Seattle Nice: Sound Transit’s New Leader, Katie Wilson’s Run for Mayor, and Ann Davison’s Challengers
The 2025 elections start heating up.
By Erica C. Barnett
On our latest episode of Seattle Nice, we discuss King County Executive Dow Constantine's likely appointment to a $675,000-a-year job as head of Sound Transit; mayor Bruce Harrell's first potentially viable challenger, Katie Wilson; and a new candidate, Erika Evans, who's joining the race against Republican City Attorney Ann Davison. We also poured one out for the short-lived candidacy of Tanya Woo, who briefly filed to run for City Council District 2 (the seat she lost to Tammy Morales before getting appointed to the council and losing to Alexis Mercedes Rinck last year).
It's somewhat unusual for an incumbent city attorney to have so many challengers this early in the race (in addition to Evans, Rory O'Sullivan and Nathan Rouse are running). But in the case of Davison, it's hardly surprising.
In her first unsuccessful campaign, in 2019, Davison ran against Debora Juarez from the right. As part of her appeal to voters, Davison proposed warehousing unsheltered people in former big-box stores, called climate change a pointless "luxury" issue compared to removing encampments and making Seattle "clean"; and claimed the city's streets were covered in human feces.
In her second campaign, for lieutenant governor in 2020, Davison ran as a Republican, announcing that she had left the Democratic Party as part of the Walk Away movement headed up by (later-convicted) January 6 rioter Bradon Straka. (State elections are partisan, but Washington state does not require voters to register as a party member, so there's no way to confirm Davison's previous Democratic affiliation).
After losing that race in the primary, Davison defeated police abolitionist Nicole Thomas Kennedy in 2021, running on a law and order platform. She has spent her term advocating for the right to prosecute people who use drugs in public, crack down on sex workers, and banish people who commit drug and sex work misdemeanors from parts of the city.
Under Davison, the city shut down community court, which provided an alternative to jail for people accused of certain misdemeanors; created a new "high utilizers" program in which people arrested over and over are subject to a higher level of punishment; and began pursuing charges aggressively under a new drug law that makes simple drug possession or using drugs in public a misdemeanor. She also supports limiting the number of times people are allowed to overdose before they're thrown in jail.
We debated whether Davison is really a Republican (she is, ) or if she's maybe some kind of moderate Democrat (as Sandeep seems to believe).
Last month, Davison belatedly joined a lawsuit filed by other cities against a Trump executive order threatening to withhold federal funds from cities that won't help the federal government conduct immigration raids—a Seattle policy for many years. Unlike other city attorneys, however, Davison's justification for joining was that the order violates "local control," a tepid reason at best.
Notably, Davison has declined to denounce Trump generally or say whether she voted for Trump or Harris in the last election (we asked), and the policies she supports are, very generously, on the far right end of Seattle's political spectrum. (Although, again, she denounced the Democrats and joined a national Republican movement in 2020, as Trump was running for reelection, and ran on a Republican ticket that was headed by a far-right MAGA extremist who went on to deny the election results.)
Check out our discussion on this week's episode: