One seat to rule them all

Later this year, Seattle voters will, for the first time, choose only one City Council member to represent their neighborhood, and two newcomers have stepped up to face populist powerhouse Kshama Sawant, who — despite mixed returns in the rest of the city — dominated among Central Seattle voters in the last election.

The new election system — in which candidates run to represent just one geographical slice of the city — is the result of the new district elections process. It replaces a system in which every Seattleite could vote for each of nine council seats, and each seat represented the whole city. (Two citywide seats will remain but will be folded into the new system in the next elections.)

Central Seattle is wrapped into the newly created District 3, along with every smaller neighborhood in the rectangle roughly formed by the Montlake Cut to the north, I-90 to the south and Lake Washington and Interstate 5 to the east and west, respectively.

The two newcomers are civil rights campaigner Rod Hearne and Morgan Beach, a recent Seattle transplant from Colorado.

Beach has made few moves in local politics since her arrival, but Hearne, born and raised in Seattle, is known for having been the steady hand on the wheel at Equal Rights Washington as its executive director during the group’s successful push to legalize gay marriage in the state.

The two will face Sawant, the socialist council member who captured one of the old system’s citywide seats and quickly made a name for herself as a vocal advocate for minimum-wage increases and rent control — and as a vocal critic of anything and anyone standing in her way.

And while the District 3 seat is a new position, Sawant is the de facto incumbent. Although she won narrowly citywide, she took her district in a landslide, with only a handful of its wealthiest lakeside precincts turning out for her opponent.

The three candidates all identified three main issues facing the district: gentrification, crime and transportation. On the last two issues, they took relatively similar positions, with broad statements of priority but few specifics. Managing growth was the exception: All three listed the issue as crucial for the district, and all three took strong stances on it.

Rod Hearne

A tech worker-turned-activist who got his start in local politics working as the webmaster on the campaigns of former Gov. Gary Locke and former Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, Hearne is known for his work as executive director of Equal Rights Washington during the organization’s last, successful push to legalize gay marriage in the state.

Facing the specter of being branded an “establishment candidate” head-on, Hearne has held fast that his experience in the trenches of the marriage fight gives him the chops to build coalitions that will ultimately benefit the neighborhood, in contrast to Sawant.

In terms of real policy, one of his sharpest splits from Sawant is on how to manage District 3’s recent and continuing astronomical growth.

“I think that the term ‘gentrification’ is bandied about,” Hearne said. “Neighborhoods change all the time.”

His own Central Area neighborhood had changed around him, he noted, as successive waves of immigrants moved in.

He aims to increase the supply of residential space and build transportation to “broaden the circle” of neighborhoods newcomers might see as desirable.

Morgan Beach

With just two years in the city after moving from Colorado by way of California, where she worked for Human Rights Watch researching racial disparities, Beach said she stepped into the local primary because she sees herself as a voice for young people on the council and wants to advance a gender-equity agenda, including equal pay and maternity leave.

While she says that she has been involved in local advocacy, compared to her opponents, Beach has little experience in local politics, with just a few positions on the boards of local advocacy groups.

Beach stands closer to Hearne than Sawant in major issues, but she strikes out on her own not only in her choice of gender equity as a key issue, but also with an idea she calls collaborative government — a forum for intercity cooperation on the eastern side of Puget Sound.

Kshama Sawant

Widely criticized as divisive, along with her notable success at raising the minimum wage in the city to $15 an hour, Sawant has gained a reputation for branding her opponents as not only wrong, but enemies of the people, the working class and perhaps decency itself.

Pointing to the minimum-wage victory, as well as progress on funding for social services and a wage increase for hourly city workers, she said, “I would say I have been phenomenally successful.”

Sawant challenged the idea that big issues don’t affect the district, linking the broken sidewalks she says she’s been hearing about in the district not to geographical under-representation but to a broader disparity in which neighborhoods get funding for such things.

As to whether she’ll also represent the wealthier neighborhoods who line the shores of Lake Washington in her district, she said, “To the extent that there is an agreement on the fundamental questions, of course, I will be representing them.

“But if they want a big0business representative, to the detriment of working people, then no, we will part ways there,” she added.

A long way to go

For her lack of support from some centrists and business, Sawant is campaigning in her stronghold. And as a catalyst and firebrand, she has touched something powerful there —by recent poll numbers, it looks like it could carry her a long way.

In an October survey by EMC Research, Sawant registered the strongest district support — 61 percent rated her favorably — of all nine City Council members. But while Sawant’s approval rating was among the highest, so was her disapproval rating.

Sawant had more name recognition than any of her colleagues. The result, alongside Sawant’s strong support, was the strongest citywide “unfavorable” rating: nearly one in three. District results were not as clear because of a high margin of error, but they still found Sawant as having the second-strongest in-district opposition.

While far from a decisive blow against her, the results point to one big unknown: whether the result of Sawant’s polarizing style will be a correspondingly fierce opposition. For new-to-office candidates trying to buck the tide, a groundswell from the middle-right could make a big difference.

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