In Seattle mayor’s race, history gives Katie Wilson supporters reason to hope

While Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell had a seven-point lead with 53.6% of the vote over his opponent Katie Wilson’s 46.4% in initial results on Election Day, the mayor’s race is far from over.

Two days later, on Thursday afternoon, the distance between them narrowed, albeit minimally, giving Katie Wilson 46.9% and Harrell 52.6%.

And pundits are turning to past races to gauge how much later ballot counts have favored the more progressive candidate in Seattle city races.

“There’s been a lot of number crunching,” political consultant Sandeep Kaushik told KUOW’s Soundside Wednesday. “There’s definitely a pronounced left shift in the late count in Seattle, that’s become a feature of our elections.”

The theory is that younger left-leaning voters cast their ballots later, right up to the deadline on Election Day. And the election night atmosphere in their sectors of the city makes it fun: Early evening Tuesday, a speaker with a megaphone welcomed voters to a “party at the ballot box” in front of Seattle Central College, where dozens of people were lined up to drop off their ballots, to live musical accompaniment.

In the last two races for Seattle mayor, that shift in later returns didn’t change the winner, but simply shrank the distance between frontrunner Jenny Durkan and her opponent Cary Moon in 2017, and between a victorious Harrell and his opponent Lorena Gonzalez in 2021.

But Raven Tyler, a political consultant with Northwest Passage Consulting (which represents Harrell among other local candidates as clients) predicted that the mayor’s race is “going to be a nailbiter, it’s going to be super, super close.”

Tyler said she thinks Harrell “will inch ahead” in later returns.

But Kaushik argued the night after election day that Katie Wilson is still favored to win.

“I would say the preponderance of evidence says the shift will be a little bit bigger than seven points but who knows," he said.

Socialist Alternative candidate Kshama Sawant is remembered for some of the most notable upsets in Seattle elections as more ballots were counted. She represented District 3 on the Seattle City Council which includes central Seattle and Capitol Hill.

As the Northwest Progressive Institute points out in their analysis of the current mayor’s race, Sawant overcame a gap similar to Harrell’s and Wilson’s to defeat incumbent Richard Conlin in 2013 for an at-large seat on the Seattle City Council. She won the District 3 seat in 2015.

And in 2019 Sawant overcame her opponent Egan Orion’s eight-point lead on election night to keep her District 3 seat representing Capitol Hill. But it took several days of additional ballot counts before she could declare victory.

But citing a City Council race from a high turnout district — a striking 58% — could be wishful thinking on behalf of Wilson supporters. This year King County has estimated voter turnout at 45% – which is still higher than expected turnout statewide.

Update: However, King County Elections says Seattle turnout tends to be three to five percent higher than the county overall. And on Thursday the county said 54.86% of Seattle voters had returned their ballots.

Tyler said she’s not surprised at the relatively low turnout for some local races in the region, despite what could feel like high energy for some campaigns online.

“It takes more to get folks engaged than just knocking in their doors during the election season,” she said, and that work has to happen outside of these election cycles.

“I think there’s still a lot of work to be done on educating folks on why these local races matter,” she said.

11/6/2025: This story has been updated with more recent voter turnout statistics from King County Elections.