Socialist Candidate Scores Well in Seattle Vote

from Advocates for Averill

In an otherwise ho-hum Seattle primary election, the campaign of socialist, feminist, bus-driving unionist Linda Averill scored an impressive 18 percent in a four-way race for Seattle City Council Position #4.

The Averill campaign focused attention on the injustices of a city where concentrated poverty coexists with Microsoft billionaires and the immense wealth of corporate giants like Amazon.com, Starbucks and Boeing.

Seattle's iconoclastic weekly, The Stranger, endorsed Averill, though it also urged Averill to give up socialism and "run as a Democrat... grow up and join the mainstream...." Still, the endorsement is a sign of how much Averill's message resonated with many who had never before considered voting socialist. The King County Labor Council came within one vote of endorsing Averill.

Averill called for city leadership in opposing the Iraq war and contrasted US response to Hurricane Katrina with that of Cuba, where islanders are safely evacuated every hurricane season. "We talked about real needs and the inability of the Democrats that rule our city to meet those needs," she says. The campaign called for rent control, reinstatement of affirmative action, and raising the minimum wage from $7.35 to $17.00 an hour--an amount shown to be the wage needed for a woman with two children to live in the city.

She raised the issues of employer-funded childcare, an elected civilian review board over police, outlawing police use of Tasers, banning military recruiters from schools, expanding youth job opportunities, and nationalizing major industries under workers control.

A split vote on the Left may have led to a missed opportunity to send a socialist to the general election. Various left-leaning groups supported one of her primary election opponents, Angel Bolanos, a Democrat who finished at 14%. With Averill only 7% points behind the second contender, Casey Corr, it is likely that a united Left effort would have put her in second place.

Averill's campaign raised some $19,000 in donations with more than half the contributors giving $25 or less. By contrast her top two opponents who made the general election, incumbent Jan Drago and former mayoral staffer Casey Corr, each raised more than $190,000 and each spent more than $85,000 in the primary. Most of their donors gave between $100 and $399, many of them wealthy developers, CEOs of major companies, and Democratic Party bigwigs.*