Please Vote!
...247 days to go...
Tomorrow is election day.
Just in case you’re still on the fence or not planning to vote, here’s my own take on why your vote is so important. Or, if you’ve already voted, here’s why you should feel good about it!
The Seattle city budget is $8.3 billion, and roughly 250,000 people will vote in this election. That means your vote, on average, controls about $33,000 a year. Seattle’s mayor and city council both serve four-year terms, so your vote controls over $130,000 over that period.
Of course, I care much more about certain parts of the budget than others, and your priorities may differ. But as the author of a newsletter on homelessness in Seattle, one area I care a lot about is how Seattle spends revenue from the JumpStart tax. JumpStart is a tax on large businesses in Seattle that will generate about $541 million in 2025.
Five years ago, the City Council passed the JumpStart spending plan, which mandated that 62% of JumpStart revenues be spent on affordable housing (that’s about $335 million in 2025). Since then, there’s been a vigorous debate about whether the city should divert the money to other causes. The current budget allocates only $133 million to affordable housing, about $200 million less than the 62% spending plan would have devoted.
$200 million a year over four years is $800 million, which is over $3,000 for every vote cast in the election. That means each vote is, in part, like a decision about whether the city should write a $3,000 check to develop affordable housing or not.
I think that’s a pretty good use of an hour.
Three closing thoughts:
Can’t easily get to the polls tomorrow in Seattle? Message me! I’m happy to swing by and give anyone a ride!
Happen to want my advice on who to vote for? See here
Think it’ll never come down to your vote? Think again. It happened in Virginia in 2017…
I’ve been knocking on doors for Katie Wilson for a few weeks now - if you want to know why, check out my endorsement of her. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed and learned a lot from the conversations I’ve had with fellow voters, the large majority of whom have been friendly and open to chatting. Much like me in, lets see, every local election until now, many Seattleites don’t yet have a clear opinion on who will be the best candidate for their city.
You can easily see this in the data: turnout in the Seattle primary election on August 5th was 198K, roughly 40% of the overall Seattle electorate of ~490K. The only other time I’ve gone door-knocking was during the 2024 presidential election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, when turnout hit 78%. That’s a lot of unused Seattle ballots.
Spending a year trying to help Seattle’s homeless, and finally armed with the time to give it some real thought, I began to wonder how valuable each of those unused votes might be. I did a thought experiment and found that voting could be equivalent to donating over $6,000 to the cause of solving homelessness!
I’ll talk about the assumptions involved below, which we could reasonably debate. But regardless, our votes are worth a lot. Thus, I encourage you to get out and vote on November 5th.
As I might say to Natalie if I were helping her with her math homework, it’s probably a good idea to show my work…
The Chance Your Vote is the Deciding One
“Hey, you never know” says the New York lottery.
It’s true of elections too. It’s unlikely that, excluding your vote, Seattle’s mayoral election would be a tie. But it’s not impossible. For example, it happened in 2017 in a Virginia election with 23,000 votes.
The likelihood really depends on only two factors: the number of people voting (n) and the likelihood of each person voting for Wilson (p). Since it’s a two-person election, the likelihood they vote for Harrell is just 1-p so it’s not a separate variable.
N has been between 200-260K for the last few election cycles, so we’ll call it 250K. It doesn’t change the math that much.
Estimating p is a lot harder. I’ve chosen to assume there’s an equal chance the value of p is anywhere between 0.5 and 0.55. Why?
The 0.55 comes from the fact that Wilson won the primary by about 10%, so we could assume she’ll maintain her 10 point advantage in the general election (a 10 point advantage would mean Wilson has a 0.55 chance of winning any given vote and Harrell has a 0.45 chance)
The 0.5 assumes that new voters (those who will vote in the general election but didn’t vote in the primary) break 60/40 for Harrell. Based on historical precedent, turnout will be about 30% higher in the general. These voters will be less politically engaged than primary voters, which makes them more likely to choose Harrell, the incumbent, who has much greater name recognition than Wilson. It’s also worth noting that Harrell won his 2021 primary by a 1.9% margin but went on to win the general election that year by over 17%, so big swings can and do happen
What’s the true value of p? Your guess is as good as mine. But using my assumptions, there is about one chance in 64,000 that your vote will be the tipping point.
The Impact of Casting the Deciding Vote
OK, one in 64,000 isn’t that likely. But what if it did happen? If you cast the deciding vote, what would actually change?
Allocation of JumpStart revenues, for one. If you’re not familiar with Seattle’s JumpStart tax, it requires businesses that spend at least $7 million on payroll annually in Seattle to pay tax on salaries and wages of high earners. The City of Seattle expects the tax to generate about $541 million in 2025, though the true number could be higher or lower than that (70% of the tax is paid by about 10 companies which use a lot of stock-based compensation, and the fluctuations in the value of that stock makes it hard to forecast Jumpstart revenue precisely).
Shortly after JumpStart was passed in July 2020, the City Council passed additional legislation creating the JumpStart spending plan, which mandated that 62% of JumpStart revenues be spent on affordable housing. That would be about $335 million in 2025. But the current administration decided instead to divert much of JumpStart’s revenues to balancing the city’s budget, which is otherwise running a substantial deficit. This left only $133 million to be used for affordable housing, about $202 million less than the 62% spending plan would have devoted.
I believe Wilson will attempt to restore the full amount of funding for affordable housing. Building affordable housing is a key part of her platform: she was a grassroots organizer behind JumpStart when it passed, and credits the Proposition 1A campaign in February (in which she fought to fund a social housing initiative with a new business tax rather than using JumpStart funds to pay for it) as a key driver in her decision to run for Mayor.
What’s more, she will almost certainly be armed with a more progressive city council (The Stranger backed, progressive candidates Alexis Mercedes Rinck, Dionne Foster, and Eddie Lin were up by 65%, 23%, and 18% against their more moderate challengers), so it is quite possible that Wilson will be able to return JumpStart to its original intent and restore the missing ~$202 million per year of funding for affordable housing in its entirety. Over the course of four years this works out to a forecast of $811 million in incremental funding for affordable housing (though actual revenue could be higher or lower).
In the interest of being conservative, let’s assume she restores only half of this funding. After all, the composition of the city council might become more conservative as her term progresses, or a recession might significantly lower the revenues generated by JumpStart. In that case, a win would still result in an incremental $400 million being allocated toward affordable housing over four years.
Your $6,000 Vote
We can bring this all together using the statistical concept of expected value. Basically, one of two things is going to happen:
You have one chance in 64,000 of determining the election - about 0.00157%. If that happens, it will free up about $400 million of incremental revenue for affordable housing which will greatly benefit our homeless neighbors. The expected value of this event is about $6,000 (0.00157% * $400,000,000).
You have 63,999 chances in 64,000 of NOT determining the election - about 99.998%. If that happens, no one will benefit. The expected value of this event is $0.
What Will Happen with that Money?
$400 million sounds like a lot, and it is, but how far will that go toward building affordable housing?
In 2024, Seattle’s office of housing spent $198 million to fund seven new affordable housing projects comprising 655 total units (about $90 million of this was devoted to costs on previously funded projects). I’m basing this on just one year of data and a small sample size, so I acknowledge the cost per unit may vary significantly. But based on this data, the cost per unit to Seattle was about $300K.
Of course, $300K does not represent the full cost of those units. Rather, it provides a supplement to other sources of funding which gets the projects over the fundraising finish line. But given there were 18 other projects which applied for funding from Seattle in 2024 and did not receive it, there appears to be significant unmet demand. Thus, I think we can assume that more units could be constructed at roughly that cost to the city if we had additional funds to allocate.
At $300K per unit, $400M buys roughly 1,300 additional affordable housing units. Assuming two people per household, that’s enough to house over 2,500 people, which is nearly one-sixth of Seattle’s current homeless population.
Conclusion
Voting matters. Based on JumpStart alone, I believe voting for Katie Wilson will matter a lot to our homeless neighbors. But JumpStart is only a single decision our next mayor will have to make, and many others will be impactful, too (the overall Seattle city budget is about $4 billion per year, roughly 20x the size of the JumpStart dollars in question).
So what can you do? For starters, please get out and vote. If you’d like a spirited discussion about the pros and cons of our two mayoral candidates, please reach out - I’d be happy to chat. And if you’re really inspired, come knock on doors with me and help spread the word!