The Brewing Anti-DSA Backlash in Seattle

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, August 27, 2026

 

The Seattle residents who filmed a shootout between what locals called the “known drug dealers” operating out of a city park and “roughly six ‘bounty hunters’” sounds like something out of a movie. In the footage, Seattle’s KOMO News said the gunmen were “wearing bulletproof vests and firing a 40 mm launcher into an RV after smashing some of the vehicle’s windows.”

 

That’s just the latest, and most spectacular, episode of mass violence and vandalism on Seattle’s streets — a phenomenon that has residents so fed up that one man has taken to publicly advertising his concerns, literally. “Would the last taxpayer to leave the Emerald City change the name to ‘The Blue Tarp City of thieves, druggies, and shooters?’” the nearly $3,000 billboard ad that went up this week over Seattle’s Aurora Avenue read.

 

Perhaps Seattle’s deteriorating security environment explains why the city’s new socialist mayor has seen a 20-point decline in her favorability rating since she took office at the beginning of the year. Mayor Katie Wilson’s image is in free fall as city residents bristle over her efforts to implement the soft-on-crime agenda that she made no effort to hide during last year’s campaign.

 

Seattle’s citizens are calling on Wilson to repair the $1.7 million hole in the city’s police budget and turn on the crime surveillance cameras she shuttered. So far, Wilson has been deaf to their appeals. Rather, it was the petition to recall her from office that got Wilson’s attention, albeit briefly.

 

The mayor brushed off the threat to her tenure posed by the August 11 petition alleging that Wilson is “derelict in her duties for public safety in the city of Seattle.” When pressed by reporters to explain her commitment to lax law enforcement amid growing public disquiet, Wilson only restated her dedication to her ideologically anti-carceral politics. “We’re continuing to stay the course that I laid out earlier this year,” Wilson insisted.

 

That will not satisfy the three-quarters of Seattle poll respondents who want the CCTV cameras turned on now, not at the end of next month following a public audit of their impact on privacy rights. Nor will it assuage the two-thirds who told pollsters they could not say they had any confidence in Wilson’s public safety plan.

 

Seattle’s own Jason Rantz has a note of caution for the socialist mayor’s opponents: “Katie Wilson is not going to be recalled,” he wrote. He observed that, due to Washington State’s “deliberately high bar” for recalling politicians, Wilson is almost certainly right that the challenge to her mayoralty lacks the requisite legal merit. And yet, Rantz sees a sudden shift in local media’s coverage of their mayor, whom they treated like a “folk hero” during last year’s campaign, as a phenomenon that corresponds with the collapse of Wilson’s support among the only constituency that matters to the press: the left.

 

A Seattle Metro Chamber poll found Wilson’s favorability collapsed from 57% in April to 37%, with 62% of respondents viewing her unfavorably, and only one in three Seattle voters say they are confident she has an effective public safety plan. The drop also comes from her own base, with double-digit losses among progressives and liberal Democrats.

 

“That is the permission slip for outlets to target the vulnerable mayor,” Rantz concluded. Indeed, there’s a hint of incredulity in the questions with which Wilson is being peppered by an increasingly hostile press corps, as if they cannot understand why she remains as impassive as she is amid a brewing public revolt.

 

Media expect hard-bitten cynicism from their politicians, but that’s not what they’re getting from the Democratic Socialists of America. Wilson isn’t playing a radical for the cameras. She’s the genuine article.