Start biting those nails: No clear winner in Seattle mayor’s race — yet

It’s going to be a loooooong few days.

Katie Wilson, the socialist candidate for Seattle mayor, was the favorite entering the general election on Tuesday night. She’d won the primary by 10 percentage points, and a recent poll showed her ahead.

When fellow progressive Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral race, it almost seemed fated.

RELATED: Live results: Nov. 4 Seattle area general election

But then the first round of ballots dropped: Incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell secured about 53% of the vote.

That doesn’t mean Harrell is safe. Here in Washington state, mailed ballots come in daily batches. The count historically inches left with each new afternoon drop, as younger, more liberal voters tend to cast ballots later than their elders.

“We ran a stronger platform. We think we're more experienced and qualified for this job, and we'll see how the vote count plays out,” Harrell said on election night. “I'd rather be where we are than where she is right now.”

On Tuesday, the votes of just about 23% of registered voters in Seattle were counted – likely less than half the total number of ballots.

“These are promising numbers, and we are going to be pulling out all the stops in the next couple weeks between now and when ballots are certified to make sure every vote is counted,” Wilson told her supporters shortly after the first ballots were tallied.

If Harrell holds onto his lead, he’ll be the first Seattle mayor elected to a second term in two decades.

Wilson entered the race as a relative unknown. She runs a small nonprofit, the Transit Riders Union. Before that, she’d worked a series of odd jobs. Going into the August primary, she hardly seemed competitive against Harrell, a former Seattle City Council president with deep ties to old Seattle.

RELATED: Katie Wilson can barely afford to live in Seattle. That's why she wants to be mayor

“This campaign, which was supposed to be such a yawner, has ended up being one of the closest races in the country,” said political consultant Cathy Allen.

National journalists noted Wilson’s upset victory in the August primary, when she beat Harrell by nearly 10 points, bore similarities to Mamdani.

Both candidates focused on affordability and housing, through light-hearted campaign videos and a strong social media game.

Wilson’s campaign attacked Harrell for clearing homeless encampments while failing to add more shelter beds – and for opposing a new tax to fund the city’s social housing authority, which voters enacted anyway.

Harrell’s campaign attacked Wilson as lacking the experience to run city government, and for not providing a cost estimate for her housing proposal.

The Harrell campaign also leaned on a story by KUOW, about Wilson touting working class cred, while receiving help from her parents to pay for child care during the campaign.

“I’m proud that we ran a clean campaign, criticizing the incumbent’s record and policies but not going after his character, his lifestyle, his family or his past,” Wilson said on election night, as the crowd booed in response. “I am proud of all the voters who have seen past the bad-faith attacks funded by the biggest corporate PAC in Seattle election history, almost $2 million.”

Harrell didn’t escape the campaign unscathed – KUOW reported on a decades-old incident in which he allegedly pulled a gun on a pregnant woman and her husband outside a casino in Iowa.

RELATED: Seattle Mayor Harrell was arrested in 1996 for pulling gun during parking lot confrontation

While Wilson fell behind in early results, two other progressive candidates did prevail Tuesday night.

City attorney results

In the race for city attorney, Erika Evans, a former assistant city attorney and federal prosecutor, came out ahead with about 63% – to incumbent Ann Davison’s 37%.

Davison said Seattle turned a corner during her first term with reductions in crime and her office’s success reducing the impact of 118 “high utilizers” who generated thousands of misdemeanor criminal referrals.

If elected, Evans said she would establish a new form of community court for low-level offenses, a type of program Davison abandoned, saying it lacked accountability.

Evans also said Davison, a Republican, was not up to the task of defending Seattle’s interests from Trump administration overreach. (The race for Seattle city attorney is nonpartisan).

Evans was endorsed by Washington Attorney General Nick Brown, and said if she’s elected, the two offices could partner on legal challenges.

RELATED: Attorney General Nick Brown on Trump and the National Guard

Seattle City Council Position 9

In one of Seattle’s at-large council seats, first-time candidate Dionne Foster led with about 58% of Tuesday’s vote. Incumbent City Council President Sara Nelson had about 42%.

Foster, the former head of the Washington Progress Alliance, advocated for the state capital gains tax, among other issues.

Nelson said she has championed new crisis response services, including more funding through a new sales tax directed to addiction treatment and recovery, from residential treatment to methadone access.

She also defended the city’s controversial Stay Out of Drug Area law as intended to steer people into diversion programs and away from hubs for drug activity.

RELATED: Seattle City Council's SOAP and SODA Zones, explained