Seattle's next mayor is willing to meet with anyone, including Trump

SEATTLE — He hasn’t yet, but if President Donald Trump invited Seattle Mayor-elect Katie Wilson to the White House, she would accept.

She won’t say what she would tell him, but as she transitions from campaigning to governing, she’s made a pledge not to shut any doors.

“I'll meet with anyone,” she said from her new office in the Seattle Municipal Tower. “I mean, he’s the president of the United States.”

Wilson says she’s a socialist who will come into office with an unabashedly progressive agenda. She’s promised new taxes on the rich and 4,000 new units of shelter. She wants to explore publicly backed grocery stores and to start the conversation on universal child care.

At the same time, she represents a shift from the progressive standard-bearers of Seattle’s recent past, who took more defensive postures toward their perceived political opponents.

Whereas M. Lorena González, who ran for mayor on a progressive platform in 2021, refused to even answer questions from the business-backed Downtown Seattle Association during the campaign, Wilson engaged. Her transition team leadership includes longtime progressive allies but is also led by someone who once worked for the organizer of an anti-Wilson political committee. Already, in the first days of her transition, she’s met with high-level representatives from Amazon — a conversation she described in positive terms — in addition to union voices.

Her approach so far also stands in contrast to former progressive Mayor Mike McGinn, who came into office with his “elbows up,” said Jon Scholes, president and CEO of the Downtown Seattle Association.

“I don’t feel like Katie’s coming in with her elbows up by any means,” he said.

Far from the militant politics of Seattle’s last socialist, Trotskyist Council member Kshama Sawant, the open-door philosophy is shared by other young risers in left-wing politics. New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, to whom Wilson is often compared, met last week with Trump. The meeting was largely well-received by Mamdani's backers. Sawant, though, slammed him for agreeing to it.

For Wilson, there’s no contradiction. In fact, she sees her willingness to talk as key to her administration’s success.

“There are going to be some people who probably see taking those meetings as selling out,” she said. “But I think that a lot of people on the progressive left do have a sophisticated understanding of what it's going to take to deliver on a bold progressive agenda, and that it's not just about only talking to your friends and using the mayor's office as a soapbox.”

Focusing on transition

The Friday after her victory was confirmed, Wilson said she felt mentally prepared for the shift from the theoretical to the real. After a strong showing in the primary, she’d had three months to adjust to the idea of being mayor and was deep into conversations with friends and advisers about preparing her office.

What changed was the volume of people reaching out to her.

“Before, non-206 area code calls were normally spam,” she said. “Now they might be elected officials in other jurisdictions.”

She’s taken the necessary meetings — with Gov. Bob Ferguson, for example — while trying to triage the others. Letting grassroots organizations reach her is important as well, she said.

As for the national response, both positive and negative, she’s tried to ignore most of it. Save for a spot on CNN, she’s turned down most national media requests and purposefully did not comment on Trump calling her a communist.

On an individual level, Wilson acknowledged there are now many people in the city who feel some ownership over her being elected. She ran a lightly populist campaign with hundreds of volunteers. Having never held a government office before — the first mayor since McGinn for whom that’s true — her mayoralty is ripe for people’s projections of their hopes and dreams.

Wilson said her approach will be to absorb those ideas without taking them at face value, while vetting the messengers through those she trusts.

Ultimately you're gonna land somewhere that probably doesn't please everyone," she said

Getting broad input

On that question of whom she will ask for advice and other short-term staffing questions, she’s so far circumspect.

The city’s department heads have been sent messages requesting meetings with the incoming mayor. Wilson said she has some in mind she intends to keep, some she intends to change and some she doesn’t know, but declined to say which.

She sees value in continuity in certain places and promises her decisions will not be political. She will not dole out positions as reward nor fire anyone as punishment for backing Harrell, she said.

“The most important thing in my mind is that the people that we have leading departments are dedicated public servants who are fantastic at their jobs,” she said.

The structure of the office is likely to look different from those of recent mayors. After the primary, her campaign circulated a memo written by City Hall alumni, advising her against having too many direct reports and warning her against creating an overly factional structure.

Instead of having a team of deputy mayors, each with a portfolio of departments, they recommended a single deputy mayor overseeing community relations, a chief of staff and a director of departments.

Wilson said she also intends to have a team focused specifically on “policy and innovation,” whose full-time job is crafting legislation. It’s an approach she’s borrowing from Ed Murray’s office, which, before he resigned amid allegations of sexual abuse, was the origin of his $15 minimum wage proposal and a suite of housing bills known as the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda.

Wilson was tight-lipped about first-day priorities, saying she and her staff are in the process of turning their campaign pledges into an actionable plan.

She said she anticipates an early conversation around new revenue, likely in the form of a capital gains tax.

In her quest for new shelter, Wilson said she expects new places to be stood up by May, if not earlier.

And, in her most specific pledge, she wants a bus lane on Denny for the chronically late No. 8 Metro route.

Not like past mayors

For now, Wilson’s team occupies a cavernous floor halfway up the Seattle Municipal Tower. Furniture is light and Wilson’s office overlooks Interstate 5 and Harborview to the east. It’s all a sharp change from the rallies where Wilson made a name for herself in local politics.

Wilson hopes, though, to retain the spirit of her organizing days. She wants an office that reaches out proactively, that has open lines to grassroots organizations, that builds political support from the ground up.

It’s a sparsely tested theory of local politics because Wilson is not like Seattle’s past mayors. But she's pursuing it because she believes it's the best way to achieve results. She knows she will ultimately be judged on how many people she can help get off the street and how safe her constituents feel.

"We're in this moment where there's an opportunity for people like me, coming from the left, coming into executive offices as a progressive, to show that we can govern," she said, "and that people can have faith in government.