How Community Organizing Turned Into a Campaign Strategy

This story was published in partnership with the Guardian.

On November 4, while a blue wave was sweeping key races in New York City, Virginia, and New Jersey, Seattle progressives were biting their nails down to the quick. At 8 p.m., only the first round of ballots had been counted in Seattle, and Katie Wilson, a longtime community organizer and the progressive challenger in the mayoral race, was behind by seven points.

But it wasn’t over that night. That first ballot count was less than a quarter of the vote. Progressives votes late, and the lines at the ballot box at 7:50 p.m. on election night were longer than one election worker had ever seen. 

As the week wore on, and progressives’ fingernails disappeared, Wilson’s share of the vote crept up, slowly but steadily. Eight days later, on November 12, the city declared that Katie Wilson would be the next mayor of Seattle.

When she won, comparisons to New York City’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, were everywhere—and understandably so. They had both seemed to come out of nowhere, with strong on-the-ground campaigns that energized voters months before their elections. They were also both progressives challenging institutional politicians. Mamdani was up against the former governor of New York, who was asking the public to trust him after a very public sexual harassment scandal that forced him to resign. Wilson was up against Bruce Harrell, who’d been in Seattle City Hall for 16 years, first on the city council, then as mayor for the last four years. He, too, had weathered his fair share of scandals: His executive office had a reputation for sexism and sexual harassment, leading to several high-profile resignations; in the middle of his term, it surfaced that early in his career, he’d pulled a gun on a pregnant woman in a dispute over a parking spot. Both men were proud moderate Democrats who had carried on the storied tradition of answering to their big-dollar donors.

In the lead-up to the primary, the Harrell campaign was riding on those last two truths. Most observers say he ran a “flat campaign.” The message was, more or less, “you want more of this, right?” And many of the major institutions bought it, including the influential labor council MLK Labor, US Representative Pramila Jayapal, Washington State Governor Bob Ferguson, and Attorney General Nick Brown.

That seemed like a reasonable strategy at the top of the campaign. Early polling showed a huge swath of undecided voters, and while press coverage pointed to Wilson’s work as an organizer—helping to raise the minimum wage across the region, save bus lines, increase access to free public transit, fund social housing projects—she was never the face of these wins. She worked in the background to get it done.

Wilson’s record was rooted in a tiny, grassroots organization that she cofounded back in 2011 called the Transit Riders Union. It started with a campaign to save King County Metro bus lines that were facing the chopping block in a recession-era austerity budget. Wilson, who had spent her young adult years researching and studying how to organize working-class power, saw public transit as a vital public good for working families.

Originally called “Save Our Metro,” the campaign had a slow start. Only 30 people showed up for the first meeting (Wilson calls the whole experience a massive learning curve). But then they kept showing up. And as the campaign built momentum, through people power alone, they were able to save those Metro lines.

The Transit Riders Union gradually expanded their scope. They started with improving access to transit by reducing fares for low-income families and making it free for kids under 18. Then they took on renter protections. Then they raised the minimum wage in cities throughout King County. The tiny nonprofit clocked substantial, impactful wins in every campaign, with barely any budget to speak of. Each campaign was driven by passionate volunteers, hitting the pavement and knocking on doors, and Wilson’s knack for coalition building—pulling in the right coconspirators at the right times.

Jake Simpson, who would eventually become her campaign’s political consultant, first met Wilson in exactly one of those situations. It was 2022, and it was his first year on the SeaTac City Council. She and another member of the Transit Riders Union approached him with a fully written renters’ protection ordinance, requiring that landlords give 120 days notice for major rent increases. It was “ready to go,” he says. She asked him to champion it on the council. He enthusiastically agreed.

“Her approach was amazing,” he says. “I think she knew that a lot of politicians don’t know what the hell they’re doing when it comes to policy work at all,” he says, so rather than advocating for ideas and asking him to translate them into policy, she did the policy work, and then asked him to get it over the finish line. That bill is now law.

So in April, if you knew who Wilson was, it was likely because you had worked alongside her, either as a politician like Simpson had, or as an organization helping to push these policies through. But to those in the know, she was a fighter, a person running a tiny organization that consistently punched above its weight, and someone whose work was always directed at improving the quality of life of working people.

“Every single community organization and every single nonprofit knew Katie Wilson,” says Anthony D’Amico, the recording secretary for the Transit Riders Union. “And I think that’s why she went from an unknown to a known so quickly.”

A New Ground Game

Those punchy nonprofits came out in force when she announced her campaign in the spring. Tech 4 Housing and House Our Neighbors, two grassroots campaigns that advocate for affordable housing, provided a backbone of early volunteers to help the campaign hit the ground running.

When I asked people who’d worked with her why they showed up so enthusiastically when she announced, it consistently came down to one thing: trust.

A politician like Mamdani draws people in with charisma, says Suresh Chanmugam, a member of the steering committee for Tech 4 Housing and volunteer for her campaign. But Wilson, who was never the face of her work, had no experience selling herself. Instead, her campaign was built on trust that she’d been cultivating for years. “She has a 14-year track record of selflessly working to help make life better for our most marginalized neighbors,” he says.

I asked Wilson if that rang true—if she relied on trust in her record to rally people behind a common goal. It reminded her of the days after the primary, when it was suddenly clear to power brokers in the city that she could soon be the mayor. She’s never had “positional authority” like that, Wilson tells me. The Transit Riders Union always ran on a shoestring budget and at most had two paid staff, including Wilson. So instead of having a staff working for her to achieve her goals, she asked people to work with her.

“The way that I’ve been able to do big things is by getting to a place where people want to work with me, because they’ve had a good experience doing that, because they see that that’s the way that we accomplish big things,” she says. “The authority that I’ve built up over the years is based on goodwill and trust.”

Running a campaign on trust allowed her to do something unusual: run a decentralized one. For most of the campaign, she had a minuscule staff of three—all former labor organizers. “That was really intentional for Katie,” Simpson, her political consultant, says. “She wanted a team of organizers doing this work.”

But that’s where the traditional structure of her campaign ended. It started with “establishing some very core values: that the city really should be one that everyone can survive in, not just if you’re a software engineer or CEO,” Chanmugam says.

By asking people to buy into these core values, he says, the campaign doesn’t have to be guided exclusively from the top. Instead, she had an enormous network of extremely dedicated volunteers. Yes, some were doing traditional door knocking, but the campaign’s Slack channel had 200 core volunteers, and at their largest, the campaign had 2,000 volunteers. There was a small team of dedicated data analysts. There were artists. A photographer. A videographer. Some people only volunteered to write video scripts.

One of the hallmarks of an organizer “is knowing that if you set out your values, there are a large number of people who will come out and support that,” Chanmugam says.

Xochitl Maykovich, one of the campaign’s two field directors, ran the operation on the ground after the primary. Between August and November, her team knocked on 50,000 doors. To do that, Maykovich essentially ran an organizer training camp. Each neighborhood had a “neighborhood captain” who went through Maykovich’s training for how to recruit volunteers, run a canvas, and report back to the team.

“The thing the Harrell campaign didn’t have—and I think probably almost every other campaign in Seattle recently has not had—is this groundswell of volunteers who are willing to put a ton of their time and energy into this campaign, unpaid,” says Alex Gallo-Brown, her campaign manager.

What Harrell did have was money. He and the PAC that supported him outraised Wilson two to one, backed by big business, developers, and some of Seattle’s wealthiest individuals. In October alone, they spent half a million dollars on TV attack ads. Like Cuomo did with Mamdani, he tried to frame Wilson as an inexperienced communist who would ultimately destroy the city.

And that spending made a difference—at least for a moment. In The Stranger’s polling in October, Wilson’s lead had shrunk from nine points to a statistical tie. That shift likely came from voters who were undecided, says Hannah Borenstein from DHM Research, who conducted the polling. “We can infer the amount of money Harrell spent likely helped him close the gap and prevent Wilson from gaining support among the around 80,000 additional voters that turned out between the primary and the November election,” she says.

Wilson ultimately won in the tightest mayoral race in Seattle’s recent history, taking just over 50 percent of the vote. But to politicos in Seattle, that doesn’t represent a lack of a mandate for progressivism in Seattle. It shows that hard-won progressive organizing actually can overcome the money that moderates and conservatives are willing to throw at these races.

“I think people want to see themselves reflected in who’s in office,” Simpson says. “Experience is relevant if you’re interested in getting the same kind of outcomes that we’ve seen for the last 20 years, but when people are tired of those outcomes, then they want someone that’s a lot more like them.”