Seattle D2 Candidates Sport Some Spotty Voting Records

The campaign to serve the last two years of Tammy Morales’ turn in District 2 on the Seattle City Council has heated up, with several compelling candidates competing for the seat.

Unfortunately, in an echo of failed Chamber of Commerce candidate Tanya Woo’s anemic voting record, two of the candidates - Adonis Ducksworth and Jeanie Chunn–have missed many, many elections. Of the remaining candidates, only one seems clearly aligned with progressive, pro-housing positions. 

Adonis Ducksworth

Adonis Ducksworth is known to be the Chamber of Commerce candidate. Although he has a few notable progressive backers–people I genuinely respect–and says some progressive things, the proof in this pudding does not look good.

Some of his more alarming funders include: 

1. Tim Ceis, who is married to/partnered with the head of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and who told the donors in his SuperPAC that they needed to instruct the City Council to appoint Tanya Woo to a vacant seat. Ceis has also received a sketchy amount of money from the City to boost public opinion for Harrell’s attempt to undermine the express will of Seattle voters when they voted overwhelmingly to build the transit stations laid out in Sound Transit 3. After having been a Deputy Mayor, Ceis was also charged with a hit-and-run (no human injuries involved). Even Cathy Moore had the decency to return this guy’s check! 
   

2. Bob Kettle, one of Seattle City Councilmember's more conservative members, seen here campaigning for a barely-covering-it-MAGA Republican. He is part of the coalition aiming to reduce minimum wages in the city.
   

3. Sandeep Kaushik, of “Seattle Nice” fame, is a talented centrist political operative who I find very personable, but whose theory of everything is that decade-long migration of working class voters toward MAGA was somehow backward-in-time caused by lax enforcement of drug laws in a few west coast cities in the 2020s. This theory somehow also includes Seattle-as-the-poster-child-of-mayhem, and one of the worst offenders, despite Seattle seeing far less of this MAGA vote migration than moderate cities. Not one to let a good fact pattern get in the way of his pet theory, none of these incongruities seem to perturb him. 

Like Tanya Woo, Ducksworth’s voting record is alarmingly sparse. 

Ballots will be arriving in mailboxes in a few weeks for the primary, and Ducksworth will be asking his South Seattle neighbors to vote for him. But he, himself, has skipped all but 3 Primaries in the last 20 years. More importantly, he didn’t vote at all in 2023, missing an opportunity to help protect District 2 from the corporate attempt to oust Tammy Morales by spending $13 per vote. Given his backing by Tim Ceis, he likely would have voted for Woo, had he bothered to vote at all.

He also failed to show up for the 2023 Crisis Care Levy election, a billion dollar initiative spearheaded by King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay that is likely the largest ever investment in our region to help those struggling with behavioral health issues, especially among our unhoused neighbors.

Ducksworth may say progressive things on the campaign trail, but he has repeatedly failed to show up and vote and actually stand up for the working class families of South Seattle and protect them from the oligarchs trying to buy our local government. He is endorsed by members of the Sara Nelson council coalition that collectively received over $300K in Corporate PAC and real-estate lobbyist support to win their elections in 2023. That council has gone on to repeatedly try to scale back minimum wages, and have cut massive amounts of funding from affordable housing in last year’s budget. 

With Adonis Ducksworth, I see a bad voting record and some upsetting signals of how he is likely to vote if he is on council. 

Jeannie Chunn

Jeannie Chunn, another candidate in the race, is much more clearly progressive than Ducksworth. She has a donation from progressive powerhouse and former Mayoral Candidate Cary Moon. But otherwise her fundraising has been lackluster, and she does not have any endorsements I can find. 

Her voting record is, unfortunately, even weaker than Ducksworth’s.  

She’s running for a District 2 City Council position, but has never voted in a District-based city council election (these were created in 2015), including in District 2. On the other hand, she has voted in citywide city-council elections. Her platform champions working families and fighting against wealthy corporations, but she didn’t vote when Amazon spent $1.5M in 2019 in an attempt to purchase all seven district seats on the council nor when Corporate PACs spent $1.5M to buy five district seats in 2023. Like Ducksworth, she also didn’t vote to help create the Seattle Social Housing Developer in 2023, a disservice to the huge, people-powered coalition that got it on the ballot, and the overwhelming majority of D2 voters who supported it. 

She may be deeply progressive. But I worry very much about this record. 

Eddie Lin

Because Eddie Lin was nominated for an appointment to Position 2 by progressive Councilmember Rinck, many, including myself, assumed he would emerge as the leading progressive candidate. Lin is known to be knowledgeable and, I am glad to report, has an impeccably consistent voting record. 

All that said, Lin’s institutional progressive support has, so far, been soft. This is likely because of some of his stances.

He bought Amazon’s propaganda about Prop 1A and voted with Amazon, Bruce Harrell and the Chamber of Commerce to cut funding from deeply affordable housing, rather than raise taxes on the wealthy (Proposition 1B). Thankfully, 70% of District 2 voters has the good sense to disagree with him. In Lin’s defense, he says he will fight for the Social Housing Developer to ensure its success. I believe him, but his choice makes me nervous about both his philosophical and political instincts. 

In his interview with The Urbanist, he expressed support for Mandatory Housing Affordability, a well-meaning policy that looks increasingly like it subsidizes (some) low income families by taxing (many) market rate rents, which actually punishes lots of other low income families who have no access to subsidized housing. If Lin wants to win over urbanist progressives, he will need to dig deeper on this one. 

Public safety is also a critical issue for South Seattle, and in Lin’s interview with Hacks & Wonks, he expressed support for SOAP & SODA zones, mostly performative measures that have only been enforced a few times since they were passed last year, but still risk making it harder for people in need to access public services. These ordinances have been a bit of a bugaboo for many progressives, though I believe they have not penetrated public discussion outside highly engaged political circles. 

Jamie Fackler

While Lin’s progressive endorsements haven’t been particularly strong, his fundraising has outpaced Jamie Fackler’s. Fackler is his main rival for the left lane. 

Fackler has clear progressive values, a track record of not just voting, but also organizing to win elections that help working families, and the endorsements to reflect it. Given that, Tammy Morales has endorsed him to serve the final two years of her term. 

Fackler is also something of a labor darling - a high school grad, carpenter, and his union’s shop steward where he works at the City of Seattle as a building inspector. As PROTEC17’s delegate to MLK Labor he fought to ensure that the juggernaut council of unions endorsed Prop 1A and came out to canvas for it. He did the same as a Vice Chair for the 37th Legislative District Democrats. 

Somewhat unsurprisingly, Fackler is endorsed by a bunch of progressive powerhouses and organizations. At the moment, he looks like the most likely viable candidate who will also be a progressive stalwart and ally to Alexis Mercedes Rinck of the bunch.

Only time will tell, however, how the primary shakes out for any of these candidates, as the most decisive conservative and progressive institutions (the Seattle Times Editorial Board, The Stranger Election Control Board, & Fuse Progressive Voters’ guide) have not yet weighed in.