Images from Converge Media’s broadcast of Wednesday night’s debate / You can view the August 2024 primary results mapped at wacommunityalliance.github.io

The battle for the citywide Position 8 seat on the Seattle City Council looks likely to cross Capitol Hill’s E Republican line as mapping the results from the August primary shows patterns that break along familiar progressive vs. centrist fault lines in the city.

Meanwhile, predicting the November election means more than simply splitting the votes from the primary candidates who did not go through along ideological lines to predict the winner. Each candidate’s most fragile borders could shift as Seattle moves forward with growing priorities around law and order solutions to the the city’s drug crisis and street disorder.

There is also this added wrinkle. Whoever wins this November between Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Tanya Woo will have to run again in 2025.

During a Seattle City Club debate Wednesday night at Capitol Hill’s Seattle Central College, some of the most pitched battles of the night came over the candidates’ approaches to public safety and the Seattle Police Department budget.

“My opponent advocates for all the policies in the last four years that have brought us where we are today. We have to move forward,” Woo said during her most aggressive jabs of the mostly calm debate. “We have to look at public safety and do that differently from what we have done in the past.”

“I always talk about Little Saigon and how it looked four years ago, and how it looks today,” Woo said. “Those are all the years of failed policy that have affected and marginalized our most vulnerable communities the most.”

Rinck, meanwhile, criticized Woo and the current council’s ineffectiveness and failure to deliver on causes important to thousands in the city like affordability and police reform.

“That is something this council has struggled to do in its eight months while in office,” Rinck said. “This is a council that has voted down affordable housing legislation, that has approve a SPOG [police union] contract without increased accountability measures, to reimplement banishment policy that has historically not worked, has also added to the budget deficit.”

View the full results map from Washington Community Alliance

This divide will play out toward November with Position 8 voting patterns from the August Primary that show some of the familiar divisons in Seattle elections as centrist candidates resonate strongest with voters in a ring along the city’s waterfront along Lake Washington and in its wealthiest, most single family home-dominated neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, more progressive candidates tend to show their strongest outcomes in the city’s most densely populated cores. How either side is able to penetrate the edges of these regions — on Capitol HIll, CHS has reported on the E Republican line as a demarcation — often tells the story of how they won the race.

Looking at District 3 Central District and Capitol Hill-area voters in the August Primary, Rinck’s campaign was able to bust north of the E Republican line. resonating with the edges of wealthier voters well into what has typically been the more centrist territory around Volunteer Park.

Can Rinck hold the line? CHS reported here on the primary victories for Rinck and Woo as they advanced with little challenge from the rest of the Position 8 field.

The progressive 43rd District Democrats endorsed Rinck, a queer, Central District Latina who hopes to fully fund city services and get corporations to pay their fair share in taxes. Rinck has said she is “a living testament” to investments in early childhood support and education, and that she understands the importance of investing in youth and city services as someone whose family needed these resources.

Woo, meanwhile, has grown as a leader in the Chinatown International District’s community helping lead her family businesses before her appointment to the council last year where she has become a staunch ally to the centrist and pro-business efforts of Council President Sara Nelson.

Woo is an incumbent, of sorts. She has filled the Position 8 seat after her appointment to finish the final year of the term when Teresa Mosqueda left to take the seat she won on the King County Council.

This November General Election will decide who gets to finish Mosqueda’s term. November 2025 will bring a fresh race for the seat. Presumably, Woo or Rinck will have a leg up as the incumbent.

The race is close on other fronts. A new Progressive People Power PAC is the latest to step into the race and is helping boost Rinck’s message. Woo got a $60,000 boost from the WA Realtors PAC. Outside the PACs, the candidates are neck and neck when it comes to funding with each having raised more then $320,000 in the race.

Wednesday night, Rinck criticized the council’s approval of Stay out of Drug Area and prostitution crime exclusion zones and said she would have voted against last year’s approved legislation enabling the City Attorney’s Office to prosecute drug use and possession on Seattle’s streets, saying she will bring more progressive priorities back to the council.

Rinck’s solutions, she said, would pair increased investments in social services and community groups as she fights to stop cuts due to budget shortfalls and, instead, would champion new taxes and fees.

“We need to try to raise new revenue,” Rinck said. “Progressive revenue, making sure that corporations and the ultra wealthy are paying what they owe”

Woo countered saying she brings a “small business owner” perspective to the council. “Asking for more taxes should be a last resort, not a first resort,” Woo said.

Woo also criticized Rinck’s work with the King County Regional Homelessness Authority and gave the city an “F” when it comes to solving the crisis.

“I think we’re failing. My opponent here wrote the five year plan for the King County Homeless Authority, a plan that would have cost the city $12 billion. We can all agree this organization has not produced any meaningful results.”

Rinck denied the plan she led would have cost $12 billion to address, saying that the figure included billions in affordable housing development recommendations and that the rest of the needed investments and services could have come “from within the city’s budget.”

But Rinck agreed with Woo on the grade.

“Having seen hundreds of our communities die outside, it’s hard not to say ‘F,'” Rinck said.

CHS reported here on the plan in early 2023. $8.4 billion of the five-year plan would have been dedicated to capital expenses and housing.

In the end, much of the debate for Position 8 Wednesday night came down to law and order where even discussion of how best to help small businesses came down to concerns about addiction, street disorder, and property damage.

“Business are really struggling. I think a lot of that is public safety,” Woo said.

Rinck, countered, criticizing Woo and the council for moving forward with enforcement and prosecution programs without wider support and spending and saying she has “yet to see additional resources” accompany the council’s public safety initiatives.

How these messages play out across Capitol Hill, the Central District, and the rest of the city in November remains to be seen but we’ll be watching the E Republican line.

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