The election was divisive, pitting an established moderate against an upstart progressive in the large, Democratic city. For a while it seemed like it would be close, but in the end the progressive won definitively, powered by a relentless focus on affordability and adept use of short-form video.

Mamdani? New York? You must be confused — I’m talking about Seattle mayor-elect Katie Wilson.

The 43-year-old political neophyte, whose term begins next month, joined Today, Explained guest host Astead Herndon to talk about her social media strategy, why she thinks the popular new political strategy known as abundance is insufficient on its own, and the other most famous new mayor in America.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Can we get a sense of how you arrived at this point, for those who are unfamiliar with you? How did this race come to be, and how did you win?

It’s been a wild ride this year. One year ago today I had absolutely no thought of running for any elected office, let alone mayor.

Key takeaways

• Katie Wilson, a young democratic socialist and political newcomer with a background in community organizing, is Seattle’s mayor-elect.
  
• Like Zohran Mamdani in New York City, she won by focusing on affordability, particularly around housing, and with a slick online campaign featuring short-form videos — but she had little experience with social media before.
  
• She says many of the abundance movement’s ideas have been popular on the left in Seattle for years, and are useful — but that the movement is missing a few ideas about what’s necessary to realize its vision.

I’ve spent the last 14 years as a community organizer and coalition builder running an organization called the Transit Riders Union, and I jumped into this race in March. In February, we had a special election on approving a funding source for our new social housing developers. So we had this social housing developer in Seattle, which was approved by voters last year. And this year, there was a citizens’ initiative to enact a tax on wealthy corporations to fund that social housing developer. And our current mayor was kind of the face of the opposition campaign to that measure, which passed by a landslide in February.

So to me, that kind of showed that our current mayor was very out of touch with the challenges that Seattle residents........

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