Just over a year ago, Sara Nelson was flying high, practically waving from cloud nine on election night. She'd pulled off a conservative coup of Seattle's City Council. After two years as a conservative outcast, she now had a majority of fellow business-friendly colleagues who were set to remake local politics in their image —the city’s progressive constituency be damned. Down with police defunding, social housing, and new business taxes. Hello, drug ordinances, SODA zones, and rollbacks to gig worker pay. But her rise might be shorter than a Seattle summer.

The Seattle Times officially called the City Council Position 8 race for progressive newcomer Alexis Mercedes Rinck last Thursday night. Unofficially, politicos are calling next year’s race for City Council Position 9 for anyone who challenges current Council President Nelson. Rinck’s decisive defeat of the council’s nepo baby Tanya Woo marks not only a second rejection of Woo, but a sign of voters’ dissatisfaction with the conservative council they only recently elected.

“People are fed up with Nelson’s bullshit,” said Carrie Barnes, a major contributor to the Progressive People Power PAC that supported Rinck. “And we aren’t going to let corporate interests sneak her back into office in 2025 when less people vote. [Rinck] is just the beginning.”

The “It's So Over” to “We Are So Back” Pendulum 

The 2023 elections left Seattle progressives devastated. Big business and real estate interest poured more than $1 million into the seven council races. Without organized labor —the city’s other monied interest — counterbalancing them, the corporate PACs bought all but one of the seven seats up for grabs. Those PACs lobbied the council they bought to appoint Woo, their only failed candidate, to the citywide council seat ditched by former Council Member Teresa Mosqueda at the beginning of 2024. Five council members voted to install Woo and she quickly announced her intention to run that year to retain the seat. 

Enter Rinck. 

“I’m of the belief that big business shouldn't be deciding who represents this City,” Rinck told The Stranger when she announced her candidacy in March. “You know, Woo was appointed by five people. I'm looking to be elected by 100,000 people.”

And as of Friday afternoon, 197,000 people voted for Rinck. She won 57.9% of the vote to Woo’s 41.6%. Her vote count trumps the combined totals of the 2023 city council victors and she scored 58,000 more votes than Nelson in her citywide race in 2021. The math is clear — Rinck represents more of the electorate than any other member and it's not particularly close. 

Rinck benefited from higher turnout driven by the presidential race at the top of the ticket. People of color and voters under 40 made up a slightly higher proportion of the electorate in the 2024 general than in 2023, according to Washington Community Alliance (WCA) data analyst Andrew Hong.

Nelson and, more recently, the Seattle Times Editorial Board, have argued against a popular democracy reform to combine even and odd year elections. They agree with proponents that this would increase turnout, but they don’t trust voters are smart enough to decide on so many elections at once. So while a higher quantity of voters cast a ballot in even years, Nelson reasons the votes are lower quality. It all sounds pretty damn racist, classist, and paternalistic when considering that more people of color, renters, and young people vote in odd years. 

While the even-year boost helped Rinck, Hong says she didn’t need it to win. Her success in the primary actually reflects a turnabout in the electorate. A nearly identical voting bloc came out in the 2023 election as in the 2024 primary. So Hong deduces that Rinck somehow “convinced people who voted for moderates in 2023 to vote for her in 2024.” 

Girl Bossed To Close To The Sun

That shift spells trouble for Seattle’s conservative-majority council as Rinck ran as a clear referendum to the newly elected council. Advocates warned that this council would attack renters’ protections, workers’ rights, gut funding for affordable housing, and bend over backwards to give the cops whatever they ask for. And as the year went on, the City Council proved those advocates right. 

Nelson put herself in a position to shoulder unique blame for any perceived failures of the council. She played kingmaker, recruiting and supporting many of the 2023 winners. Then her stooges elected her president after spending two years as the body’s conservative outcast. And she immediately started making power moves, including firing the head of central staff Esther Handy.  This is the precise shit that new, insecure leadership does when they want to ensure total loyalty. But Nelson may have power tripped flat on her face.

“The issues that this City Council has taken up under the leadership of Council President Sara Nelson are not popular amongst Seattleites,” says MLK Labor Council Executive Treasurer Katie Garrow. “In the 2025 campaign, we don’t need to persuade voters on our ideas. We just need to make it clear that Nelson was the leader of the council while these already unpopular positions have been pursued. It seems clear from Rinck’s success that they're with us, not the council majority.” 

Most notably, she’s burned any possible bridge with workers. SEIU 775 Secretary-Treasurer Adam Glickman said there’s nothing Nelson can do to win back support from labor, one of two major players in local political PACs. 

Nelson wasted months on a controversial crusade against a newly passed minimum wage for gig delivery drivers. And as president, she oversaw Council Member Joy Hollingsworth's “political suicide,” a short-lived attempt to permanently enshrine a tip punishment system for workers.

“It was sort of unbelievable that our leaders thought that was a position that Seattleites agreed with,” says Garrow from MLK Labor.

Even for voters who may not have workers' rights top of mind, Rinck’s consultant, Erin Schultz of NWP Consulting, says voters might be frustrated by the fights Nelson and her majority picked. 

The council did not explicitly campaign on wasting half their first year engaged in career-ruining battles against workers' rights. They ran as a backlash to the collective hallucination that the previous council defunded the Seattle Police Department (SPD) — the City allocated $398 million to SPD in 2019 before the protests and have proposed $457 million in 2025. Voters may have expected to see more change to public safety. 

At the same time, the City Council has not done much for the corporate donors who bankrolled their last campaigns – if only by virtue of not accomplishing much in general. Still, 

Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce CEO Rachel Smith told The Stranger earlier this year that the business community felt satisfied with the council they bought. They may even gladly reward Nelson and the rest of the majority for stalling efforts to increase corporate taxes to address the budget shortfall in the ongoing negotiations

On The Flip Side

Not everyone forecasted Rinck’s win as a death knell for Nelson. 

“Seattle City Council never really stopped being unpopular,” says Nelson’s consultant, Ben Anderstone of Progressive Strategies Northwest. 

Anderstone echoed Hong’s analysis. Many of the same voters who went center in 2023 picked Rinck in 2024 and for “not-especially-ideological reasons,” according to Anderstone. 

Rather, the data points to an anti-incumbent bias, rather than the electorate’s true progressive nature, says Hong. 

“Seattle voters are uniquely reactionary,” says Hong. “They want change, and they're impatient for change, so they're not going to wait that long to vote out whatever the majority is.”

The 2023 council represented a backlash to the 2019 council, which rode into office on the backlash against Amazon’s attempt to buy the election. Hong says this trend indicates that centrists and progressives have both failed to solve the issues that voters care about most, particularly the housing and homelessness crisis. 

Anderstone says that incumbents are not destined to lose, “but any incumbents need to effectively message around [voter’s] frustrations.”

Choose Your Fighter

Over the next few months, the chattering class will vet and prop up candidates to take on Nelson. It’s critical that consultants and endorsing bodies back the right candidate. If a progressive beats Nelson – and if Rinck resists the council’s conservative gravitational pull — the balance of power shifts. Right now, the council has enough conservatives to pass whatever legislation they want. But three progressives in Council Members Tammy Morales, Rinck, and the Nelson challenger could sway more moderate council members to join them in passing more progressive policies or blocking the most egregious legislation. 

So far, it seems they are on the hunt for someone like Rinck. 

Rinck’s consultant Schultz tells The Stranger Rinck is a “unicorn” of a candidate.

“It's very rare that you have someone that brings real policy experience, is rooted in their values, and is connected with community,” says Schultz.

Schultz also commends Rinck for running a “badass” campaign. She earned early support from a broad coalition, which Schultz says helped legitimize her as a relatively unknown candidate. 

Glickman says Rinck threaded the needle of appealing to progressives without losing moderates to Woo’s conservative campaign. When asked how she pulled that off, Glickman said, “If I had a total answer to that, I'd be the richest political consultant in the country.”

It won’t be hard to have a broader coalition than Nelson. As Upper Left consultant Michael Charles says, “Nelson has done no favors for herself by making allies that lead me to believe that she'll run a strong campaign next year.”

But Nelson won’t rely on her merit to win anyway. Outside spending plays a huge role in who wins the election. Nelson had almost five times as much money behind her as her opponent Nikkita Oliver in 2021 and she won by about seven percentage points. Business way outspent labor in 2023, buying their corporate takeover. In 2024, business and labor spent roughly the same amount on their candidates, and labor won Rinck’s seat. 

SIEU 775 will certainly play ball this go round. Glickman concedes that labor may have been a little “naive” for investing so little in the left-lane candidates in 2023, giving rise to the new corporate council. Now with more energy around fundraising with the launch of P3 PAC, designed explicitly to never let a corporate takeover like the one in 2023 happen again, progressives seem better positioned to compete with big business. But Glickman says Seattle can expect a “big, bitter, expensive” race.