This time last year, Katie Wilson had no plans to run for any elected position, let alone the highest office in Seattle. 

Then, last February, voters adopted a tax on big Seattle businesses that would pay for the city’s newly created Social Housing Developer. Not only did the measure win in a landslide, it did so despite the fact that then-Mayor Bruce Harrell had endorsed a competing measure to stop it.
 
The common wisdom before that special election was that Harrell was on the glidepath to reelection and would be the first Seattle mayor elected to a second term in 20 years. But Wilson saw something in that result: evidence that Harrell was not fully aligned with a majority of Seattle voters, and that many of those voters shared her vision for the city.

That intuition proved correct. Despite having never held elected office and being a relatively unknown figure outside of Seattle City Hall—facts for which Harrell’s campaign tried to hammer her—Wilson finished first in the August primary, and her populist campaign resonated with just enough voters to eke out a victory in the fall. 

Shortly after election results were certified, Wilson and her transition team took over a sprawling corner of the Seattle Municipal Tower’s 41st floor. On a gloomy mid-December day, a handful of transition staffers sat typing away. The sounds of a strategy meeting to help shape the mayor's year-one agenda spilled out of a crowded conference room. 

Sitting in her temporary office backed by a sweeping view of Capitol Hill, Lake Washington, and the Cascades, Wilson said taking on the job has actually felt natural. The issues she ran on—affordability, homelessness, transportation, and quality of life—are the same ones the 43-year-old has been working on for more than a decade as a progressive political organizer in Seattle and the surrounding suburbs. 

“Affordability has been just a really core theme of my whole career, and became a core theme of the campaign,” Wilson says. Now it will be a theme of her mayoralty.

Wilson cut her teeth as an organizer with the Seattle Transit Riders Union, the grassroots group she cofounded in 2011 to fight against cuts to Metro bus service. Over the years, it has successfully fought for the creation of reduced low-income transit fare and free transit passes for low-income middle and high school students in Seattle and run successful voter initiative campaigns to raise the minimum wage in Burien and Tukwila. 

Wilson also played a key role in the creation of Seattle’s JumpStart payroll expense tax on big businesses, which has become an essential revenue source for affordable housing in the city and has helped balance the budget every year amid postpandemic deficits. 

Those victories required building coalitions of transit riders, low-income residents, renters, labor unions and even business owners to persuade councilmembers to change laws or voters to adopt initiatives.

Wilson is hoping to draw on her skills as an organizer to implement the straightforward but nonetheless ambitious agenda she campaigned on: making a dent in the homelessness crisis by expanding shelter capacity and services; building more affordable housing (including publicly owned social housing); and pushing for safer streets, affordable childcare, food access, and worker protections, with new taxes to help fund it all. 

Getting there, Wilson acknowledges, will be hard and will often involve conflict. Change comes slowly in big-city government, and there are plenty of entrenched interests in Seattle who don’t share Wilson’s progressive priorities. She also needs support from a divided city council and is inheriting a projected $127 million budget deficit. 

The job of the mayor is fundamentally about city management. They pick department heads and set priorities; they establish the parameters for the city budget each year. It’s the mayor's responsibility to make sure the city is running well. It’s the city council’s responsibility to pass laws and approve city spending. 

Wilson will get to work with what should be a fairly friendly council. After 2021 and 2023 saw a slate of moderates elected on pro-business, law-and-order campaigns, the pendulum swung progressive. Erika Evans ousted conservative incumbent City Attorney Ann Davison by a 34-point margin. Lefty candidates Alexis Mercedes Rinck, Dionne Foster, and Eddie Lin all won their council races in landslides. 

Ben Anderstone is a political consultant with Progressive Strategies NW who worked on the campaign of former council president Sara Nelson, one of the moderates ousted in November. He said in talking to voters and conducting opinion polls, his team frequently heard that Seattleites were frustrated with the pace of improvement on issues like homelessness and felt like local leaders weren’t driving the change. 

“Voters were very much primed for someone kind of coming in as a blank slate,” Anderstone says. “I think that’s probably the number one factor. But obviously, on top of that, Katie met the moment pretty well.”
 
As an organizer, Wilson has helped to build coalitions with enough power that elected officials “had to say yes to something that maybe, under normal circumstances, they wouldn’t have touched with a 10-foot pole because they didn’t want to anger their wealthy donors,” Wilson says.

It’s an approach that she not only wants to bring into the mayor’s office, but thinks is essential for getting that hard work done. 

In the startup period between election and inauguration, Wilson directed her transition team to connect with many different community and civic groups across the city to help shape her agenda. She wants to continue that as mayor, with a robust community engagement team soliciting the public’s support and ideas for improving Seattle.

“I believe that in order to make the more profound changes that need to happen, there needs to be much more of a movement built up,” Wilson says. “That’s why part of my hope is that I can govern in a way that both inspires confidence in the ability of people coming from the progressive left to lead a city government and that opens space for organizing and movement building.”

In the run-up to November, Wilson was often compared to New York City’s Zohran Mamdani. Both are young, pushing for systemic change, and unabashed about their progressive beliefs being rooted in socialism. After Wilson’s victory, many national headlines zeroed in on “Seattle’s coming socialist experiment” as The Washington Post put it. 

On the campaign trail, Wilson shied away from going too far into her views on socialism, fearing that ideological debates would distract from her message about fixing Seattle’s biggest problems. But, of course, it’s something she’s thought deeply about through decades of activism and advocacy. 

“As a socialist, I believe that we need a profound transformation of our socioeconomic system,” Wilson says. “And I’m also realistic about what can be accomplished in four or eight years. We’re not leading the revolution here.” 

Wilson sees a parallel between her pragmatic ambitions for office—fewer people experiencing homelessness, more affordable housing, better public spaces, safe streets—and those of Milwaukee’s Sewer Socialists who held office nearly continuously from 1910 to 1940. They were lauded for improving quality of life with public housing, city planning, expanded parks and playgrounds, and the municipalization of street lighting, water treatment and sewer systems. 

“That results-oriented outlook is absolutely something I’m carrying into the mayor’s office with me,” Wilson says. “I believe that my administration will be judged by the improvements people see or don’t see in their daily lives, and that’s something I’m taking very seriously.”