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.

Sawant's Got Her Mojo Working; Cage Fight in District 1; Some Thoughts on Rent Control

As anticipated, socialist firebrand Kshama Sawant rolled to victory in Tuesday's primary for city council racking up 50% of the votes in Seattle District 3. My guess is that total will increase as ballots continue to be tallied until the election is certified on August 18.

The conventional wisdom is that conservative ballots show up first. So initial counts usually skew anti-progressive. As the count proceeds the votes tend to be more working-class. No better example of this is Sawant's successful 2013 campaign against city council incumbent Richard Conlin. Conlin led by more than 6,000 votes on election night, but Kshama kept chipping away at his lead until she ended up winning by 1%.

Sawant's faux-progressive opponent Pamela Banks, who has garnered a solid 35% of the primary vote so far, will advance to the general election. But come November even if Banks were to grab all the votes of the other candidates in District 3, the chances of her beating Sawant are tiny. The reason? The Seattle Times reports that as of election night 21% of Seattle voters had returned their ballots. Summer primaries are low-turnout affairs that favor the propertied class. General elections, which usually feature a hot-button statewide ballot measure or two, bring the "unwashed" to the polls in greater numbers. If Banks can only manage to get within 15 points of Kshama in the Richie Rich primary, she has little hope to prevail in the general election.

This message I am sure has registered loud and clear in the downtown corporate suites. What will be interesting going forward to the general is if the developers, landlords and business moguls continue to bankroll the phony Banks. The smart play clearly at this point would be for local plutocrats to back off and pour their dough into other districts to make sure Kshama doesn't have like-minded allies on the council. Dumping more money into Banks' campaign is just going to bring more Sawant voters to the polls.

As a District 3 resident I saw many Banks yard signs. She clearly won the yard signs primary. Kshama didn't invest in traditional yard signs, the kind that are staked into a lawn. Instead, the Sawant campaign used handbills the size of a small poster with messages like "TAX THE RICH!" or "SUPPORT RENT CONTROL" and then "RE-ELECT KSHAMA SAWANT." These handbills are then taped to a utility poll or put up in apartment window (which is what I did). Also, I saw no one displaying support for Banks by wearing a Banks campaign t-shirt, whereas I made sure every weekend in the lead up to the primary to wear my fire-engine socialist red "Re-Elect Sawant" t-shirt whenever I went out running. On Sunday drenched in sweat on the back end of a long run one guy saw my Sawant shirt and gave me a high five.

Kshama can't be beat. Her support is deep and real. Pamela Banks' campaign is a fiction fabricated by corporate cash.

The race in District 1 is going to be a cage fight. A single percentage point separates the corporate candidate Shannon Braddock from the people's tribune Lisa Herbold. I would imagine the plutocrats are going to inundate this race with cash in order to prevent longtime Licata-aide Herbold from joining Sawant on the council.

The tangible fear on the part of the power elite is that there will be a ground swell to enact rent control. Stories are rife on both coasts about the spike in predatory rent increases; in fact, the anti-Sawant Seattle Times concluded its main primary election recap with the following two paragraphs:

Robin Orona, 50, also stopped by the drop box. Orona said she was thinking about her own housing crisis as she filled in a ballot bubble beside Sawant’s name. 

The Capitol Hill mother of two said her family’s rent is set to increase by hundreds of dollars next month because the building was recently sold. Sawant has been pushing for more protections for tenants, including rent control.

I have lived in two cities -- Berkeley and New York -- that had rent-control laws. Rent control is like a form of catastrophic health insurance. It doesn't prevent your rent from increasing; in fact, rent control pretty much guarantees that your landlord will increase your rent each year by the maximum amount allowed (based on whatever formula that is). In Berkeley and New York City, I can't recall what it was; but I don't think it was more than 5% per year. What rent control prevents is the gigantic increases, the Dickensian horror stories which are becoming all to familiar where a new owner comes in and overnight doubles the rent basically forcing the tenants out onto the street.

Let's not bullshit each other. This is a form of terrorism. Most people live where they live because it has some relation to where they earn a living. You take that away from them overnight, and you are threatening their livelihood. You are threatening their lives.

Seattle District Elections: Money Tries to Beat Back Kshama Sawant's Progressive Movement

On the job I will have conversations with the few coworkers who are able to conceive of a big picture. Where are we headed? Who is going to win it all in 2016? Can we imagine a future that isn't bleak and apocalyptic?

My usual contribution to the dialogue is to locate the nexus of our collective ills in the concentration of wealth and power in a tiny elite who are driven by insatiable greed and who feel themselves somehow invulnerable to the onrushing societal and ecological collapse.

Yesterday I was telling a coworker that if you are a Saudi royal who owns opulent estates on more than one continent, the possibility of genocide in Yemen or igniting a war with Iran must not mean what it does to your average person. The super-rich I believe always expect to be able to parachute somewhere to safety.

Another one of my mantras is that we -- "we" meaning the 99% -- can't win the money game; the super-rich have far more of it. If we try to compete by pooling our dollars and cents -- and try we must -- we almost always end up being buried.

The story of our present history -- Citizens United v. FEC -- is a story of a 1% who, freaked out by the success of Obama 2008 in raising millions online in small donations, rushed to equate money with free speech, clearing the way for unlimited independent expenditure campaigns and creating a brave new world of electioneering in the United States.

In the City of Seattle a law was passed in 2013 to create a district system for the city council. Of the nine council seats, seven would represent individual districts and two would be at-large.

The idea is that it takes a lot less money for yard signs and mailings to campaign in a couple of neighborhoods than it does citywide. I don't think that can be denied.

But what we are seeing in the midst of primary voting (election day is August 4) for the first district elections is that money in the form of independent expenditures is saturating the process as never before.

I am at ground zero, District 3, where superstar socialist Kshama Sawant is running for reelection. The Downtown Seattle Association (DSA) has backed a shill, Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle President Pamela Banks, in an attempt to oust Sawant.

Banks' yard signs and hip, colorful, almost Avalon Ballroomesque posters are, if not everywhere, highly visible. It is a cynical effort made possible by developer deep-pockets that repackages the Urban League corporate toady as a multiracial, multicultural Hippie goddess. As Sawant wrote in a recent email, "So far over $70,000 from 160 top corporate executives, bankers, private equity managers, and developers have poured into our race."

Local captains of industry are banking that Banks can hoodwink enough voters, the ones who are obviously not paying attention, to fill in her bubble on the ballot.

The same thing is happening in other districts. In District 1 $74,000 has been dropped by a business PAC to make sure Lisa Herbold, a longtime legislative aide to Nick Licata, will not join Kshama on the council to push for rent control in the city.

What we are witnessing is the Democratic Party, which is terrified of a socialist rebirth at the local level thanks to the celebrity of Sawant, joined at the hip with the downtown power structure of the Seattle Times, developers and sundry capitalists drenching the primary election in gobs of cash in an effort to beat back a truly progressive uprising.

The issues are income inequality and exorbitant rents in a city that is rapidly, chiefly due to Amazon's ascent, becoming a San Francisco on the Sound. Kshama has proven herself time after time a fighter who will not go down, a rare almost unique politician who walks her radical talk and who cannot be bought. She is concatenating allies around her; and the fear of the power elite is that these allies will join her on city council. Hence, the gobs of cash.

We'll see what happens. I don't think Kshama can be beat. And as for the important District 1 race, the large independent expenditures will hopefully go the way of Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS effort in 2012: Lots of money which in the end bought next to nothing.