There has been a lot of fuss about the election in Virginia which gave the Democrats all three houses in the state and to be sure, they are significant but for my money the bigger story if the city council election in Seattle.
Virginia is propped up by national politics and by Democrats winning despite scandals involving both the Democrat Governor (Blackface business) and Lt. Gov (Sexual Assault). We are already seeing memes of Virginia becoming California west.
But this is still early and if the Democrats majority is not huge. All it will take is a little overreach and there is every possibility that voters, even anti-Trump one will look at these results in four years and decide the left is a bridge too far.
Seattle is VERY different.
We have already seen story after story of Seattle surrendering it’s streets to the mob, of it’s business’ closing or fleeing because of the environment for them and people not being safe in their own city.
Well they had a city counsel election recently, an election where quite a few folks had been crying “enough” and guess what happened?
Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant has nearly completed a stunning turnaround in her quest for a third term Friday evening, recovering from a deficit of more than 8 percentage points and taking a 1,515-vote lead over her opponent, Egan Orion — putting her up by 3.6 percentage points.
At that margin, Sawant will almost certainly retain her seat.
After a disappointing result in the initial ballot drop on election night, Seattle’s most famous socialist has cleaned up in the votes tallied in subsequent days, winning around 60% of ballots that were either postmarked or left in drop boxes on election day.
Washington’s vote-by-mail system means some last-minute ballots take several days to count. With the late trend strongly favoring Sawant — part of a pattern in Seattle of late-counted ballots tilting left — and relatively few ballots remaining, her reelection is a near lock.
With Sawant’s apparent comeback win, an election that was cast by many as a referendum on the leftward lean of Seattle politics has almost completely backfired on the business groups and mainstream Democrats who spent millions in their effort to rein in the city’s progressives.
Now I have some shall we say doubts about the mail in systems and their integrity but even given that consider the following.
The decline of Seattle has not been a secret. It’s been a national story and actually reached the point where not just business but even local media had taken sides against the left:
The left loves to make Amazon the face of any opposition but it wasn’t just Amazon and the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce pushing for a more moderate City Council. As I pointed out this week, the Seattle Times editorial board was campaigning to oust the far left members as well, including Sawant.
Yet despite all of this Seattle has decided to stay the course.
This tells me that liberalism is such a religion for the People of Seattle that not even the realities of life under liberalism and it’s costs can counter their loyalty to it. They have achieved a San Francisco level of wokeness and will likely have to go far beyond that level of danger and insanity to get out of it. I instantly thought of Bill James description of Hal Chase after managed to get MLB to take his side on allegations of him throwing games.
“He was free, then. It had all be brought out into the open, and he had gotten by with it. This seems to have had a liberating effect on Chase’s activities”
What this means for Seattle in general and Kshama Sawant in particular is that they can rightly claim a licence by the voters most affected by their policies to go farther left. Seattle has gotten the government they deserve and the left is going to give it to them good and hard. If that doesn’t scare the hell out of every normal still living in the city it ought to.
by baldilocks
