Kshama Sawant has Won! Wave Approaching!

I’m incredibly proud to announce our victory! Together, we defeated the determined efforts of the world’s richest man to buy Seattle City Hall. Thank you for all your support and sacrifices.

With mail-in ballot returns as of Friday night, we’ve surged from being eight points behind on election night to leading by 3.6% and 1,515 votes, with that number likely to rise even further as the final thousand ballots are counted.

These election results are a repudiation of the relentless attacks of the billionaire class and the lies of the corporate establishment. Working people have stood up and said loud and clear: Seattle is not for sale! We want to keep our socialist voice in City Hall.

We won a stunning 60% of the later ballots, which come overwhelmingly from young and working-class people. While our district includes some of the wealthiest parts of the city — and is home to many members of the corporate elite like billionaire Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz — more working-class areas and neighborhoods with many young people and people of color, like Seattle’s Central District and Capitol Hill, voted decisively for our campaign. Many such precincts voted for us by more than 70% even on election night's initial returns.

Kshama Sawant 

In the end, all Amazon's loot could not buy a city council; it did buy the preferred candidate of the plutocracy, a bland gay aspiring capitalist, nine percentage points. Which is a lot.

As David Kroman writes in Crosscut,

When she’s sworn in for a third term this January, Sawant will be City Hall’s most senior elected official, a reality few could have imagined when she first declared her candidacy in 2013 on an explicitly Marxist platform.

In Sawant’s view, her reelection was not despite her far-left platform, but because of it. “It is the power of socialist ideas, Marxist ideas, the power of our analysis, strategies, our understanding of class struggle, the historical memory and lessons we bring of the past victories and defeats of our class, the working class,” she said.

For Seattle’s business community, her election represents a reversal of expectations. With just weeks until election day, groups such as the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce felt optimistic both that Sawant would be defeated by her opponent Egan Orion and that several candidates would be elected who were more friendly to the chamber’s agenda. While they suspected they’d lose races in Districts 1 and 2, there was an expectation that they could win in most or all of the remaining districts.

But then Amazon wrote a check for $1 million to the chamber-supported political action committee — bringing its total for the election cycle up to $1.5 million — and things began to turn south. In the race for District 3 between Sawant and Orion, polling two weeks before election day had Orion winning by high-single digits, according to a source familiar with the late-tracking polls. But the same polling also showed a strongly negative reaction to the Amazon contribution, which spelled trouble for those most associated with the cash dumps.

[snip]

In her speech to supporters, Sawant called the results a “mandate for bold, progressive ideas.” She called on her “progressive” colleagues-to-be to work to implement a hard-left agenda. Notably, she explicitly called for reviving the now-famous “head tax” on high-grossing businesses — which, once upon a time, was assumed to be politically toxic.

“The overall city council results were as close to a referendum on the Amazon tax as possible,” she said. “I look forward to working with this new progressive city council to urgently pass a strong tax on the largest businesses in the city, like Amazon.”

So what are the takeaways?

First, corporate cash boomerangs. The plutocrats are so unpopular with the electorate a proud Marxist can triumph in their backyard. This will necessitate some shrewd re-branding by the oligarchy. But they don't seem to have read this memo yet. Bloomberg's nascent quest for the Democratic nomination, as Maureen Dowd notes, will all but guarantee a victory for Elizabeth Warren. And one also-ran after the next in the lineup of the neoliberal anointed -- Klobuchar, Harris, Buttigieg, Booker -- continues to receive free advertising from The New York Times. All to no avail because the neoliberal anointed remain ten-points south of the big three -- Biden, Warren and Sanders.

Second, a blue tsunami approaches. Trump's tent was much bigger in 2016 than it will be next year. In 2016 Trump could rope in anti-war, anti-free-trade, pro-social-democracy voters; he can't do that this go-round. Trump shattered Rojava merely to move troops and bases to Deir ez-Zor; he's looking to settle with China; and he never delivered on infrastructure and was obviously never serious about it. Plus, after Charlottesville, young voters and African Americans will not sit out 2020 like they did 2016.

Third, nothing matters unless policies are actually implemented. So let's keep our eye on this newly-elected progressive council. Winning a left-leaning election mandate rarely translates into systemic change. Look at what people have to show for two Obama landslides: the (un)Affordable Care Act and scotched JCPOA.  Let's see if the head tax on Amazon is reintroduced and passed.