On Nov. 2, 2021, voters in Seattle voted in city elections including for two council seats and an open seat mayoral election. On Dec. 7, however, voters in Seattle’s District 3 will have to return to the polls as one of the most prominent members of the City Council, Kshama Sawant, faces a recall election.
Sawant immediately stands apart from the other members of the Seattle City Council. In a heavily blue city, eight of the nine councilors are Democrats — Sawant, however, refuses to identify with the Democratic Party, and is instead aligned with the Socialist Alternative party. Sawant has built a reputation as a committed leftist, first running for office in 2013 on a pledge to raise Seattle’s minimum wage to $15 an hour (a year later, Seattle did precisely that; the national minimum wage remains $7.25 an hour). Since then, she has advocated for a Renters’s Bill of Rights — whose provisions included extending the advanced notice landlords must give before evicting renters —, led the effort against a planned $160 million police station, persuaded the City Council to cut ties with financial institutions that provided loans to the TransCanada or Keystone XL Pipeline, and more.
Yet where Sawant may have gained the most national attention is for her battles with Amazon, which is headquartered in Seattle. In 2018, Sawant joined the other members of the Seattle City Council in unanimously voting for a head tax charging $275 per employee on large corporations making at least $20 million per year in Seattle, with the money going toward addressing homelessness in the city. However, after Amazon — which would have to pay $12 million a year under the tax system — funded an effort to overturn the law via referendum, the City Council voted 7-2 to repeal the tax they had earlier unanimously passed. Sawant was one of only two councilmembers to vote against the repeal.
In 2020, however, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Sawant revived the tax with a Tax Amazon movement that would have established a tax on corporations making at least $7 million in Seattle, with revenue going towards COVID-19 relief, climate programs, and affordable housing. That same year, Seattle passed the Jump Start tax, which taxed corporations making at least $7 million in Seattle between 0.7% to 2.4% based on how much they paid their Seattle-based employees. The tax, sponsored by councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, was inspired by Sawant’s Tax Amazon movement, and is expected to generate over $200 million per year in revenue.
With Sawant’s consistent opposition to Amazon, it should come as no surprise that she has consistently been a top target of Amazon’s. In Sawant’s 2019 reelection campaign, Amazon spent $1.5 million in the Seattle City Council races, backing the more business-friendly candidate Egan Orion against Sawant. Orion, who opposed the Amazon head tax, claimed that Amazon’s donations were “completely unnecessary” and may have contributed to voters switching their support to Sawant in protest of Amazon attempting to buy the election. Despite being down eight percentage points on Election Day, Sawant ultimately triumphed after all the ballots were counted, with Amazon’s donations contributing to increased grassroots support for her campaign.
Now, however, Sawant faces another political challenge in the form of an upcoming recall election. Proponents of the recall have criticized Sawant on three charges: that she inappropriately used city resources to promote the “Tax Amazon” initiative, that she let protestors rally inside City Hall during the George Floyd protests, and that she led a march to the private home of then-Mayor Jenny Durkan. Sawant has responded saying she did not believe what she had done was unethical, and resolved the issue by paying $3,500 in fines regarding the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission complaint for using city resources for the “Tax Amazon” initiative. Moreover, she has denied her role in leading the march to Durkan’s home, claiming that she did not know the address of Mayor Durkan’s home, and was not responsible for organizing the route of the march. She stuck by her decision to let protestors into City Hall to rally, pointing towards the legacy of nonviolent protests in the civil rights movement, and noting that the rally was both nonviolent and did not present a risk of COVID-19 transmission.
Sawant has meanwhile attacked the organizers of the recall for purposefully scheduling the recall after the 2021 elections had already taken place, in between Thanksgiving and Christmas, in order to drive turnout down for the election. Sawant’s followers had in fact helped collect signatures for the recall effort in order to ensure that the recall was able to get enough signatures in time to be on the ballot for the November elections. However, the organizers of the recall effort presented the signatures when it was too late to be on the ballot by November, leading to the recall election being moved to December, separate from the other city elections.
Sawant has also noted support for the recall election from right-wing sources such as Breitbart and big money donors. One anti-Sawant PAC, called “A Better Seattle,” has raised money from groups such as the Commercial Real Estate Development Association and the Washington Multi-Family Housing Association, likely opposed to Sawant’s stances on rent control and housing. The PAC has also asked the Washington Public Disclosure Commission for contribution limits to be lifted for the recall election, claiming that “as a recall committee, A Better Seattle does not have the potential for corruption, or the
appearance of corruption.”
Although Amazon does not seem like it will spend another $1.5 million like it did for the recall election in 2019, it does seem fitting that Sawant’s next political test after emerging from her 2019 campaign victory comes in part due to her work on the “Tax Amazon” proposal. Yet this is exactly the fight Sawant has been itching for her entire career.
In a statement published by the Socialist Alternative, Sawant wrote, “As long as I sit on the City Council, I pledge to continue to fight in solidarity with working people and marginalized communities. I pledge I will continue to be accountable to working people and to never join the establishment’s club. I pledge I will uphold my oath of office as I understand it. And most importantly, I pledge to never waver in my fight for social justice and a different kind of society.”
Image by Seattle City Council is licensed under the Creative Commons license.
