Business tries buying the Seattle elections again, quietly this time

By Danny Westneat

On November 1, 2023

With the fall political season winding down, there are some trends and themes playing out in Seattle’s election that set it apart.

The biggest one? It’s that business has learned its lesson from past failures.

Instead of openly trying to buy the election, this time around they’re being discreet in trying to buy the election.

Remember the Amazon debacle from 2019? That may have been the worst own goal in local political history. Amazon dropped an October surprise $1 million money bomb on the campaigns, gifting Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant with all she needed to survive. Namely, an enemy.

Business and other moneyed interests are again dominating the closing days of an election, but you probably haven’t heard as much about it. It’s not attracting national outrage from progressive superstars like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren like that 2019 Amazon money did.

But in the last couple of months, business has gone in for another million-plus, again swamping the ability of some candidates to respond.

Instead of being lumped together, this time the spending is spread out among nine different independent expenditure committees, all with innocuous, neighborly sounding names. These groups are separate from the candidates and don’t have to abide by contribution or spending limits.

Together, they’ve spent more than $1.1 million, from the National Association of Realtors, developer groups and a host of bankers, investors and other folks who play in the City Hall sandbox, such as Amazon’s general counsel. The money is going for ads opposing the more activist, lefty candidates, such as Maren Costa in West Seattle’s District 1 and council incumbent Tammy Morales in South Seattle.

The unions have curiously ceded the field this time. Their volunteers are out doorbelling for some of the above candidates, but the unions haven’t jumped in with much in the way of paid advertising, as they did in 2019. Union outside groups have spent about $300,000 in Seattle this fall.

So, how will all this affect you voters? There was major backlash last time. But now, business is playing it cooler. The money’s more diffuse. So though they’re once again bigfooting a Seattle election, my hunch is it’s probably going to prove more effective.

Another observation: These independent expenditure groups are ruining our elections.

The candidates are each authorized to spend only $93,750 for their campaigns, by the rules of the taxpayer-financed democracy voucher program they all agreed to. But the outside money has exceeded that cap in six of seven districts. Costa, in West Seattle, has had at least $160,000 spent against her just in the last 10 days. She’s been released from the spending restrictions, but campaigns have a hard time pivoting that quickly to respond.

Nobody understood this power dynamic better than Sawant. In 2019, she refused to join the democracy voucher program, arguing its spending limits would make her a sitting duck. Sure it’s ironic that the council’s socialist would resist the socialization of political campaigns. But she was also right.

“It does not prevent corporate PACs from overnight dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into the race to try to buy the election,” Sawant said prophetically in early 2019.

The spending restrictions should be abolished. It’s a quaint notion, but our democracy is disarming while the big money is not. Sawant got that; we should, too.

The other reason independent expenditure groups are bad is they inevitably muddy up the campaigns. This week in West Seattle, a group called, benignly, Elliott Bay Neighbors, but which is really a who’s-who of major developers, sent a mailing about District 1 candidate Rob Saka that was simply wrong.

It said he was endorsed by the firefighters, which in politics is as good as it gets. Trouble is, he wasn’t. (Neither District 1 candidate was.) So now Saka’s getting bashed for fluffing his résumé — the firefighters called it a “lie” — when Saka didn’t have anything to do with it.

“It’s very frustrating as a candidate to not be able to control the message put out there by these IE committees,” he said.

Voters should increasingly be suspicious about mailers that are “not authorized by any candidate.” The outside groups are likely to spend more on ads than all the candidates combined.

Finally, a note about Trump.

Yes, Donald Trump. You may have heard, and if you haven’t you probably will before Election Day, how this candidate or that in Seattle is “backed by Trump,” or “got money from a Trump donor.”

West Seattle’s Costa recently claimed this in a mailer about Saka, asking “Why are Trump and Republican donors supporting Rob Saka?”

As I am the original source of this Trump business, I thought an update and some context might be in order.

This all comes back to one George Petrie. He’s a Seattle real estate executive who had given more than $40,000 to the Trump Make America Great Again Committee but who also donates to local candidates prodigiously (Democrats and Republicans alike). I wrote about him in the summer of 2021, calling him the state’s top local Trump donor that year and noting he’d also given to the mayoral campaign of Bruce Harrell.

Soon after that column appeared, though, Petrie clawed back his Trump donations. Federal records show Trump’s committee paid back to Petrie $44,000 over nine days in mid-August of 2021. Petrie hasn’t made any Trump donations since.

So while it’s true that Petrie has been a Trump donor, he isn’t anymore. Ads could accurately call him a “former Trump donor,” and definitely he’s a GOP donor. But this much-repeated notion that candidates in Seattle are Trump-adjacent because of Petrie has gotten two years stale.

Seems like Costa and others should stop saying it.

As for me, I’m not proud that this guilt-by-association racket started with me. I am ecstatic though that something I wrote may have led to that charlatan Trump losing forty grand. Journalism’s a murky business, so you take your wins wherever you can find them.

This piece was republished from the Seattle News.