Seattle Nice: Closing Arguments in the Mayoral Election, and a $5,000-a-Week "Outreach" Consultant
It's our last podcast before the Tuesday election!
By Erica C. Barnett
On the final Seattle Nice episode before Tuesday’s election (look for our post-election show in your feed later this week!), the guys and I debated the two mayoral candidates’ closing arguments. Bruce Harrell, the incumbent, has argued that his opponent Katie Wilson lacks his experience in government and is a privileged brat because she dropped out of college and her parents have helped her pay for child care as she campaigns. Katie Wilson has argued that Harrell’s policies cater to his corporate backers and leave working and poor people behind; also, “he’s bad at the budget.”
David said no one he knows is enthusiastic about either Wilson or Harrell; I said he probably isn’t talking to younger people, or not-so-younger renters, who can’t afford Seattle’s ever-rising rent. Sandeep said Wilson’s supporters are part of the “movement Left.” That’s not how I’d describe Wilson’s base, which seems motivated by a candidate whose chief focus has been making Seattle more affordable, rather than maintaining the status quo.
We also discussed a story I wrote last week about Abdul Yusuf, the Eastside for Hire owner who’s getting $5,000 a week from the Harrell campaign for unspecified “outreach” in the Somali community. David and Sandeep both said it didn’t seem that unusual to them (Sandeep compared it to “walking-around money” distributed before elections in the 20th century South; David wanted to know how a campaign giving an individual $25,000 for “outreach” is any different than the way labor unions and business PACs spend money supporting candidates.
As the author of the story, I argued that the two things have little in common. Unlike PACs, which put out campaign materials like ads and mailers, the nature of Yusuf’s work is unclear (although rumors abound). According to the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, he isn’t registered to collect democracy vouchers (worth up to $100 per voter) on behalf of any campaign, which anyone gathering vouchers is required to do. Nor has he ever done any consulting work for any campaign in the state prior to Harrell’s; his main lobbying work has been on behalf of rideshare drivers as the vice president of Drive Forward, the Uber-backed group that recently advocated against higher minimum wages for delivery drivers.
As I noted in my story, Yusuf’s weekly pay is the same amount his campaign consultant, Christian Sinderman, makes in a month. It’s also more than any full-time Harrell campaign staffer earns in a month, according to campaign finance reports.