Mayor Jenny Durkan revealed today that she will not be seeking reelection. Polling suggests Durkan’s popularity nosedived after a summer of protests that saw her oversee the tear gassing of her constituents and the abandonment of East Precinct, inciting critics from both the Left and Right.
After winning her election with 56.5% of the vote in 2017, Mayor Durkan mostly coasted along without upsetting her electoral coalition too significantly–in part by avoiding tough decisions and focusing her attention on criticizing the Trump administration. That changed in 2020 as crackdowns on protesters and wishy-washy vision for police reform upset progressives. To make matters worse, she opposed a popular JumpStart Seattle payroll tax on corporations and the 2018 head tax before it, strengthening the perception she was out of touch and beholden to corporate power.
Uprising and recall effort
In fact, Mayor Durkan faced a major recall effort following her botched, heavy-handed response to protests. One online recall petition gathered more than 43,000 signatures, while another petition asking her to resign or face impeachment (spearheaded by local Democratic party leaders) surpassed 16,000. Three official City commissions joined the call for her to step down. Mayor Durkan went to court to impede the recall effort and was successful, and has now handed the $240,000 bill for legal fees to taxpayers after initially claiming she–unlike Councilmember Kshama Sawant–would fund her recall defense herself out of pocket.
Former city council candidate Shaun Scott crediting Black Lives Matter and Defund The Police protests as pushing Durkan into retirement. “You don’t see a move like this without uprising we’ve seen,” he said. “Durkan not seeking re-election is a victory that belongs to the organizers, activists, and demonstrators who forged a new civil rights movement in Seattle this summer. The fact that the Human Rights Commission—created by the Mayor’s office in 1963 in response to protests against housing discrimination—asked Durkan to step down says all we need to know about her tenure as mayor.”
The mood became increasingly tense between Mayor and Council this summer as they sparred over policing, budgeting, Covid relief, emergency reserves, and so on. The Mayor used her veto or threat of it on several occasions.
After fighting the JumpStart tax, Durkan reluctantly let it become law without her signature (knowing the Council had the votes to override her veto anyway). That didn’t stop the Mayor from raiding JumpStart revenues to patch holes in her 2021 budget and seek to fulfill a $100 million pledge to communities of color in lieu of promising to hold the Seattle Police Department accountable or to ratchet up reform efforts. In fact, Durkan vetoed the Council’s 2020 rebalancing package over her opposition to the requested thirty-some layoffs targeting problem officers. The Council overrode that veto, but the delay blocked some of the cuts.
From a transportation standpoint, the disappointments started much earlier. Durkan delay became a common refrain as a growing list of multimodal projects were paused, shelved, sabotaged, loudly abandoned, or quietly put out to pasture. Some of the issues–like a seven-line RapidRide plan that overextended available funds–were inherited, but many were of her own making, like caving to car activists and canceling a safety-focused redesign of 35th Avenue NE and stalling out progress on the bike master plan and pedestrian master plan.
