Primary election night was a rough showing for Seattle’s moderate incumbents. The week that followed was even worse.
After the first ballot drop, Mayor Bruce Harrell lagged by one percentage point, Council President Sara Nelson was down by 14.6% and City Attorney Ann Davison was behind by 13.9%.
As King County Elections finished counting ballots over the succeeding week, the gaps between those incumbents and their progressive challengers widened significantly.
With just a handful of ballots left to be counted, political organizer Katie Wilson now leads Harrell 50.7% to 41.2%; nonprofit executive Dionne Foster leads Nelson 58.4% to 35.5%; and former U.S. Prosecutor Erika Evans leads Davison 55.8% to 33.4%.
There are nearly three months to go until November, and a lot could change over the course of general election campaigns. But Mayor Harrell’s 9.5% loss in the primary puts him on the back foot, and Nelson and Davison’s respective 22.9% and 22.4% gaps will be huge deficits to overcome.
Alexis Mercedes Rinck was the only Seattle incumbent to fare well in this primary. The Council’s most left-wing member is on the fast track to reelection, netting 78.3% of the vote over Capitol Hill business owner Rachael Savage’s 13%.
Rinck’s victory comes with the asterisk that Savage didn’t mount a serious primary campaign, raising only $7,800 and spending $5,600 to Rinck’s $225,000 raised and $148,000 spent.
But the results are consistent with voters’ strong progressive preferences this August, and part of the broader signal that Seattleites aren’t continuing their moderating trend for a third straight municipal election cycle.
Harrell, Nelson and Davison were all elected in 2021 in a city barely beginning its recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Seattle’s crime rate was still rising, street homelessness had proliferated amid pandemic shelter closures, the upheaval of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests was fresh in residents’ minds and there was a general sense among Seattleites that the world was out of order.
Campaign promises to rebuild the Seattle Police Department’s ranks, prioritize public safety and help the city recover from the pandemic resonated with voters, and Harrell, Nelson and Davison all beat their more progressive opponents.
That pattern continued in 2023 when Seattleites chose in five of seven district City Council races a slate of more conservative candidates whose politics and policies largely align with those of Harrell and Nelson.
Josh Cohen
August’s results didn’t come completely out of nowhere — there were clues in the past year that Seattle voters hadn’t fully given up their love of progressive policy and taxation.
Councilmember Rinck ran for office in 2024 on a campaign platform of passing new progressive taxes to fund social services, affordable housing, police alternatives and community development. She beat appointed Councilmember Tanya Woo, whose politics aligned with the Council majority, by nearly 17% in the special election to finish the final year of Teresa Mosqueda’s term.
In February, voters approved a new tax on big businesses 63% to 37% that will help pay for the work of the new Seattle Social Housing Developer.
The success of the social housing tax was part of Wilson’s inspiration to enter the race for Mayor. Wilson is the co-founder and general secretary of the Seattle Transit Riders Union, a progressive political organization that has successfully pushed for policies like minimum-wage increases and renter protections.
Wilson’s not surprised she won the primary, but didn’t expect to do so by such a wide margin.
“Winning over 50% of the vote in an eight-way primary, against an incumbent with a lot of institutional backing, feels pretty amazing,” Wilson told Cascade PBS. “So many people are feeling the pinch of rising rents, unaffordable child care, and other expenses from groceries to gas. Harrell is simply out of touch with the challenges working families are facing in this high-cost city, and he doesn’t have answers.”
Throughout her primary campaign, Wilson reminded voters that Harrell’s been in office since 2008, the start of his three terms as a Councilmember. In that time, Seattle’s housing has gotten drastically less affordable and homelessness has consistently worsened — problems Wilson said Harrell hasn’t solved.
Harrell’s campaign said they expected this to “be a challenging race” but likened it to 2021, when the primary was close but Harrell ultimately went on to win election by over 17%. In 2021, however, Harrell won the primary by 1.9%.
“We are confident that once voters know more about Bruce's Seattle story, and his commitment to affordable and safe communities, compared to Katie Wilson's thin resume and history of fringe politics, that we will prevail in November,” the campaign wrote in a statement to Cascade PBS.
Josh Cohen
In the race for citywide Council Position 9, Foster, like Wilson, thinks her success is evidence that Seattleites haven’t seen enough progress on housing affordability, homelessness and public safety. Foster is the former executive director of the Washington Progress Alliance, where she helped fight for the passage of the state capital gains tax.
“[Voters] are frustrated that Council President Nelson has been more focused on divisive politics that roll back the gains we have made, and when neighbors have expressed their concerns with the current Council, they’ve felt dismissed and ignored,” said Foster, referring to Nelson’s attempt to eliminate a new minimum wage for app delivery drivers, among other proposed policy reversals from the Council.
Nelson acknowledged that the city has significant work to do on major issues like housing, homelessness, public safety and the drug crisis.
“The primary election results are clear: Voters want faster action on their top priorities, and I share their frustration with the slow pace of progress,” Nelson said.
As an example, she pointed to the Office of Housing’s hundreds of millions of dollars in unspent Housing Levy funds, calling it “unacceptable” amid the affordability crisis.
The Office of Housing said the deep reserves are due in part to the long timelines for projects and slow pace of development. The City Council has, in recent months, explored the possibility of using Housing Levy funds to backfill the city’s projected $150 million deficit.
Nelson highlighted her first-term work on police hiring and addiction treatment services, but said there’s still a lot to improve. “Bottom line, the status quo isn’t working. Council passes the laws and the Executive implements them, and we’ve both got to work harder for a better Seattle," said Nelson.
Josh Cohen
Asked about the primary results, City Attorney Davison said, “We face the same hill to climb as we did in 2021. You know the result [of that election].”
She pointed to the August 2021 primary results in which she trailed Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, who she went on to beat in November. In that race, however, Davison was behind the frontrunner by 3.7% and 7,188 votes in the primary, a much smaller deficit than her 22.4% and 42,448-vote gap in 2025.
“Can we repeat 2021’s win? I believe so, with all my heart,” said Davison. “As voters learn more about the candidates’ positions and policies on enforcing laws and what’s at stake, I am confident they will choose the path we’re on instead of returning to the failed policies of the past, represented by my opponent.”
Her opponent Evans sees the results as an affirmation of the experience she’d bring to the office. Evans was an assistant U.S. Attorney in the Biden administration, a position she resigned from this spring. Prior to that, she was an assistant Seattle City Attorney under Davison’s predecessor Pete Holmes.
“We’re excited by this outcome and looking forward to the weeks ahead to the General election,” said Evans. “We see this outcome as a validation of my experience at the city and federal levels, protecting our rights and safety, and reflecting the personal experience I hope to bring to this office — an understanding of the challenges people face when rights are threatened and communities experience instability.”
