Success by Association? Harrell Ad Piggybacks on Mariners

As you were enjoying the Mariners’ 10-3 beatdown of the Toronto Blue Jays in the American League Championship Series on Monday, you might have seen this ad from Bruce Harrell for Seattle’s Future, the wealth-fueled PAC behind the incumbent mayor.

That’s the first salvo in a $700,000 independent campaign designed to erode the advantage that progressive challenger Katie Wilson took out of the August primary. Most of the money is earmarked for television between now and Election Day, November 4.

The spot leans on an edit of some awkward moments for Wilson during a Seattle Channel debate between the two candidates, in which Harrell challenged Wilson on her administrative experience and the cost of her ambitious agenda. Wilson’s experience is mostly running the small — although politically effective — Transit Riders Union.

As the ad notes, that experience pales before the complex task of running a city with more than 780,000 people, over 14,000 employees, and hundreds of needy stakeholders.

The PAC behind Harrell has at least five times as much money to work with as Katie Wilson for an Affordable Seattle, the independent committee behind Wilson. That kind of advantage buys a wide audience for Harrell’s camp to make the argument that he should get another term instead of getting shunted aside for a newcomer. We took a look at the much smaller campaign from the Wilson side last week. Both candidates are relying on the city’s democracy voucher system for their own campaigns, where the spending limits associated with that program means neither has a significant cash advantage. (Candidates and independent campaigns are barred from coordinating.)

Will the Harrell side’s attack work? Harrell finished 18,000 votes behind in the primary, and the bettors on the prediction market Kalshi still peg Wilson as a prohibitive favorite. We know the pro-Harrell PAC has spent about $50,000 on research so far, including a series of focus groups after the primary. That work likely tabbed Wilson’s experience as her most exploitable weakness. That said, even $700,000 doesn’t go that far in an expensive market like Seattle, especially in these times of fragmented viewership.

It should be noted that none of Seattle’s recent mayors brought extensive administrative experience to the job. Harrell’s argument to be mayor stemmed from more than a decade on the Seattle City Council, the city’s legislative branch. Former Mayor Jenny Durkan was U.S. Attorney, while her predecessor, Ed Murray, had been leader of the Democratic caucus in the state Senate. Murray’s predecessor, Mike McGinn, like Wilson, ran a small nonprofit that tangled with the city’s power structure. McGinn’s outsider administration struggled to find its footing early on and lost a reelection bid to Murray. Nor did the insider-heavy Murray and Durkan administrations result in a second term, as both candidates decided not to seek a new term.

One interesting element to this ad is the amount of the audio that is devoted to the mandatory disclosure of the PACs donors. That’s a Seattle-specific piece of campaign finance law designed to keep PACs from hiding their money behind a friendly-sounding generic name. In this case, the list uses up fully half of the 30-second spot’s audio track. The second name on the donor list is John Stanton, the majority owner of the Mariners. Wilson’s campaign has been leaning into calling out all the wealth behind the pro-Harrell PAC, trying to paint him as a lackey of the rich.

While it’s likely that many of the bandwagon fans watching Monday’s Mariners game won’t connect the dots, it might turn out that the support of the really rich guy who also opened his checkbook to put a winning baseball team on the diamond at T-Mobile Park wasn’t such a bad thing. It’s worth remembering that the late Paul Allen, owner of the Seahawks, died as a hero to the city’s sports fans because of that banner hanging in the rafters down the street.

This story also appears in the author’s political blog, The Washington Observer.