So it Looks Like Mayor Katie Wilson

Katie Wilson, if nothing else, has had an audacious rise from a little-known progressive activist to the odds-on favorite to be mayor of the biggest city west of Chicago and north of San Francisco. Tuesday’s ballot counts tracked with Seattle’s procrastinator-voter trend to break hard left, with Wilson erasing Bruce Harrell’s eight-point election day lead to pull ahead by 1,346 votes.

Wilson had about 55% of the votes counted on Monday, which were mostly pulled from ballot drop-boxes. Wilson got a similar haul on Friday. The trend is causing Harrell’s folks to break into the good Scotch to ease the pain, because more ballots were dropped in the drop box at Seattle Central College, an epicenter of the Gen Z crowd on Capitol Hill, than from any of the city’s 31 drop locations.

Machine recounts are required for races separated by less than 2,000 votes; hand recounts are required for a 150-vote difference. Time to bring in the lawyers. So recent history tells us that Seattle will likely be under a socialist administration at City Hall, with a new, farther-left city council amenable to Wilson’s tax-the-rich populism.

If the margin holds, the post-mortems will focus on Seattle’s wild political swings in the past decade between far-left idealists and sober centrists, which, as The Seattle Times’ Danny Westneat noted this weekend, leave neither side fully able to fix the city’s woes.

Both campaigns hit doorbells and cell phones this past weekend looking to cure about 1,900 challenged ballots in the Seattle race. That hammer-and-tongs campaign work involves getting voters whose ballots typically lacked a signature to prove they were, in fact, the voter, with a valid John Hancock.

A note on all those drop boxes: a remarkable 308,990 ballots were dropped countywide (Seattle is about half of the countywide total) in the final two days of the election. That drove the percentage of last-minute votes cast on election day higher than during the last two presidential elections. A $5,000 text message blitz on election day, paid for by SEIU 775’s PAC, hit more than 62,000 young and low-turnout voters — likely Wilson voters — urging them to find a drop box. Good money spent, it seems, but the trend further muddles the ability of politicos to read anything meaningful into initial vote counts.

Meanwhile, Trump’s war on mail voting goes to the Supreme Court. The Washington State Standard’s Jake Goldstein-Street wrote about a new U.S. Supreme Court case that could have big consequences for the Evergreen State’s vote-by-mail system. The court case, which is out of Mississippi, heads to D.C. via an appeals court that took a jaundiced eye toward Mississippi law that — like Washington’s — allows mail-in ballots to be counted after Election Day. That late counting, the argument by the Republican National Committee goes, violates federal law’s definition of “election day,” when voting must be conducted.

If the Supreme Court agrees, it would certainly delight President Trump, who has raged against vote-by-mail, and such a decision would cause all kinds of chaos for Washington’s vote-casting, which counts both mail-in and drop-box ballots that are postmarked or dropped by the end of election day. (Jonathan Martin)

A tax on short-term rentals redux

Airbnb and friends are bringing a money gun back to a high-stakes fight in Olympia over a tax hike on short-term rentals.

You may have seen a commercial or two about exactly that on the tube this week. The footage tugs at all the right heartstrings. In between the smiling families road-tripping through picturesque forests and cheering their progeny at soccer games, the TV spots jabbed lawmakers’ ongoing bid to let local governments impose a new tax on short-term rentals — Airbnb’s bread and butter. They were also keen on highlighting their role as wildfire shelters, as was the case in L.A. earlier this year.

The above was part of a six-figure ad blitz courtesy of the humbly named Airbnb Helps Our State Thrive (HOST) PAC, which dropped some $610,000 into the committee back in October per the Public Disclosure Commission. The buy dovetails on its campaign from earlier this year, which helped nix such a proposal from Sen. Liz Lovelett, D-Anacortes, whose touristy district around the San Juan Islands is home to plenty of splashy rental homes.

Lovelett’s proposal breezed by the Senate but hit a roadblock in the House, where lawmakers took a hard pass on it last session. Airbnb is betting big bucks they will take another crack at it, especially as local governments scramble to fill their own budget gaps.

Consider the aforementioned money shot a succinct preview of a rumble under the rotunda. Should Airbnb lose, we’re told they’re ready to play in next year’s elections. (Tim Gruver)

These articles also appear in The Washington Observer.