Seattle has elected a socialist as its next mayor.
Katie Wilson, a longtime community organizer and co-founder of the Transit Riders Union, has secured a mathematically insurmountable lead over incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell, a Democrat, according to the latest ballot returns. This means Seattle has taken an even harder turn to the left.
Wilson now leads by 1,976 votes, more than the number of ballots remaining to be counted. She cements her victory in one of the closest mayoral races in the city’s modern history.
Harrell’s office announced he will deliver an address to the people of Seattle on Thursday, a speech expected to be his concession.
Wilson’s win marks a sharp political turn in one of America’s largest cities and places Seattle alongside New York City, where voters recently elected democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor-elect.
Wilson, who has even embraced comparisons to Mamdani, campaigned on a platform of higher taxation, more affordable transit funded by taxpayers, stronger renter protections and less landlord protection, and universal child care.
Her path to victory was anything but conventional. On Nov. 4, she trailed Harrell by seven percentage points. But as late-arriving mail-in ballots, which are the often younger, more progressive voters, were tallied over the following days, Wilson steadily erased the gap. She took the lead on Nov. 7 and widened it just enough on Wednesday to make the outcome all but official.
The race revealed several unusual electoral dynamics. Wilson’s final 0.71% margin—1,976 votes out of more than 275,000 cast—fell just above the threshold that would have triggered an automatic recount. Roughly 1,700 to 1,800 ballots were initially rejected for signature issues, disproportionately from younger voters who tended to favor Wilson, and both campaigns scrambled to “cure” those ballots before the deadline. Another anomaly: nearly 3,500 voters participated in down-ballot races but skipped the mayoral contest entirely.
Wilson’s victory is even more striking given her background. The 43-year-old has never held elected office and has spent much of her adult life living with her parents while building the Transit Riders Union into a formidable voice on transportation and housing policy. She announced her mayoral run in March after concluding, she said, that Seattle voters were losing patience with a lack of progress on public safety, affordability, and homelessness.
Wilson will take office next year facing immediate challenges. Seattle is preparing to host FIFA World Cup qualifying matches, a marquee event expected to draw between 400,000 and 750,000 visitors. She also inherits ongoing crises in housing affordability, homelessness, and public safety—issues that dominated the campaign and will shape her early months in City Hall.
Her campaign said Wednesday it considers the race effectively over. “Ahead by almost 2,000 votes, we now believe that we’re in an insurmountable position,” the campaign said in a social media post. “We look forward to hearing the mayor’s address to the city tomorrow.”
Wilson’s victory adds Seattle to the roster of major U.S. cities shifting sharply to the left in local governance, signaling continued strength for progressive movements in urban politics heading into 2026.
4 thoughts on “Seattle’s mayor-elect is Emerald City’s version of NYC’s Mamdani”
The timing may be good. The progressive shift will put their policies on full display for many months prior to the election. Hopefully, some ‘blue-bies’ will open their eyes, re-start their brains (a BIG ask!), and discover that maybe conservatives actually know what they are talking about.
Hopefully, you will be correct. The new mayor has a limited skill set and experience. Things may go very badly.
As the big cities with record crime, homelessness, poverty, and housing affordability turn harder into the leftist ideology that causes these issues and wholly embrace the failed policies it’s not hard to imagine the results…since they are the policies that have led to these crisis to begin with. Unfortunately many more will suffer while learning the lessons that have played out historically across the globe when leftist policies are forced upon these who allow it.
If Alaska GOP party (@your chair warfield) doesn’t get the party together, You all will do the same to elect Alaska’s next socialist governor too in Clamon