District One: West Seattle

Lisa Herbold vs. Shannon Braddock

Before there was Kshama Sawant, there was city council member Nick Licata—or more specifically there was Licata’s fastidious, energized, left-wing staffer Lisa Herbold. 

Herbold, a former Tenants Union organizer, has been Licata’s brainy aide since he was first elected on a populist anti-stadium-funding and antidowntown platform in the late 1990s. In the ensuing 15-plus years, Herbold has done heavy behind-the-scenes (and often onstage) lifting on all of Licata’s signature social justice accomplishments, stopping the racism and classism inherent to car impounds, getting cops and city social service workers out of immigration enforcement, winning tenants rights such as mandatory rental inspections, making police officer records available for review, and, the Licata office’s crowning achievement, passing paid sick leave. And while she shares Sawant’s politics, she’s more likely to offer friendly amendments than to occupy Westlake.

Shannon Braddock, an aide to liberal King County Council member Joe McDermott, is less of class warrior than Herbold (she’s skeptical of dramatic linkage fees requiring developers to help pay for affordable housing) and more of an environmentalist—she helped McDermott lead on funding Duwamish cleanup and Maury Island preservation, and she’s into nerdy policy stuff like studies about vehicle miles traveled. A West Seattle PTA activist, Braddock is also a strong children’s advocate. 

✔︎  Vote for Braddock if you want mayor Ed Murray to have a progressive ally.
✔︎  Vote for Herbold if you want Kshama Sawant to have an experienced ally.

District Three: Capitol Hill, Central District, Madison Valley

Kshama Sawant vs. Pamela Banks

Whether she’s getting arrested outside Alaska Airlines while protesting low wages, denouncing colleagues as corporate lackeys for attending chamber of commerce retreats, or ushering the landmark $15 minimum wage law through council, Kshama Sawant is constantly watching out for Seattle’s underclass. With her zealous troops packing hearings, the incumbent socialist council member helped stop massive rent increases at the Seattle Housing Authority, and she’s currently revving up her followers in a fight for rent control and “the highest possible” developer fees to fund affordable housing. 

On a quieter front, Sawant’s a bona fide nerd about City Light rates; in her standard freshman-term gig as chair of the energy committee, she has emerged as a keen, studied watchdog. Her cult is creepy, but frankly we’re a bit squeamish that establishment dollars—developers, the restaurant industry, CEOs—have lined up behind progressive Urban League leader Pamela Banks simply because they see an African American woman as the best hope for defeating their Trotskyist foe. An experienced 30-year city employee at the transportation and neighborhoods departments and a former mayor Greg Nickels policy staffer, Banks took over the scandal-hobbled Urban League in 2012 and has undeniably turned the civil rights organization around, quadrupling the $500,000 budget to $2 million and galvanizing the group’s Career Bridge program for underemployed men of color.

✔︎  Vote for Sawant if you want to “Tax the Rich”! 
✔︎  Vote for Banks if you want the most fascinating era in Seattle politics to come to a premature close.

District Four: U District, Roosevelt, Wedgwood, Sand Point

Rob Johnson vs. Michael Maddux

Thanks to their August primary smarts, voters in District Four are starting out way ahead. They wisely booted the longtime incumbent, inconsequential council member Jean Godden, setting up a November showdown between two outstanding and distinct candidates: transit advocate Rob Johnson and Democratic activist Michael Maddux. 

Actually Johnson, the longtime executive director of the pro-ped, pro-bikes, and pro–mass transit nonprofit Transportation Choices Coalition, is technically the only “outstanding” candidate in the race, winning that top rating from the even-keeled Municipal League and being just one of four candidates citywide to get the gold star from the civic group during the primary. 

And no wonder. From transit-oriented development to environmental impact statements, Johnson knows his way around public policy. His history of aligning transit advocacy with equity has earned him across-the-board endorsements from fiery lefties like the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 21 to the centrist chamber of commerce. And he picked up nods from the green Sierra Club and the wonky Seattle Transit Blog along the way. 

Maddux, more street smart than planning-degree smart, is a gay single dad who comes at policy with more of a civil rights and labor lens—and, frankly, with more passion. As chair of the King County Democrats’ endorsement board, Maddux helped usher state senator (and closet Republican) Mark Miloscia out of the Democratic party. And, as a parks advisor, he went to the mat against neighborhood cranks for permanent city parks funding.

✔︎  Vote for Johnson if you want those architecture firm renderings of bustling urban streetscapes to actually work. 
✔︎  Vote for Maddux if you want to roll the dice on a passionate quick study with progressive values.

District Five North Seattle

Sandy Brown vs. Debora Juarez

Two strong progressives, Reverend Sandy Brown and former public defender and King County Superior Court judge Debora Juarez, are running in North Seattle. Brown campaigned for both the gun control initiative and the gay marriage measure. Juarez, a former attorney with Evergreen Legal Services, is focused on housing affordability (she also has a powerful rap about “decriminalizing homelessness”). Both candidates are minorities—Brown is Mexican American and Juarez is a member of the Blackfeet Tribe—which matches the changing demographics in North Seattle. But the more pressing question in the district is who will deliver on the long-standing need for sidewalks. While Brown has a clever idea (a hyperlocal tax), infrastructure isn’t as central to his politics as it is for Juarez. Seeing an urgent overlap between environmental and social justice issues, Juarez cites basic transit, pedestrian, and bike investments when asked, for example, about climate change. Brown’s sweeping answer to the same question focused on Shell Oil. 

✔︎  Vote for Brown if you want headlines.
✔︎  Vote for Juarez if you want bottom lines.

Position Eight At Large

Tim Burgess vs. Jon Grant

Incumbent Tim Burgess, often seen rolling his eyes during Sawant’s speeches, has a reputation as the council conservative. To the chagrin of the ACLU and the Seattle Human Rights Commission, the former Seattle cop turned successful PR consultant infamously tried to crack down on panhandling. He also regularly votes down amendments from the council’s lefty bloc for things like employer and parking taxes (instead of sales and property taxes) to pay for transit. He also sided with antsy homeowners who wanted to redline temporary homeless encampments out of residential neighborhoods. 

If these things don’t strike you as Scott Walker–level transgressions, it’s mainly because Burgess really is a liberal who led the push for Seattle’s preschool funding measure, brokered the deal on Seattle’s paid sick leave law, and recently passed a gun ammo and firearm tax—drawing a lawsuit from the NRA. Burgess’s opponent, tenants’ rights advocate Jon Grant, is focused on affordable housing, rent control, and more sweeping developer fees. Grant’s push for renters’ rights also comes with foreclosure protections, which is complicated by the fact that his parents helped him buy a foreclosed home.

✔︎ Vote for Grant if you want to strengthen the Bernie Sanders bloc on the council.
✔︎  Vote for Burgess if you occasionally want to keep that bloc in check. 

Position Nine At Large

Bill Bradburd vs. Lorena González 

Civil rights attorney Lorena González’s race against neighborhood community council leader and pod apartment watchdog Bill Bradburd is a bellwether contest. Bradburd is seen as the standard-bearer for the so-called neighborhood movement that’s freaked out about upzones, density, and bike lanes. If González, the former legal counsel to Mayor Murray who rose to prominence by suing the SPD (and prevailing) in the infamous “kick the Mexican piss out of you” case, wins as convincingly in her one-on-one with Bradburd as she did in the primary (she got 65 percent of the vote in a six-way race to his flatline 14 percent showing), the notion that Seattle wants to remain a sleepy burg will finally be put to rest. 

✔︎  Vote for González if you want to live in a city. 
✔︎  Vote for Bradburd if you want to live in the 1970s.