Katie Wilson has prevailed in her progressive challenge to incumbent Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell. Wilson expanded her lead to nearly 2,000 votes in Wednesday’s count. That pushed her advantage to 0.71 points, which is beyond the threshold for a machine recount. Wilson has won 50.2% of the vote, and will be Seattle’s next mayor, breaking a long run of centrist leadership.
“Ahead by almost 2,000 votes, we now believe that we’re in an insurmountable position,” Wilson said in a statement.
With election officials estimating no more than 1,320 ballots remaining to be processed, insurmountable does appear the correct word for her lead. Nearly all local media outlets called the race for Wilson after Wednesday’s drop, including the Seattle Times, PubliCola, KING 5, KUOW, and The Urbanist.
Even Decision Desk HQ, a national outlet, called the race for Wilson, after prematurely calling the race for Harrell last week. That move and subsequent retraction earned plenty of ribbing from Seattleites, who likened the move to the famous “Dewey defeats Truman” headline from the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1948. President Truman definitely won, it turned out, much like Wilson.
— Sanders Lauture (@golf1052.com) November 11, 2025 at 4:06 PM
KUOW, which is Seattle’s local NPR affiliate, contracts with Decision Desk for its election results. Given the screwup, it’s not clear that will continue in future elections.
Wilson trailed by as many as 11,183 votes the day after Election Day, but steadily gained ground on Harrell from that point onward. By Friday’s ballot drop, Wilson trimmed Harrell’s lead to 1.9 points, and surpassed him by 91 votes by Monday. On Tuesday, that lead grew to more than 1,300, as Wilson continued to build momentum.
Mayor Harrell has yet to issue a statement, but is expected to give a concession speech on the steps of Seattle City Hall at noon Thursday.
Wilson’s victory completes a clean sweep for The Urbanist-endorsed slate. Seattle progressives picked up two city council seats and retained another.
In a repudiation of centrist leadership over the last two years, Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson mustered just 37% of the vote. Her opponent, progressive nonprofit leader Dionne Foster, cruised to victory, winning nearly 63% in the citywide Position 9 race. In District 2, Seattle Office of Housing attorney Eddie Lin won 68% of the vote, defeating Adonis Ducksworth, who is Harrell’s transportation adviser.
Former federal prosecutor Erika Evans trounced Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison by a two-to-one margin, unseating Seattle’s sole Republican officeholder.
Many reasons exist for the progressive shift, from stronger candidates and messaging to Trump backlash to rising economic anxieties to voter frustration from centrists leading differently than they promised during their previous campaigns. Plenty of time remains to conduct postmortems on moribund centrist campaigns.
Doug Trumm is publisher of The Urbanist. An Urbanist writer since 2015, he dreams of pedestrian streets, bus lanes, and a mass-timber building spree to end our housing crisis. He graduated from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington in 2019. He lives in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood and loves to explore the city by foot and by bike.
