With All Eyes on NYC, Seattle Quietly Braces for Its Own Experiment with Socialism

While incoming New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has been dominating the headlines, Seattle has been quietly preparing for its own experiment with socialism.

Like Mamdani, incoming Seattle mayor Katie Wilson identifies as a “democratic socialist.” Wilson, a progressive activist who runs a small nonprofit, the Transit Riders Union, narrowly defeated incumbent Democratic Mayor Bruce Harrell on Election Day, making Harrell the fourth consecutive Seattle mayor to serve just one term.

“Yes, I am a socialist,” Wilson said earlier this year. “I’m not out here waving a socialist flag, because I’m not a super ideological person. . . . But yes, I’m fine with being called a socialist.”

Wilson’s plans for Seattle look a lot like the blueprint Mamdani has offered for the Big Apple. She has proposed government-run grocery stores and has suggested Seattle voters “want to tax the rich.” She has also vowed to “Trump-proof” the city by protecting immigrants and LGBT communities.

Wilson wants to use tax revenue from her proposed higher taxes on businesses and the wealthy to fund government-owned apartment blocks that would be managed by the city. The program would be modeled after Vienna’s social housing model.

She has also advocated for universal child care and has vowed to bring 4,000 new shelter units to the city in an effort to address the homelessness crisis.

And like Mamdani, she came under fire over her past criticism of police and her support for defunding the force. While she argued in a 2020 op-ed that “There’s a strong argument for simply disbanding police departments and starting over,” she walked back her position on defunding the police during her mayoral campaign.

While campaigning, she and Harrell took a similar approach to managing the police department. The outgoing incumbent had prioritized officer recruitment after hundreds of officers left the department in 2021 and 2022. He did so by signing a new contract that increased officer base pay by 23 percent and offered hiring incentives of up to $50,000 for new officers.

Wilson has said she would look to maintain funding for the department and to continue on with the hiring bonuses.

However, she has also voiced support for the city’s Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) department, a crisis response effort led by social workers. She has vowed to make the department more independent, as CARE responders are currently required to be accompanied by police officers under a provision in the police union’s contract with the city.

But in many other ways, Wilson was a harsh critic of Harrell’s tenure, including his efforts to crack down on homelessness. Harrell conducted more homeless encampment removal sweeps than his four mayoral predecessors combined. Wilson told Bolts she’d curb these sweeps.

In the wake of Wilson’s win, Mamdani said Seattle is in “great hands.”

“Seattle voters made their voices heard: they want a new kind of politics — one that rejects corporate PAC money and delivers for working people,” he wrote.

Wilson, for her part, has no formal political background. Before starting her nonprofit in 2011, she worked odd jobs including a barista, boatyard worker, apartment manager, lab technician, baker, construction worker and legal assistant.

Her win was just one part of a progressive sweep in the city this Election Day: progressive candidates won all three of the city council seats up for grabs, while progressive Erika Evans ousted incumbent city attorney Ann Davison, the only citywide elected Republican. Evans won in a landslide, defeating the incumbent 62.5 percent to 37.2 percent.

In a recent interview with National Review, the outgoing city attorney attributed the loss to national headwinds.

Though the office of the city attorney is nonpartisan, Evans keyed in on Davison as a Republican, because she ran for lieutenant governor of Washington in 2020 as a member of the GOP. However, Davison, who identified as a Democrat until 2020, is not exactly a traditional conservative. Her office joined multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration this year, including challenges over the president’s executive orders on gender ideology, DEI policies, and sanctuary policies.

“I do think that it was a national response and it’s a sense of identity for a lot of people,” Davison said of the city’s progressive movement. “I don’t think that it was focused on work performance and local issues at all,” she added, pointing to her efforts to revolutionize her office’s data transparency, which allowed her to show that she came through on her campaign promises to crack down on crime.

Since Davison took office in 2022, crime in the city dropped 8.7 percent, from 50,367 cases in 2022 to 45,982 cases in 2024, with 2025 trending even lower.

But now, as she departs her office, Davison has concerns about public safety and homelessness under her successor and the incoming mayor.

The city attorney is tasked with prosecuting misdemeanors committed in city limits, which can include everything from DUIs to domestic violence to petty theft. Felony charges in the city are brought by King County prosecutors.

Evans, a former assistant lawyer for the U.S. attorney’s offices and the city of Seattle, largely campaigned on undoing much of the work Davison has done over the last four years to lower crime.

Davison’s office filed roughly 5,000 to 6,000 misdemeanor charges each year she was in office.

She created a “high utilization” list of repeat offenders for special emphasis in prosecutions. She found some offenders had as many as 40 referrals from police. Now offenders rarely meet the high utilizer criteria, which is ten referrals, as repeat offenders are in jail, have left the city, have stopped offending, or in some cases, have passed away.

She also abolished the city’s community court program after finding it doubled recidivism, but Evans has vowed to bring back a revamped version, which will mark the city’s fourth iteration of the program, this time hosted at local libraries.

Community court, as it previously existed, “was encouraging people to commit crime because they knew there were very little consequences,” Davison said. Under an agreement between the previous city attorney, the judge, and the public defense, the city attorney’s office agreed there would be no look back to criminal history for defendants in community court, so offenders were treated the same whether it was their first crime or their 41st crime committed.

Davison instead focused on expanding the city’s pre-trial diversion program and also authored and lobbied for new ordinances that created banishment zones for people suspected of committing drug or prostitution-related offenses. The city council approved the ordinances 8-1. The orders subject violators to arrest and up to a year in jail and a fine.

Evans, however, has claimed the banishment zones are “harmful and ineffective and racist.” She has vowed not to request anymore banishment orders or charge anyone with violating them.

The editorial board of the Seattle Times condemned Evans’s position, saying, “[Stay Out of Area of Prostitution orders] may not be the perfect solution but ignoring the will of the Seattle City Council and implicitly condoning the actions of those purchasing sex or controlling victims sends the worst possible signal.”

Davison noted the law only applies to traffickers and buyers, not to people who are being trafficked. “It’s highly confusing to understand why a lawyer would come in and say they’re not going to enforce laws. We’re not lawmakers, so that’s concerning. And I think that those things are starting to show improvements for fostering economic vitality in neighborhoods that have had very entrenched specific types of criminal activity in them for far too long and that’s why these were voted into law and so now they just will not be used.”

Evans, for her part, has vowed to provide alternatives to jail for certain offenders, to prosecute wage theft and to hold landlords accountable.

Davison said she has lived in Seattle for 30 years and was driven to run for office because of the public safety issues the city faced, which made it difficult and dangerous to raise her children in her longtime home.

When Davison was elected, the city attorney’s office had a 60 percent staffing level and a criminal case backlog of 5,000. There was “really just a sense that laws didn’t matter in the city of Seattle at the misdemeanor level of criminal activity,” she said.

With the new incoming leadership, Davison fears the city is headed backward.

“I have concerns for the future of the city given the incoming mayor and the incoming city attorney with the lack of focus on the laws and the tools that are available,” Davison said. “I hope that we don’t see that. We have the World Cup coming in 2026 and I hope that we are a city that can show we can function well and take court of ourselves. That’s what I left it as.”

And Davison isn’t the only one who’s worried.

Conservative Seattle podcaster Brandi Kruse predicted the city is “doomed” in a recent post on X.

“Cowardly ‘moderate’ Democrats who backed down in the face of destructive progressive policies led us to this place,” she added.