Maps of the neighborhood by neighborhood totals show recent political fault lines across Capitol Hill, the Central District, and Seattle held firm in the November election even as city leaders stoked rising priorities around law and order solutions to the city’s drug crisis and street disorder.

Meanwhile, anybody looking for clues about the changing political nature of “blue cities” will likely be confounded by our local results.

In the battle for Tanya Woo’s appointed citywide seat on the Seattle City Council, progressive challenger Alexis Mercedes Rinck dominated the core of the city with some of her strongest precinct showings in Capitol Hill’s renter-dominated center and on her home turf in the Central District with results approaching 75 to 80% of the vote.

As Rinck held onto ground won in the August primary above the E Republican line, Woo’s few Central Seattle strongholds were north of Volunteer Park and on First Hill in addition to her expected success in the wealthy neighborhoods along Lake Washington.

Overall, Rinck will finish with around a 16-point win and 58% of the vote across Seattle as she will be immediately installed to replace Woo before again facing an election battle next year as Position 8’s next term will begin.

While Rinck’s victory solidified recent patterns for progressive victories built on renter-dominated areas of the city, the candidate also cleaned-up in the city’s still wealthy but less affluent single-family zoned areas in the north and south of the city.

Woo, who has filled the Position 8 seat since her appointment to finish the final year of the term when Teresa Mosqueda left to take the seat she won on the King County Council, made public safety a center of the debate in her campaign, joining leaders like council president Sara Nelson in championing a traditional law and order approach while Rinck has said she will champion public safety legislation that addresses root causes of crime like social and housing programs.

43RD LANDSLIDE
Meanwhile, as pundits are examining the national wreckage left by the results of the presidential election and attempting to ponder the future of Democratic stronghold “blue cities” like Seattle, another Central Seattle vote should be part of the equation.

Shaun Scott scored a landslide victory over Andrea Suarez in the race for the Position 2 seat to represent the 43rd District in the State House of Representatives, claiming 69% of the vote and generating results maps that are nearly comical in their restriction of his challenger’s totals.

Suarez, who has gained notoriety through the We Heart Seattle organization she started as a neighborhood clean-up and homelessness volunteer group and who has courted controversy in her association with conservative pundits and Republican officials, managed majorities in only the 43rd’s wealthiest, waterfront precincts along Laurelhurst, Madison Park, and Denny Blaine, where Scott still managed 45% of the vote.

Voters weren’t buying her approach to cleaning up the city, and they weren’t buying endorsements from the Seattle Times and the Seattle Police Officers Guild.

They also didn’t buy her criticism of what she called Scott’s “defund” policies and looked past her attacks on the candidate’s support for Palestine liberation.

Meanwhile, Scott won big with support from Frank Chopp, the Washington political legend and housing champion whose retirement opened the seat, and a campaign he said was focused on continuing to respond to the issues that drove the Black Lives Matters protests, and the responses to the COVID-19 crisis that forged progressive policies including the creation of a public social housing developer in Seattle.

In a country that has supposedly shifted to the right, Washington is being reported as an outlier as pundits and leaders debate what comes next for cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. The map of Scott’s success — and Suarez’s failure — in the 43rd District might paint one clear picture of what holding steady looks like.

UPDATE: For the morbidly curious, here is a look at how Trump fared across Seattle. Those blue precincts? Harris victories. President-elect Trump scored just over 22% of the vote in King County this time around — pretty much what he scored in 2020 and 2016. According to the 2024 dataset, Trump managed to “win” one Seattle precinct — King 3693 where a single voter cast a vote for the Republican. According to the voter database, the precinct includes the Jefferson Day Center Shelter and King County Work Release facility.

You can view Washington’s November 2024 election results mapped at wacommunityalliance.github.io.

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