Seattle’s mayoral race remains too close to call, with democratic socialist candidate Katie Wilson trailing incumbent Bruce Harrell by fewer than 4,300 votes as of Friday.
The race could be decided by as few as 65 votes if Wilson, who some outlets like the Daily Mail have dubbed the “white female Mamdani,” continues to gain at the same rate she did in the most recent ballot count.
The Nov. 4 general election has produced one of the tightest contests in Seattle’s recent history. More than a week after Election Day, officials say about 50,000 ballots remain uncounted.
Former mayor Gregory Nickels estimated that if Wilson secures 54.85 percent of the remaining ballots—matching her performance in Friday’s batch—she would edge out Harrell by a razor-thin 65 votes. “
Yeah this will be close,” Nickels wrote in a Facebook post analyzing the data.
Wilson would become Seattle’s first democratic socialist mayor if elected. The 43-year-old’s campaign has drawn comparisons to that of Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who won a decisive victory in New York City earlier this month.
Harrell’s campaign website includes a statement from Carolyn Riley-Payne, former president of the Seattle King County NAACP, who questioned Wilson’s credibility on affordability.
“It’s hard to trust a candidate running on their challenges with affordability when her family’s wealth shields her from actual consequences and financial stress,” Riley-Payne said.
“Wilson chose to not graduate from college, and now chooses to rely on parental subsidy to avoid financial hardship,” Riley-Payne added.
According to Wilson’s financial disclosures, she and her husband pay $2,200 per month for daycare for their toddler and another $2,200 in rent for their one-bedroom apartment.
Wilson has spoken openly about her privileged background.
She told KUOW that she became aware of it while attending public schools and seeing classmates who did not have the same resources. After moving to Seattle in 2004, Wilson said she stopped taking money from her parents and worked multiple jobs to support herself.
“Psychologically, it really did something to me,” she said.
A spokesperson for Wilson’s campaign defended her financial situation, calling it typical of many working families. “Families from all different kinds of economic backgrounds support each other in all different kinds of ways,” the spokesperson told the Daily Mail.
The campaign statement continued, “Katie Wilson’s experience—as a working mom who lives in a one-bedroom apartment with her husband and two-year-old daughter and recently received a small amount of financial support from her middle-class parents to help pay for childcare in one of the most expensive cities in the country while she ran for mayor—is far less of an aberration than that of the incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell, who lives in a 7,000-square-foot house and has a net worth in excess of $15 million.”
The spokesperson added, “Katie’s experience is, if anything, representative of her generation and underscores the need for broad system change to address affordability for working people in our city and nation.”
Wilson led Harrell in the August mayoral primary by 9.5 percentage points. Ballotpedia reported that voter turnout for the primary was slightly lower than in the 2021 election.
Resist the Mainstream reported Tuesday the city of Ithaca, New York, just made history by electing a 20-year-old member of the Communist Party USA to public office.
Hannah Shvets, a sophomore at Cornell University and student organizer, secured a victory in the Fifth Ward race for Ithaca Common Council.
