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Last night's Big Event was the
mayoral candidate forum, featuring fully seven candidates running for Mayor of Seattle, at the
Columbia City Theater. It felt a lot like I was in 2023 again, when I attended countless of these, except those for were Seattle City Council District 3, and Shobhit was running. This time we were just there as constituents—though it was far more for the district Columbia City is in (District 2), and this particular was very much tipped toward representing Seattle's Black community. It was hosted, and put together in a matter of a couple of weeks, by
Rainier Avenue Radio, and moderated by
MUSICA Entertainment founder and CEO Tony Benton.
It was mentioned at least three times that Seattle's Black community makes up 6% of Seattle's population, and whether that means they matter to any of these candidates' eventual success. (Side note: the figure is actually
closer to 7%. That's roughly 1 out of every 14 people, and would make a total of just over 50,000 people out of the city's entire population of 737,015 (based on 2020 Census data). For context, Capitol Hill is the mostly densely populated neighborhood in the Pacific Northwest, and the neighborhood population is around 30,000. My point is, 7% of an overall population may sound small but it's plenty big enough not to be discounted or underestimated.
The panel of candidates included Bruce Harrell, who is the incumbent. There were six other candidates on the panel, including
Ry, who had run for City Countil alongside Shobhit in 2023—in the primary results of that race, Shobhit came in last and Ry was second-to-last, in a comparable spread of candidates. To then run
for mayor after that experience seems a little bonkers to me, but whatever, more power to them. Shobhit and I are both goin to allocate half of our democracy vouchers to Ry, but as a gesture of goodwill. Ry doesn't have a shred of a chance of becoming Seattle's next mayor.
And here's what I will say about
all the other candidates besides Bruce Harrell: it was very apparent early on that they were all out of their depth. I went to this event last night not sure if I would support Harrell for reelection, but after seeing the performances of the other candidates, especially in the face of what was likely the toughest audience they'll get at any forum (black folks have no time or patience for bullshit), I quickly settled my mind on re-electing Bruce Harrell.
I've never thought Bruce Harrell was an especially exciting candidate or mayor. But even that's a kind of misguided thing to say to begin with: politicians aren't
supposed to be exciting. They're just supposed to get shit done. And even though there are legitimate complaints about Seattle not doing enough to solve some major problems (chief among them our homelessness crisis), something else I thought of right in the middle of the forum last night was that it's stupid to lay the blame on one individual's shoulders. People make this stupid mistake with the president as well (although currently a huge amount can be blamed squarely on President Fuckwit, we should always be cognizant of how wildly permissive and enabling both the other branches of government currently are), and even with state governors. It's a naive and ignorant thing to do.
Once the forum opened to the few audience questions there was time for, the first person to ask a question was an 80-year-old Black woman named Dawn Mason, a big supporter of Harrell, something she made no secret of. I don't remember the specific question, only that she was very emphatic that "We can't expect a mayor to solve all our problems in a single term," which is an incredibly valid point in light of the gargantual problems (including homelessness) facing our city. Then she added: "We gotta stop with these one-term mayors, this is ridiculous!"
This got a pretty heavy applause. It was apparent almost immediately that this was a very pro-Harrell crowd. I even said to Shobhit in the car on the way home after: It's a tough beat for White candidates trying to win over Black voters who support the Black candidate already in office. It's good for them all to face a tough crowd for sure, but how they all handled the crowd reactions really put the differences into sharp relief. Really none of them besides Harrell himself (and although I think I knew he was biracial, I didn't realize until I looked it up that he's
half-Black, half Japanese—and side note, I love that his father worked for Seattle City Light and his mother worked for the Seattle Public Library) gave satisfactory answers to any single question that related specifically to the Black community, and there were several.
Joe Mallahan, who one guy in the audience clearly despised and kept calling him "Garbage Man Joe" or "Garbage Joe" from the middle of the audience, literally said at one point, "I have a Black nephew," a statement that got a well-deserved groan from the audience. He even followed that up with "I've got a young Black man who calls me Dad." Like: so what? Talk about tone deaf.
Even Ry said, and I'm paraphrasing a bit because I can't remember verbatim: "My relationships with the Black people in my life are sacred." This didn't get a groan, but it hardly got cheers either; I felt a bit like the audience granted Ry slightly more respect as a person who identifies as trans. I could be projecting a bit there, I'm not sure. But the audience was far more contemptuous with Joe Mallahan.
There was another Joe on the panel,
Joe Malloy, who spoke very well on the issue of homelessness, and was very open about being homeless himself and living in a tent city. He even spoke pretty well, I thought, about the intersectionality of homelessness and people of color and other marginalized communities. There were people who openly disagreed with this assertion, but I agree with it: he said more than once that drug addiction doesn't cause homelessness but rather homelessness drives people to drug addiction. The problem with Joe Malloy was that homelessness was the single issue he could speak on with authority, and he very much fumbled on the questions regarding Seattle's Black community.
Frankly, I didn't feel like any of these people besides Harrell had any business running for mayor, but this is how the process works, and there's still value in other candidates pressing the incumbent, or even the front-runner, on important issues. I will credit Joe Mallahan as actually seeming to have more institutional and technical knowledge of how a lot of things work than perhaps anyone on the panel
besides Harrell, but Malloy was also utterly clueless on sociological nuances, and pretty despised by this audience in particular. I found myself considering
Katie Wilson when we got flyers from her in the mail a few days ago, as she did better with the questions overall than anyone besides Harrell, and felt pretty clearly to be in second-place in the runnings. But, pretty clearly a distant second: her reason for being 45 minutes late to this forum may have been perfectly legitimate but unfortunately it's still a count against her; and she didn't do a whole lot better than the other non-incumbent candidates when it came to questions about the Black community. More than once people would shout out from the audience: "What what are you
going to do?" and the candidate would have no solid answer. Bruce Harrell was the only one who ever truly did: both on what he's worked on while in office, and what his plans are for his future in office.
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There was one question from the moderator that I had very mixed feelings about: "Does Seattle have a Black community, and if so where is it?" This felt very much like a trick question, and especially a lose-lose proposition for the White candidates. To be fair, every candidate needs to learn how to answer questions that come this way, or seem phrased with an impossible answer. A couple of the candidates actually did sort of okay with this, but most really stumbled over the words they tried to get out in their response. Only Bruce Harrell got pointedly specific, rattling off three or four
zip codes (including 98122, the one Shobhit and I live in). This of course played incredibly well with the Columbia City crowd, largely Black, in this audience.
Whether it had to do with the concerns of the Black community or other issues, though, it was consistently Bruce Harrell who would answer with any real authority. He was the only candidate up there who truly commanded respect. The man is far from perfect, but what politican isn't? This forum really crystalized my thoughts about this election. I think Dawn Mason is really on to something when she says we need to give mayors more of a chance than one term. It would be one thing if Harrell were truly running the city into the ground, President Fuckwit-style, but that's obviously not happening. In fact, over the course is his first term Seattle has continued to improve, especially along the waterfront, in ways that really delighted me and only served to strengthen my unshakable love for this city. It might even be another thing if there were an even remotely viable challenger, but there is not. I don't feel like I need any other forum to come to this conclusion.
I only even know about this event because Shobhit got sent an email about it by the
Bruce for Seattle campaign. I kind of wondered if I should have slightly mixed feelings about going to a forum created specifically for District 2 voters when I am from a different district, but then I decided not to worry about it. The mayor is running to represent all districts after all, and even though the event was far more useful to me than I was for it just by being there, it
did solidify one more vote (mine) for Harrell. In fact, I can't think of any other community where a mayoral forum would have done so as effectively as this one did. I can imagine forums in more affluent and White neighborhoods going down a lot differently (particularly for Joe Mallahan).
Still, I saw a lot of parallels between this forum and the many I attended when Shobhit ran for City Council two years ago: there was a clear frontrunner very early on, and even a clear top-two pretty early on, but the other candidates still stuck it out with their commitments. I admire that, at least, and am not ready necessarily to tell any of them to throw in the towel. (Most of them could use some media and campaign training. Being trained and being authentic are not mutually exclusive.)
There were two women who asked most of the questions, and I can't remember who they were; I just remember one was a White woman and one was a Black woman. One of the rapid-fire questions had to do with whether they would endorse U.S. District 9 representative
Adam Smith for re-election. This was posed as a yes or no question, and then the same was done for whether they would endorse Kshama Sawant (I'm not even going to provide a link to her campaign website) in her race against him. A couple of people said they need to have more conversations but "probably yes" and most otherwise had an emphatic "yes" for endorsing Smith. All but one of them said "no" about Sawant, the far-left woman with notoriously stupid tactics who used to be on the Seattle City Council on my district. Only Isaiah Willoughby, the only other Black person on the panel but also the most naive and inexperienced with campaigning, said "yes" to endorsing Sawant. Immediate disqualification!
A lot of people make Palestine their one issue, and even though I am generally in agreement with how they feel about it, making it a single-issue voter thing is tantamount to self-sabotage. We have to consider all issues in aggregate, and Shobhit makes a good point when he mentions a veteran congressman like Adam Smith and what good he has actually done and the committees he's gotten into over time, giving him a strategic position in the Demcoratic party that no Freshman congressperson would have. Voters don't think about this stuff enough, how much voting has to be done strategically. Single-issue voters who refused to vote for Kamala Harris because of Gaza are largely the reason we are now dealing with a second President Fuckwit term, a scenario that is actively making the situation far worse, something we were all well warned about. I understand the resetment when faced with the choices of bad or worse, but knowingly making the choice that results in "worse" out of a sense of self-rightousness makes no sense.
Which is all to say: thank god the vast majority of these candidates basically had a "fuck Sawant" attitude. I really believe she would only make things far worse for all of us. I'm also pretty lucky because district 7, which is my district, has Pramila Jayapal, and she's basically wonderful.
The forum was scheduled from 6:30 to 8:00, and it ran a bit over, until maybe 8:15. This was largely because of the audience's incensed reaction to Joe Mallahan making the bold claim that Bruce Harrell is "a misogynist." Shobhit and I sat in the second row to the far left, which just happened to be right behind Harrell's campaign mamager, a Black woman whose name I
think was Diane, and then Harrell's wife (also Black), Joanne. Diane
really took exception to this "misognynist" accusation and attempted to commandeer the audience-questions mic, but the moderator had already stopped the audience questions and had to shut this down in the interest of time, even as the rest of the audience was also pretty loudly reacting.
I think that might have been followed by the "Does Seattle have a Black community and if so where is it" question, and then right after that the candidates were given a minute and a half for closing statements. Shobhit quipped in a whisper that Isaiah will probably say yet again that he grew up here and his mom lives nearby (he didn't in his closing statement, to be fair, although he did mention it three or four other times). As with everything else, only Bruce Harrell did even reasonably well with this.
Joe Mallahan was pretty cordial about all the contempt directed at him, to his credit, though I can't say any of his actual responses particularly engratiated himself to anyone there. To the guy who called him "Garbage Joe" he actually said "I love you" more than once: the guy called back from the audience, "You don't have to love me!" Whether it's Joe or the other candidates not already in office, these people really need to learn how to talk to a crowd. I can only come back to what I started with: everyone but Harrell himself was so clearly out of their dept, it left Harrell the only viable choice.
I'm certainly glad I was able to come to the conclusion in this way, though—democracy in action.
— पांच हजार आठ सौ उनचास —
[posted 12:31pm]
