily gentrifying for years, what's happening now is a gold rush. Seemingly every block we traveled down had a new slender townhouse going up.

This go-round the plutocrats are trying a Gay Chamber of Commerce guy, Egan Orion, as their shill. He has the endorsement of the daily newspaper, The Seattle Times. Orion might not even make the general election. Labor, at least the developer-dependent building trades who have a lock on the central labor council, abandoned Sawant in favor of school board member Zachary DeWolf, who is another shill.

Conservative Pat Murakami is the dark horse. She has an enormous number of yard signs throughout the district. Murakami is running against the homeless, painting a picture of Sawant as a Trotskyite Fagin leading an army of the dispossessed bent on expropriation,

It's an interesting election because it takes place in an educated progressive district that is massively gentrifying. If somehow Sawant fails and the plutocrats triumph it is a very bad sign. Money will have won out one more time.

But I don't see how Kshama can lose.