Major American cities have been failing to make things better for residents after decades of Democratic rule. Rather than trying to vote for something different, those cities keep trying to elect even more left-wing Democrats. Now, they have turned to the failed ideology of socialism.
Katie Wilson, a self-described socialist, defeated incumbent Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell earlier this week. Wilson, like new New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, ran on affordability while supporting policies such as rent control, which creates housing shortages and thus increases housing costs. Like Mamdani, Wilson wants more taxes.
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Also like Mamdani, Wilson has little regard for the quality of life in her city. She opposed Harrell’s clearing of homeless encampments in Seattle and argued that she also doesn’t want homeless people sleeping in city parks, but that she won’t use the law to remove them. (That, of course, means that there is nothing disincentivizing homeless people from flooding Seattle’s parks, but what would a socialist know about incentives?)
And, like Mamdani, Wilson was previously a “defund the police” zealot who recognized that such a position doesn’t play well in a general election. She now advocates “community policing” with all the other buzzwords and magic phrases that far-left candidates use to pretend that they have anything but outright contempt toward police officers and their profession. On a related note, Seattle’s violent crime rate ranks among the highest for major American cities.
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Wilson is a typical pie-in-the-sky socialist who wants free everything and whose life is financed by her rich professor parents (who live in New York). She is already leading a boycott of Starbucks, one of the biggest businesses headquartered in the city. Combine that with her failed economic policies, reluctance to remove intransigent homeless people from the city’s parks and sidewalks, and her squeamishness toward police officers doing their job, and you have a recipe for more failures in Seattle’s future.
Seattle has been run by Democrats since 1969. Voters can be as unhappy as they want with the city’s affordability crisis, but electing a 13th Democratic mayor is not going to solve that, especially when her focus on affordability belies a failed socialist ideology. Socialism can only make things worse in both Seattle and New York City, and voters will soon find that out the hard way.