The establishment versus the abolitionist

Big money, orchestrated campaign seek to sink upstart bid for city attorney

When we published our well-received piece about abolitionist public defender Nicole Thomas-Kennedy’s surprise win in the primary for Seattle city attorney, David Kroman over at Crosscut tweeted that describing her as the “likely” winner in November seemed a tad bullish.

My response at the time:

Well, something interesting is happening that might make me wrong.

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Seattle’s moneyed donor class, along with some of the Eastside’s moneyed donor class, quite suddenly developed a passionate interest in a race that had previously been sort of an overlooked experiment in the unintended consequences of the city’s democracy-voucher program. Two former Democratic governors made very public endorsements of Thomas-Kennedy’s opponent, maybe-former Republican Ann Davison. The Seattle Times doubled down on its endorsement of Davison with a scolding editorial against Thomas-Kennedy. Deeply concerned op-eds are appearing in prominent publications. And a political action committee opposing Thomas-Kennedy looks like its going to dump more money into the race than either candidate. In short, there’s an orchestrated campaign to keep Thomas-Kennedy from winning.

We’re not going to delve too deeply into the policy differences here, which are immense. The short version: Thomas-Kennedy wants to end most prosecutions of low-level crimes, under the argument that prosecution and punishment do more harm than good. Her opponents

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fear that would lead to a lawless, violent dystopia, which would be both bad and bad for business.

If you want to dig in, check out Erica C. Barnett’s lengthy Q&A with Thomas-Kennedy in PubliCola, then head over to Crosscut for one of the aforementioned op-eds, built around a particularly gruesome anecdote of the consequence of non-prosecution. It was penned by one Scott Lindsay, who served as a public safety policy advisor to former Mayor Ed Murray, an association that helped Lindsay get brutally spanked

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in his own run for city attorney four years ago.

Lindsay, now a consultant, is actually the driving force behind this campaign, along with Erin Goodman, the executive director of the SoDo Business Improvement Association, a kind of public-private partnership that advocates for the mostly industrial area south of downtown Seattle. Goodman has been fighting with the city for years now about the disproportionate impact of homelessness on SoDo and the city’s highly visible disinterest in fixing all of that, which has prompted various ad-hoc responses including that giant cinder-block thing.

I should note at this point that KOMO TV had a version of this story on Friday, when I was not really paying attention because of the new puppy and the fact that the Oct. 15 tax deadline — or at least the evening thereof — is a holiday in our house because the Woman Who Lets Me Live With Her is a fancy variety of tax accountant. But we can add a little Observer-style context.

Here’s how this campaign unfolded. In late September, former Democratic Governors Gary Locke and Chris Gregoire, who happens to be Lindsay’s mother-in-law, endorsed Davison and roundly denounced Thomas-Kennedy. The move by the former governors, who are centrist or even conservative Democrats by today’s standards, drew howls of outrage from local Democratic groups that had endorsed Thomas-Kennedy.

The independent committee, Seattle For Common sense, was created Oct. 1. by Lindsay, Goodman, and Victoria Beach, a longtime advocate for public safety in the city. Less than three weeks later, the committee has raised more than $300,000 from an interestingly bipartisan cast of extremely wealthy people and organizations.

There’s $25,000 from Vulcan, Inc., the real estate empire created by the late Paul Allen. There’s $25,000 from Steve Gordon, the truck dealer and founder of Concerned Taxpayers of Washington State, a conservative PAC currently spending freely to try to salvage Kathy Lambert’s re-election bid for the King County Council. There’s $25,000 from John Goodman, the vintage Ferrari-driving real estate tycoon from last week’s Observer on all the money sloshing around in the mayor’s race. There’s $10,000 each from Microsoft President Brad Smith

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and the Seattle-based shipping conglomerate Saltchuk.

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There’s $9,000 each from John Stanton and Chris Larson

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, members of the ownership group of the Seattle Mariners.

Now Gordon is probably here on purely ideological grounds. His group is all about stopping the spread of what conservatives refer to as “Seattle Crazy.” But everyone else has actual skin in the game. Vulcan and Goodman are among the city’s biggest commercial landlords, yearning for a `profitable post-pandemic Return To Normal. Smith has a similar interest in a Seattle that appeals to the city-loving nerds that Microsoft depends on. Saltchuk’s headquarters is in Pioneer Square. Stanton and Larson? Baseball fans prefer to pre-game free of dystopia.

That money is buying this hit mailer:

Really a classic of the genre. The grainy photograph. The angry red banner. The context-free quyote. You can almost hear the creepy minor chords.

And this takeover of The Seattle Times home page this morning:

Somebody needs to call their ad rep. The targeting robots should know that a reader sitting in 98070 on Vashon Island doesn’t get a vote in this election,

And it paid for this website, which focuses on some really ill-considered tweeting Thomas-Kennedy did last year.

Thomas-Kennedy does have at least two monied defenders of her own. A recently created PAC called Voices United has raised $10,000 from two $5,000 donors, one of which is the True Patriot Network, a nascent invitation-only social media platform aimed at improving American political discourse (Good luck with that.). The PAC has spent $9,500 on text messages opposing Davison. What say you, dear readers? Anyone get one?

Now it’s not clear this avalanche of negative campaigning against Thomas-Kennedy is going to work. Seattle is still overwhelmingly Democratic, and endorsements from Locke and Gregoire may not be enough to scrub the Republican off Davison, who ran for lieutenant governor last year under the GOP banner..

It’s also unclear Thomas-Kennedy has enough money left to fight back. Although her campaign had raised more than $335,000 through Oct. 11, almost entirely via democracy vouchers, it had just $62,000 in hand last week, and $22,000 in debts. Most of the money went to fundraising costs and consulting fees collected by Prism West for harvesting all those democracy vouchers. Its filings to the Public Disclosure Commission show very little spending on advertising of any kind.

That evokes Prism’s other major client this cycle, the mayoral bid of Andrew Grant Houston, which turned out to be more of a moneymaking opportunity than a political campaign. The numbers are oddly similar: Grant’s campaign raised $346K, most of which went to Prism, and wound up with more than twice as many vouchers (13,853) as votes (5,485). Could this be the Seattle progressive version of the Culp grift?

All that said, the campaign did raise a robust $109,000 in September and early October, so enough money may be flowing for a late push.

She’s still an intriguing bet, and the most interesting political story of the year. But Thomas-Kennedy doesn’t look like as much of a lock as she did in August.

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And now for some adorable puppy…

Arya thought bubble: “Explain to me again why I can’t go on the beach yet? What are these “shots” of which you speak?”

1. Journalism as the “first rough draft of history” is generally credited to former Washington Post Publisher Philip L. Graham, but there’s some debate as to whether he truly coined it.

2. We don’t spend much time on Davison here because it’s abundantly clear that nobody is that excited about her. This is Thomas-Kennedy vs. not-Thomas-Kennedy.

3. In 2017, Lindsay ran to the right of incumbent Pete Holmes, who ran third in the primary this year. Lindsay lost by nearly 100,000 votes out of about 200,000 cast. Maybe he should have waited four years; he’d be a stronger candidate than Davison.

4. As we noted in this piece, Microsoft itself can’t play in Seattle politics anymore, but Smith can as an individual. Ten grand is the change in the couch for a Microsoftie of his seniority.

5. In my former life as a strategic communications consultant, Saltchuk and its subsidiary Foss Maritime were among my clients.

6. I really only mentioned Larson so I could link once again to this fantastic piece, which may be the finest example of the schadenfreude-laden art of mining the divorce file for a great story. It had to be unsedated-colonoscopy unpleasant for Larson.

7. I rashly bet on Cary Moon for mayor in 2017. In my defense, I was getting serious odds.