In writing last week about why a campaign based on process and personality won’t be enough to defeat Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels in November (“Will Voters Tune In to Seattle City Government’s Family Feud?“), I raised a question that’s surely on the mind of his challengers and their self-soothing consultants:
Now some might counter, if Nickels is so strong, why are his polling numbers so weak? But that’s a question for another post…
Well, with retiring City Council member Jan Drago officially announcing her candidacy today, it’s time for that post, and I don’t think it’s one the field of challengers will find any more encouraging or flattering than the last.
Let’s begin with the facts. Every survey out there—the mayor’s, his opponents’, and those from third parties—shows Nickels’ approval rating consistently polling somewhere in the mid-thirties, and anybody who knows anything about electoral politics will tell you that for a two-term incumbent, that’s an awfully bad place to be. Just falling below 50% is conventionally considered a sign of vulnerability, but 35%…? It’s time to start sending out your resume.
So it’s understandable why Drago and the other challengers might feel buoyed. Up until Drago’s entrance it was a crap-shoot as to who might win the second spot on the November ballot (my sense is that Nickels and Drago are now the clear favorites to make it through the primary), and going up against such an unpopular incumbent, it would be the challenger’s race to lose.
Or so dictates conventional wisdom.
But the the thing about conventional wisdom is that it’s so damn conventional, and as such, tends to obscure the vagaries that surround all candidates and influence all political campaigns. And as I wrote last week, anybody counting on 35% in April to automatically translate into defeat in November has another think coming, especially since, quite frankly, Mayor Nickels never seems to poll all that well.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen the mayor poll above fifty percent,” one long time Nickels aide told me. You know, except on election day… the only day that really counts. As to why the mayor polls so poorly, well, that’s hard to say, but I’m guessing it has something to do with his penchant for attempting to do stuff.
Are you an ardent opponent of light rail? Then you probably hate the mayor… likewise for those of you for whom the monorail was the stuff of wet dreams. Prefer the rebuild or surface/transit options for replacing the Viaduct? Well then, screw Mayor Nickels and his gold-plated, faith-based tunnel.
Angry at losing the Sonics? Convinced the grocery bag tax is nanny-statism gone awry? Think Nickels is anti-business and/or in the pocket of developers? Affordable housing vs. plummeting home prices… transit-oriented development vs. preserving our neighborhoods… service cuts vs. tax increases… whatever side of whatever issue, you name it and you can probably find reason enough to blame the mayor.
Of course, the only alternative to doing stuff is to do nothing, but that’s just not in Nickels’ character, and besides, whatever reputation the mayor has for a willingness to spend political capital (sometimes frivolously), it can’t help but appear exaggerated compared to the how-low-can you-go profile of the city council.
I mean, here’s a thought experiment for you: pull out your stopwatch and see how long it takes you to come up with nine things you don’t like about the mayor and his policies. Pretty easy, huh? Now time how long it takes you to name all nine city council members.
See what I mean?
Yeah sure, there’s something about Nickels’ style that particularly pisses off those establishment types steeped in a lazy political culture that puts every contentious issue up for public vote, and too often confuses leadership for arrogance (all the while whining about the lack of the former), but he’s not the only executive to head into an election year with less than stellar approval ratings. Gov. Chris Gregoire had only just inched up to 45% by April of 2008, yet still managed to win by over six points come November. And perhaps more relevantly, former King County Executive Ron Sims’ approval rating was likewise mired in the mid thirties in April of 2005, yet he still ran away to a 16-point win in his landslide bid for a third term.
So while no doubt the mayor’s people would prefer to see his approval ratings climb, they won’t start shitting bricks unless and until the coming barrage of campaign advertising fails to budge his numbers.
So now that we’ve settled that—35% approval rating bad, but not fatal—let’s talk about what the challengers can do to exploit Nickels’ obvious vulnerability. And the answer is… um… not much. For despite the litany of mayoral gripes I’ve outlined above, and the many, many more I’ve neglected, there really aren’t any big, consensus building issues with which to attack the mayor.
Drago and the others can focus all they want on Frozen Watergate, but in a city that experiences major snowstorms every decade or so, snow removal is hardly a top priority, while efforts to spin the icy streets as emblematic will be hard pressed in the absence of evidence of a broader culture of mismanagement. The city failed to clear the streets for a week, and…? They better come up with an “and” or two if they truly want to use this issue to their advantage.
We had the snow as bad as anywhere down in my neck of the woods, but that’s one week out of the 385 or so Nickels has been mayor. Over that same tenure our crime is down, our streets have been paved, our libraries renovated, and our playfields re-turfed. We’re not too happy about the direction our schools are going or the level of Metro bus service, but somebody should remind Mike and Jan that these two services don’t fall under the mayor’s purview. Meanwhile, we’ve got a shiny new train running through the Rainier Valley that’s driving much needed redevelopment, and is about to make us the envy of the region.
And I live in South Seattle, one of the most neglected areas of the city.
I’m not saying there aren’t failures in the mayor’s administration, there just haven’t been any major failures, and certainly nothing endemic. A couple weeks ago I chatted with a staffer for self-financed candidate Joe Mallahan, who after failing to goad me on snow removal and Key Arena (“Aren’t you angry about the Sonics leaving… or don’t you like sports?” she asked me, I think implying something lacking in my manhood should I affirm the latter), raised the specter of Seattle’s budget deficit as evidence of Nickels’ unfitness to manage city affairs.
The budget? Really?
Seattle’s projected $29.5 million revenue shortfall is nothing compared to that of the state or even King County, and the mayor’s proposed budget adjustments have proven proportionately less painful and controversial, mostly consisting of a mandatory one-week furlough for library employees, the elimination of 59 positions (half of which were already open) and a $5 million transfer from the city’s rainy day fund (leaving another $25 million in reserve, compared to the mere $2 million he inherited in 2001).
All in all, I’d say the city has recently managed its finances quite well, and I don’t get the sense that many voters are convinced otherwise.
Likewise, despite the many opportunities Nickels has had to piss off one constituency or another through positions he’s taken and the policies he’s advocated, it hardly adds up to a throw the bum out consensus, especially considering the utter lack of differentiation his opponents have enunciated on these very same issues. How exactly does Mike McGinn expect to court the environmental vote away from one of the most outspoken environmental mayors in the nation? Does Drago really believe she’ll be embraced as a credible alternative when she’s been the mayor’s most reliable ally on the council?
Yes, opinion polls show the mayor remains unpopular, but it’s not due to any major scandal—personal, ethical, performance or otherwise—and its not due to the stances he’s taken on major issues, which have largely been in step with the vast majority of Seattle voters. The fact is, Mayor Nickels is neither corrupt nor incompetent nor out of sync with our values. Folks just don’t like him.
The dilemma for the challengers is this: how do you defeat a competent, scandal-free mayor whose values you share, and whose policy agenda you largely support? You beat him by being a better politician.
And that’s why I’m convinced that none of the challengers in this race, not even Drago, can beat Mayor Nickels, for as vulnerable as he is, and as grating as his style obviously can be, none of his opponents possess the force of personality necessary to get voters excited about change. I don’t write this as Nickels booster; I’ve got nothing against the mayor, though I’ve got nothing particularly for him either, and there have been plenty of issues on which we’ve disagreed.
But issues don’t win races, candidates do. Thus the solution to beating a scandal-free incumbent, even one with a pathetic 35% approval rating, is to simply be a better politician. And sadly for them, none of the challengers are that.
“Angry at losing the Sonics?”
Only until the guilty are tarred and feathered, lynched, defeated at the polls and run out of town. Other than that, no, I’m not angry at all.
There are a number of areas where his competence level has been substandard.
He was the monorail authority’s #1 cheerleader, yet it had a lousy payment plan and it ended up costing city residents $150 million in completely wasted taxes. Had he looked more carefully at the income projections that disaster might have been avoided.
He didn’t budget well for the first five years in office, and had to go to the voters with hat in hand for the additional “Bridging the Gap” tax, mostly to pay for road and sidewalk repairs that should have been a part of normal operations costs on an ongoing basis.
He thinks the finance plan for the AWV tunnel is not enforceable. Then why is he supporting it, and not even suggesting how it could be made enforceable?
The plastic bag tax is a joke – it isn’t going to do anything in terms of overall solid waste production (locally or region-wide).
Even Sound transit’s not that great. It’s brutally expensive for poor people here, and it doesn’t improve overall mobility over buses.
Plus, you can tell the character of a man by his children. The fact that JR. got a job at a casino (patronage) and then ripped off the native american casino just tells me the kid didn’t get good values at home.
Nickels has friends who have lots of money, and the rest of the candidates are joke candidates. Look at San Diego. The challenger there for mayor last year put up over $4 million trying to take that seat. The challengers here don’t have the money, and they can’t get the money, to outspend Nickels. If they tried, they’d be buried by piles of negative ads Nickels’ friends pay for with PAC cash.
Nickels is waltzing into another term, because nobody is able to challenge him.
SNow.
Seattle DOT.
The parks gun ban he is intending to waste Seattle’s money on.
Ha. Drago is a stalking horse for Nickels.
Her campaign – as a retiring councilman – is designed to split up the anti-Nickels vote with a recognizable name. No matter that she was so far up Nickels’ ass during her years on the Council, he couldn’t stop quick or she’d break her nose. She won’t win and she’ll try, just hard enough, to knock out anybody else.
2 Good set of points…although I don’t remember Nickels being on board with the Monorail.
You don’t win an election any more just by being a “better politician”. You have to be a better politician with more money.
“how do you defeat a competent, scandal-free mayor whose values you share,”
Competent?!?
Seriously dude, share whatever it is you’re loading in that pipe…
Anyone know what the long term average approval is for Seattle’s mayors? Is 35% below or above the average?
delbert @6,
Go ahead… point out the specifics where the city is poorly run. Police, fire, libraries, parks, SDOT, public utilities? Point out the corruption and/or mismanagement.
double entry: see below
We have voted for Nickels in every election and been disappointed steadily in his manner of running the city like a personal fiefdom. The snowstorm was the last straw. We will vote for whoever is his opponent. Even a Republican. May God forgive us.
“Police, fire, libraries, parks, SDOT, public utilities? Point out the corruption and/or mismanagement.”
Police – http://www.uslaw.com/law_blogs/?item=214740
and http://www.seattleweekly.com/2.....he-police/
Fire – Two senior chiefs on the front page of the Times for corruption/cover-up over the Hannah Montana/Qwest Field scandal just this week.
Libraries – Nothing notable, thankfully
SDOT – snow.
Public Utilities – Hydrant and street light fees and that whole mess.
Best joke ever from a former City Engineer:
Q. What’s yellow and sleeps 6?
A. City Light Van.
Things you didn’t list:
SLUT
Budget – $43 million in the red for 2009
AW Viaduct boondoggle
Giving SLU to Paul Allen
Giving a franchise to Frankie C. for the strip club business
Basic services are crap, but we’re paying top dollar tax-wise for them.
I consider the departure of the Sonics a success story. If you want to know why Renton city officials were eager to host a $500 million basketball palace, the reason is Renton would have paid only 2% of the taxes for it. And if it had been built, Clay Bennett would have jumped ship at the first opportunity, and King County taxpayers would have been stuck with a half-billion-dollar white elephant.
6, 8 — Delbert knows as little about Seattle’s governance as he does about Didden v. Port Chester.
Funny how delbert gets all worked up about alleged “extortion” in the Didden case, but doesn’t have any problem with Stefan extorting $225,000 from King County taxpayers.
Goldy @8,
Not speaking for Delbert and I hope he provides his own example, but here is mine.
The Joint Training Facility project in south Seattle was budgeted/engineered at $16-18 million at bid time (2003). By the time the entire fiasco was “complete” (2008) the price tag was in excess of $33 million. It featured an environmental “in your face” by the Mayor’s office, the ire of the Army Corps of Engineers who put the City’s nuts in a vise over the deal, complete construction mismanagement leading to major cost overruns supplemented by arrogance and ineptitude on the part of Fleets and Facilities and its Director (a Nickels appointee). I am sure that more examples can be brought to light (the Monorail clearly is one). Keep your eye on the outcome of the current budgets for construction/renovation of the City’s fire stations. Bungling is SOP for this administration. Drago is sort of a “Glenda type” (from the Wizard of Oz) but I bet she could appoint better department directors. SDOT, FD, SCL, Fleets all headed by either incompetents or tyrants.
@13
I addressed your concerns on that thread, please keep this discussion on track.
@14
Stefan got $225,000 from _King County_ as a negotiated settlement for their malfeasance. We’re talking about _City_ mismanagement here. Please stay with the topic or go take your 7p.m. meds.
To the above – you betcha Hizzoner was behind the monorail effort. 110%. So was Drago, and the rest of the SCC. They gave it a $20 million loan right away, gave it the transitway agreement no questions asked, and before the vote it was city staff who did the faulty revenues number crunching.
In fact it was Ethan Melone who signed off on the car tab tax revenue forecasts that were off by one-third. Then Nickels promotes Melone to TranspoWhiz (or whatever his title is).
By the way, don’t vote against Nickels if you don’t like ST. Nickels is just an appointee, and the next KCE will just appoint whomever they want (not the next Seattle mayor.
The big problem with Nickels in my book is he keeps putting tax increases on the ballot. It is no excuse that people vote for them. Voters have imperfect information about the need for and uses of those new taxes, and by doing this Nickels has put us in a really bad tax structure: one that harms those with the least the most. He’s brutal in that way (fiscal philosophy).
@13
Roger – You do have some interesting comments such as @11. But your continued comments about Stefan @13 show you are in a rut in many cases!! Stefan did not extort “$225,000 from King County taxpayers”. King County was at fault by not providing the requested data in a timely basis as requested by Stephan and required by law and they paid the penalty!! You are a lawyer, so it is very surprising to see you to continue commenting down the same ‘non-lawyer road’!
Seattle deserves Nickels hook line and sucker.
Goldy – glad I checked your blog today. I think your mayor’s race analysis is spot on — and while 14 digs up a concrete instance of bad management, I’m not especially shocked by someone a level or two below the mayor on the org chart mucking up spending 30 million dollars. What is the City’s budget? 4 billion? Of which around a billion is discretionary? Anybody? After the State and County budget shortfalls, California’s mess and TARP, I am numb to big numbers.
Please keep pointing out that the areas McGinn touts himself on are not traditional city functions. Metro is county. And while being strong on the environment is great (and plays great here), Nickels has really pushed the envelope pretty far for a Mayor.
Oh, and there aren’t any punchy reasons to like Drago, as your thought experiment illustrates. I may steal that thought experiment for a dinner party.
Drago might be the one candidate who gets me to support Nickels. As to the snowstorm- do you remember her let them eat cake comment-something like, “I don’t know what the problem is. I am getting around just fine in my all wheel drive SUV.”
Nickels strong suit right now is that to win a horserace it takes a horse. All he is facing right now are a bunch of nags.
Goldy points out Ron Sims and Christine Gregoire, both of whom managed to get re-elected, despite approval ratings a good bit below 50%, However, Sims and Gregoire both got to run against REPUBLICAN opponents. This resulted in fairly easy victories, since the REPUBLICAN party is even less popular than Sims or Gregoire.
By contrast, Greg Nickles will probably end up running against a DEMOCRAT in November. So there is a pretty good chance of Nickels getting defeated.
i love how goof ole Sandeep chided Drago about the how being Mayor is not a part time job WHILE MAYOR QUIMBY WAS OUT OF THE COUNTRY.
It simply could not have been a more hypocritical press release.
This really is going to be FUNFUNFUN.
Goldy’s right. Nickels will win handily. The field of candidates running against him is about as lame as it gets.
I think the argument that everyonecan find something they don’t like should not be taken so lightly. If a politician only moves on because he is currupt, or has has a major screwup as the basis for a 35% approval rating being a winner for Nickels just sets the bar freakishly low.
You live in South Seattle and get little support. I live in North Seattle and wonder if I could get the City of Shoreline to annex everything down to 130th street.
In the middle is Nickels and Drago taking turns servicing Paul Allen’s South Lake Union (put that on a bumpersticker).
It is no big shock the Drago came out and started sucking up to the neighborhoods, too bad she has zero cred outside of where she has imagineered the streetcars of her desire.
Everybody can find something to not like, and they will.
@ the Renton basketball palace, Bennett would have sold the team for a “sweet flip”. So, fact you!
KeyArena and Seattle Center needs some help, and his half-assed lobbying of Olympia was just the worst. Really, you can not deliver locally collected tourist taxes for Seattle Center, you had the Senate Ways and Means carry that ball and you send your finance troll to testify WTF.
Meanwhile, the first person to present a plan to cover the open ditches, put an actual painted stripe on my road, and put in a sidewalk before I die gets my vote (that aint your man Greg).
We could used a stop sign to prevent a t-bone rollover “accident” yesterday 2 blocks from my house, but I guess we get them big city stop signs when hell freezes over.
It is those minor details that stick with people, I’m guessin’.
“We had the snow as bad as anywhere down in my neck of the woods, but that’s one week out of the 385 or so Nickels has been mayor.”
Looking forward to your support for GW Bush, who had only about twelve bad weeks out of 416.
Goldy’s analysis pretty much points out the problem in modern Washington State politics in general – we get stuck in the status quo because any solution is just complicated enough that something in it ticks off everyone, and the whole idea gets side-tracked. Just about every highway/transit project since the mid-1970’s has suffered from this problem.
The way to win elections here is to keep your head down and don’t do anything. Reichart is the perfect example of that. Rossi almost won the governor’s race in 2004, in part because he didn’t have much of a record to run against. Even Locke was considered the “ideal politician” for Washington State, because he didn’t do much, either good or bad. As the Japanese say, “it’s the nail that sticks up that gets hammered down.”
But just because Nickel’s hasn’t done anything wrong doesn’t mean he could win this election. With an approval rating that low, people will be just looking for an excuse to vote against him, and his opponants will be offering up all sorts of rationales to provide that excuse. This thread already has a few potential ones. Just the prospect of any mayor having a third term is enough to turn away some voters.
Comparing rather minor “mis-management” stories might be unfair when there’s nothing to compare them to (i.e., what might have happened under a different administration in the same time period), but politics is seldom fair. The competent administrators are often defeated by the more attractive and charismatic politicians (Reichart again being a prime example).
The snowstorm could be the great wild card. Anybody with enough money to run late-in-the-race TV ads showing cars stuck, busses sliding down hills and poised to drop on the freeway below, superimposed with Seattle Times headlines about snow removal mis-management in the Seattle DOT, could win. Wasn’t it in 1977 that a similar snowstorm paralyzed Chicago and ended up getting the Daley machine bounced from office (at least temporarily)? And remember that Hurricane Andrew in 1992 leveled Homestead, Florida, and the tardy government response is credited with throwing Florida’s electoral vots against G.H.W. Bush in the 1992 election. Likewise, Katrina in 2005 was the turning point in Bush’s popularity and power.
Therefore, I think that if ANYBODY can form a credible opposing coalition, they’ve got a good shot at winning. Of course, that’s the point of Goldy’s post – nobody yet seems to have that potential.
The way to win elections here is to keep your head down and don’t do anything.
Dumb fuck: the way to win elections is to do what needs to be done to ensure regressive taxes are increased. That’s what Nickels is a star at. The tax burden on the lowest quarter of people around here has taken off during his tenure, for not very good reasons. Nobody stands a chance of defeating him because he and the governments he heads use that revenue to make rich entities richer. Plus, the beneficiaries of his largesse have the judges in their pockets, so anyone trying to unseat Nickels in any serious way would be punished.
Hey Ivan, how about those cunts Murray and Cantwell voting to take funds away from Obama he’d use to close Gitmo? How about Casey saying he was going to extend the expansionist US military presence in Iraq by at least a decade and increase the Bush troop increases in Afghanistan? You must love what the Democratic Party is doing with the reins of power, huh Ivan?
Hear, Hear. I think you are right on the money, Goldy. Drago reaks of opportunism, pulled into the race by nothing more than Nickels’ low polling numbers.
If anyone was going to defeat Nickels, it would’ve been an Obama, a fresh, hyper-competent and articulate face that could do to local politics what our now President has done to national politics. Unfortunately, Tim Burgess chose to not run.
Agreed. The only way to defeat Nickels is to present a comprehensive 50-year vision for the City, and make the election a referendum on your competing visions. Because, as you wrote, the city government is basically competent, and nothing really horrible has happened in many years.
Nickels wins.
Gotta disagree here, Goldy. Paul freaking Schell had better numbers – voters have had two terms of Greg Nickels, and his approval ratings are stuck at about 25%.
You want scandals? Not firing Grace Crunican and Greg Dean in the wake of well-documented recent personnel, um, “irregularities” will make excellent campaign fodder. And yes, people do expect the City to keep the streets clear in a prolonged winter storm and fix the 1,000,000 potholes that followed, and neither occurred.
Drago can – and in my view probably will – beat Nickels (although this race does lead to oddball scenarios in which Drago and Nickels split the corporate Seattle vote so much that one of the other candidates faces off against the survivor in the general – we don’t know enough yet about the minor candidates to really see how that would play out).
This is not to say that there would be any substantive difference if she did win, though.