The Real Deal

First: authenticity was our strength. From the beginning, it was clear Wilson was a nontraditional candidate. She didn’t have a polished, campaign-ready political history, nor did her personality fit the extroverted politician profile. What some thought was a weakness, we realized early on was an asset.

The authentic Katie Wilson, who voters saw in videos and interviews, and at forums and in meetings, was remarkably intelligent, talented at communicating with specificity and clarity, and a seasoned organizer with hard-won instincts. She’d spent a decade and a half in the trenches, building a record of tangible wins for working people across the region. In some cases, she had been instructed by labor unions and other progressive organizations to stand down — advice that, in most cases, she ignored.

This independent, moral, and strategic streak is core to her character, an attribute that we embraced rather than tried to suppress. By encouraging Katie to stay true to Katie – despite numerous efforts from outside the campaign to have her dress differently, talk differently, and otherwise “professionalize” herself – we won over voters who were sick of consultant-speak and manipulation. In a historically antiestablishment time, she represented authentic change, not just in policy proposals but through her personality, aesthetic, and approach to campaigning.

New Media Savvy

Second, social media was critical to our success, not least because of the specific dynamics of our race.

In most Seattle elections, candidates have the support of either business groups or labor unions. However, Wilson’s opponent Bruce Harrell — the incumbent mayor who was strongly aligned with big business — had managed to break this binding “either-or” through tactical overtures to labor and progressives during his past four years in office. This meant that, before Wilson had even entered the race, the incumbent had stitched together a contradictory but coherent coalition that included big business (Amazon, Starbucks, Microsoft), large labor organizations (the Martin Luther King Labor Council, SEIU 775, and the building trades), the Democratic political establishment (Representative Pramila Jayapal, Governor Bob Ferguson, Attorney General Nick Brown), and the Seattle Times. Consequently, we needed to platform ourselves rather than rely on significant expenditures on our behalf. This was especially true during the primary.

Despite this unlikely but powerful coalition, we had identified one of our opponent’s biggest weaknesses: his lack of authentic and consistent communication. For the past four years, he had been operating with limited visibility, wheeling and dealing behind closed doors, with the expectation that he would coast to a second term. Meanwhile, homelessness was worse than ever, affordable housing was scarce, the cost of groceries was eye-watering, and small businesses were closing left and right. The city government was doing . . . what, exactly? No one seemed to know. In the early days of the campaign, voters often seemed resigned to voting for Harrell, despite not having positive views of him.

We set out to make a series of explainer videos. The first would link the high cost of a restaurant meal to the lack of affordable housing. Because the cost of living was so high, restaurant owners needed to pay their workers more, which caused them to raise prices; the lack of housing also meant fewer customers, which meant less profit, which meant businesses needed to make more per individual item sold. It was a vicious cycle: because everything was so expensive, people ate out less, exacerbating the problem. Wilson explained all of this while walking down the street with a cold piece of pizza, arguing that you deserve a living wage and to eat out at a restaurant from time to time. Seattle went nuts for it.

Over the next few months, we made more videos (one of our more popular featured Katie shopping for debate clothes at Goodwill), most of them shot and edited by volunteers. We learned that the highest traffic times were around 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., so we tried to post at those times every day. Photos of Katie out in the community, statements on current events, messages of solidarity with workers and immigrant groups — all of these went up onto the feed. We committed to posting one explainer video a week, no easy feat given that our entire video production team was composed of volunteers.

Our Instagram presence went from a few hundred followers at the start to over thirty-seven thousand now. And while we directed the messaging and approved posts, volunteers ran all of the accounts, monitored comments, and responded to direct messages. We posted to Facebook, Bluesky, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and LinkedIn. No one can tell you exactly how large an impact social media made on the election, but it’s clear to everyone that it was significant. The pizza video alone made Katie into something of a local celebrity.To be clear, we did not avoid the mainstream media. But new and social media were essential to our success. Voters, especially working-class and young voters, found us trustworthy because we were showing up in the places they got their news, and we were talking about the things that shaped their lives.

Katie Wilson’s Army

The third takeaway from our campaign is the value of our volunteer base. This was first demonstrated when we sought to qualify for “Democracy Vouchers,” a local program that allows voters in Seattle to award $100 of public money to candidates of their choice. To become eligible, mayoral candidates must receive six hundred ten-dollar donations and six hundred signatures. Within a few days, we had passed both thresholds, making our campaign the fastest to qualify in the ten-year history of the program. (If your city does not have a public financing system for elections, and you want to build a pathway for progressive and socialist candidates to get elected, we strongly suggest you fight to win a program like Democracy Vouchers.)

The enthusiastic volunteers who originally contributed — many of them members of the Transit Riders Union or affiliated organizations — then worked to collect vouchers from other voters. Over the next few months, hundreds of them staffed farmers’ markets, light-rail stops, music festivals, and political rallies, gathering the maximum amount of $450,000. The vouchers served three purposes. First, they allowed us to hire and pay staff, send out mailers, and purchase advertising. Second, they helped us to grow our lists of emails and phone numbers, which gave us another way to communicate with voters. Third, they allowed Katie to show up to house parties with working-class voters who were struggling to pay their rent and still walk away having raised hundreds or thousands of dollars, effectively democratizing her time and attention.

Volunteers coordinated by our field team collected $900,000 worth of democracy vouchers in total ($450,000 each in the primary and general) and knocked over fifty-five thousand doors (for context, about two hundred seventy thousand people voted in the general election). They also ran our social media accounts, designed our graphics, edited our videos, took our photographs, transported Katie (famously carless) to events, babysat her two-year-old daughter, organized house parties, phonebanked, textbanked, and more. They were the beating heart of our campaign, and the enthusiasm they generated frankly overmatched our competition. By the end of the campaign, Bruce Harrell was left fearmongering about Katie Wilson’s supposed lack of experience and saying things like “this is not the time for hope.”

Bread and Butter, Baby

The fourth observation is the significance of focusing on material issues rather than political labels. Katie Wilson is a socialist, she is a progressive, and she ran as a Democrat. We didn’t waste our time parsing the distinctions. Instead, we directed our messaging to other topics.

This was intentional. When we used to train organizers for local unions, we would tell the story of a worker who was trying to unionize his grocery store. The worker had all kinds of reasons for why he supported unions. “Unions are the reason why we have an eight-hour workday,” he said. “Unions are a source of political power for workers. Unions represent workplace democracy in action.” We agreed with everything he said. And yet, after months of trying to convince his coworkers, most of them decided not to join his effort. Why not? Because, we argued, for most people, abstract political ideology is less important than the reality of their material needs. Would unionizing the grocery store result in better hours for them? More money in their paycheck? Cheaper health insurance? Better (or worse) relationships with their coworkers? The question was not whether the workers supported having a union or not. The union was the answer to the question of how workers were going to improve their situation. But the workers needed to ask it.

We applied a similar logic to the campaign. Instead of leading with an argument for socialism, we addressed the issues that were top of voters’ minds: affordable housing, access to childcare, homelessness, and public safety. When Katie Wilson acknowledged to a reporter during the general election that, yes, she was a socialist, it barely registered. By that point, voters knew what she cared about. The label used to describe her belief system didn’t matter as much as what her values and priorities were.

Which brings us to our final observation.

Universalism and Localism

In our perhaps most consequential decision, we chose to focus our messaging on universalist and local issues. That meant affordable housing, childcare, labor rights, food access, violence prevention, small business support, and homelessness response. It did not mean reviving a maximalist call to “defund the police,” or emphasizing the liberation of Palestine, or demonizing the tech industry (which, like it or not, is central to Seattle’s economy and voter base), or using the narrow, competitive, identity-based framing favored by elements of the Left in recent years.

We were criticized for these choices. While Katie Wilson condemned the genocide in Gaza when asked about it directly (and she had no qualms about using the word), she made the decision early that as a candidate for a position with little influence over conflicts in the Middle East, she was going to focus on local issues. She built relationships with local Muslim organizations and advocacy groups, making explicit commitments to their members and communities, and affirmed that, as mayor, she would oppose any city collaboration with the government of Israel. But she only talked about the genocide when others brought it up. When she had the opportunity to frame the conversation, she was driving it toward affordability and other issues that she could impact once elected.

Similarly, on the issue of police, instead of calling for “defunding,” which was no longer popular in Seattle and likely only to set off a semantic tug-of-war, we framed the need for community safety and police reform as a question of civilianizing roles that did not require armed officers, such as those who respond to nonviolent property crime and traffic incidents. Key to this argument was advocating for an expansion of the CARE team, which provides a non-police response to some kinds of 911 calls, and arguing for community policing, which would require officers to work in better partnership with the communities that they serve.

Finally, on issues of equity, Katie avoided identity-based arguments while also making clear that she believed racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other forms of bigotry intersected with capitalist economic oppression to form the material basis of lived experience. When anti-queer agitators held a rally in Seattle, we issued a public statement condemning the organizers’ actions, just as when Somali childcare providers were targeted by the Trump administration, we released a statement in solidarity. We made extensive efforts to build relationships with local black and African American communities, Asian American communities, Latino communities, queer communities, Muslim communities, immigrant communities, and so on. In conversations, we focused on issues that these communities held in common — crises of housing, homelessness, food access, targeted mistreatment, and childcare. We did this because we believe that durable wins come from a solidarity that recognizes particularity while also stitching us together. Our decision to take a more universalist approach challenged us to better articulate our vision for an administration that prioritized the interests of the diverse working class. Proving that universal programs are the best way to win long-term collective well-being will be essential, we believe, for the future of our movement.

There are good arguments on both sides of these approaches, and we expect socialist and progressive candidates to wrestle with the balance for months and years to come. But for us, in our city at this time, we felt that running this way would give us the best chance to win our election — which, in turn, would allow us to advance a popular left-wing agenda the likes of which the city had never seen. We now have that opportunity.

An authentic candidate. A strong social media presence. A dedicated and energetic volunteer base. A relentless focus on material issues rather than political labels. And an emphasis on locally relevant issues and cross-community solidarity. That’s what worked this past year in Seattle. What will work in your city?