A pro-Woo PAC pumped $70,000 into the race on Friday in a last-ditch effort to tip the election.

Alexis Mercedes Rinck is the progressive challenger seeking to reduce the centrist majority on the Seattle City Council. With a wide range of endorsements, including The Urbanist, Rinck outperformed centrist candidate Tanya Woo in the primary, receiving more than 50% of the vote, compared to just 38% for Woo. However, in recent elections, centrist parties had a big advantage in fundraising, helped by outside money, which could make the 12-point lead precarious.

This year, however, could be different. With the help of a new political action committee (PAC), progressives were able to prevail over centrists in much of this race, albeit by a slight margin. It took a last-minute $70,000 purchase from Friends of Seattle, reported Friday, to get Woo ahead of Rinck.

The short-term increase in external spending doesn't worry Rinck because it's the standard playbook for centrists. Plus, it doesn't hurt that, according to a recent poll, she has a whopping 24-point lead over Woo.

“We knew all along that special interests would distort my record and positions to keep their appointee in office,” Rinck said The urbanist. “We remain focused on a forward-looking and unifying campaign and believe Seattle voters will see through the divisive tactics of these cynical late-night expenditures.”

The Public Disclosure Commission (PDC) filing shows that Rinck's campaign is on par with Woo, having raised $448,365 for Woo's $454,566 campaign.

The situation is similar with independent spending by PACs. Progressive PACs have spent $132,292 in support of Rinck, most of it from the Progressive People Power (P3) PAC, a newly formed group chaired by former D3 candidate Ry Armstrong. The P3 board also includes several other left-leaning candidates and activists for Seattle City Council in 2023, including Efrain Hudnell, who also serves on The Urbanist's board. Progressive People Power PAC also spent $47,117 campaigning against Woo. That's a total of almost $177,000.

On the other hand, pro-Woo PACs spent $141,875 supporting her and $81,875 opposing Rinck. So Woo has a benefit of about $47,000 in outside spending to date. Overall, Woo enjoys an 8% lead in fundraising (including outside spending), which is significantly lower than in recent centrist elections.

After suffering losses in 2021 and 2023, progressives in Seattle believe it is essential to keep up the fundraising fight to prevent their message from being lost. And progressives believe they have a winning message after the Seattle City Council's new centrist supermajority embraced what they say attracts the rich while hurting the poor.

Progressives have pointed to the council's efforts to weaken minimum wage protections for gig and tipped workers, stymie new investments in public housing and block a proposed tax on high earners to fund those investments — much to the ire of the mega-donor class.

Centrists are seeking to deduct affordable housing funds from the JumpStart tax and cut services rather than raise new revenue to close a $250 million budget deficit. This will impact the production of affordable housing and undermine the intent of the 2020 Progressive Initiative.

Amazon famously tried to buy the Seattle municipal elections in 2019 with more than $1.5 million in political donations. In 2023, business interests became smarter and more subtle, setting up PACs with innocuous-sounding neighborhood nomenclature. Still, the PACs had the same impact, far outpacing the progressives and tipping the election results in their favor.

Amazon's 2019 money bomb backfired, leading to a progressive supermajority on the council and the passage of the progressive JumpStart payroll tax on the city's largest companies in 2020, providing resources to weather the financial turmoil of the pandemic and then invest in affordable housing and the Green New Deal. However, the more diffuse external spending efforts were much more effective in subsequent elections and produced resounding results without provoking backlash.

For example, in the next election cycle in 2023, centrists outnumbered progressives by more than double, which likely made the difference considering Maritza Rivera had a narrow 235 vote lead over Ron Davis, who was supported by progressive groups like The Urbanist. The degree varied, but all losing progressives were far surpassed in 2023.

Most candidates have participated in the Democracy Voucher program, but some cycle vouchers are not enough to offset the huge outside spending through PACs.

Seattle pioneered the Democracy Voucher program to mitigate the impact of outside spending, but it still has a major influence on elections. That of the Supreme Court Citizens united The ruling guarantees companies and individuals the ability to make unlimited campaign contributions to PACs. Public funding has helped democratize local campaigns, attract new people to run for office, and expand the base of donors to whom elected officials naturally pay more attention. However, with uncontrolled external spending, there is still the possibility that monetary interests will distort the results and exert their influence on the scales.

Campaign finance laws limit donations of $350 to a city council candidate each election cycle. To receive democracy vouchers, campaigns must meet spending limits, with the current limit for the two candidates who emerged from the primary being $450,000.

The catch is that there is no cap on outside spending by PACs, allowing big spending from corporations, hedge fund managers or real estate moguls to swamp an election and easily marshal hard-fought money campaigns thrown together in small donations and vouchers surpass.

The Democracy Voucher system provides a safety valve for raising individual spending limits and campaign spending limits once an outside spending threshold has been reached. This happened recently in the Rinck-Woo race, as both candidates' limits were recently increased.

“Seattle freed our campaign from previous individual contribution limits; The new individual limit is $650.* So if you previously reached the $350 donation cap, you can now donate up to an additional $300,” the Rinck campaign said in an email Thursday . “But the bad news is that we can only do this because our opponent has caught up with us in terms of fundraising.”

Rinck's team found that the campaign behind Woo became increasingly negative over time, which is a classic way to engage in outside spending since a candidate can claim that they were not involved in the negative messaging. By law, PACs are not allowed to coordinate with candidates and their campaign staff.

“From the extent of our support to the number of democracy vouchers received, we have outperformed our opponent in many ways,” Rinck wrote in the fundraising campaign. “But thanks to her generous donors, she has raised more money to fuel her increasingly negative campaign. Can you donate today to help us fight back?”

The Progressive People Power PAC could keep up with the centrist fundraising machine in 2024, provided there was only one municipal race on the ballot and a relatively favorable dynamic for progressives potentially stifling centrist donations. Raising sufficient resources to compete in the race for mayor and two City Council seats in 2025 will be a bigger win for progressive donors.

The center appears likely to be heavily invested in the re-election of Mayor Bruce Harrell and Council President Sara Nelson. Losing a seat could have been seen as a big deal, but Seattle's biggest players are unlikely to sit out the mayoral race.

For progressives, a Rinck victory would be a positive momentum to build on, but there is still much work to be done to level the playing field, regain control of the Seattle City Council and elect an equal mayor.

Update: This article was updated with a new Rinck quote at 9:20 a.m. Sunday.

Doug Trumm is editor of The Urbanist. He has been writing about urbanism since 2015, dreaming of pedestrianizing streets, blanketing the city with bus lanes, and sparking a massive timber construction boom to end the affordable housing shortage and avert our coming climate catastrophe. He graduated from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington in 2019. He lives in East Fremont and loves exploring the city by bike.