I never paid much attention to my birthday for most of my adult life, other than to be glad that another improbable year had passed. But lately these birthdays have gotten pretty notable.

Two years ago, on my birthday, I was knee-deep in helping run the Kshama Sawant campaign, which – like the campaigns of Lisa Herbold and Tammy Morales this week – was busy chasing ballots and trying to catch their opponent, in Kshama’s case incumbent Richard Conlin. Sawant passed him on my birthday, much like Lisa will pass Shannon Braddock on my birthday today :-). I got serenaded with “HappyBirthday” by Kshama, her staff, and volunteers in front of a bunch of TV cameras as the results were published. It was pretty awesome.

Last year was a completely different scene. In 2014 my 20-year relationship ended. I subsequently fell in love with a friend and colleague of several years, Revel Smith. Revel and I had a lot in common – music, political activism, professional media chops, and chronic health issues (in her case, multiple sclerosis). But in addition to our respective existing health issues we promptly each got serious new health problems – and hers, rapidly worsening chemical sensitivities and reactive airway disease (i.e., her throat would close up – scary stuff!), meant that we’d signed leases for not one but two consecutive apartments that we then found out were toxic. We couldn’t live in or quickly get out of the leases for either. (Side note: This city is a tenants’ rights nightmare.)

On my birthday last year, we were paying rent for both apartments while unable to staying in either – we were essentially homeless and (after taking a huge financial hit on the housing problems) broke. Worse, our ongoing health issues were worsening – Revel wound up receiving an extremely difficult but ultimately helpful series of IV steroid treatment last December, and a biopsy last fall had revealed that after a 20-year run, my transplanted kidney was finally showing serious signs of failing.

It was a frightening – OK, terrifying – time. My birthday one year ago marked the first time I wrote about much of this publicly , and asked friends for financial help to help stabilize my life. The outpouring of support from our friends and community – no exaggeration – saved our lives. Thank you, all of you, from the bottom of our hearts.

This year has been difficult, but it’s gotten better. I’m somewhere between the euphoria of two years ago and the rock bottom of last year. This April, we were able to move into an apartment that worked for us, ending seven long months of homelessness and the dubious privilege of having all of our worldly possessions in Hefty bags and a storage unit. (Our apartment has got problems, but we’re managing!) In May, Revel and I got married. (!) In August, I started working in Kshama’s city council office as a very part-time legislative aide. And Revel continues to be a source of both enormous joy and serious practical help in my life.

But there’s also been major problems. Most notably, I got a very frightening e coli infection in June that escalated rapidly and got into my bloodstream – I almost died from it, and, of course, any infection of that sort also further damages my transplanted kidney. That infection and my compromised immune system also meant that a small infection in a wound on my ankle took a long time to heal. And then it reemerged in August. And then again in September, with another week-long hospitalization.

At that point the infection had gotten into the bone, which is nasty and very hard to treat. At the moment, as I’m writing this, I’m at home with a central line in my chest hooked up to an IV line and a pouch of antibiotic. For nearly two months, with Revel’s invaluable help, I’ve been doing these daily IV infusions at home. I’m also cleaning and packing the ankle wound every day, which is another, separate process. And Revel’s dealing with her own health issues, including random, serious injuries to both feet which kept her frustratingly immobile while exhausting her remaining resources.

All this has financially exhausted us, too. We managed to stabilize our situation earlier this year, but it’s still a thin, fragile margin, and we still have almost no capacity to absorb unexpected expenses. With a bunch of health issues this fall, my resulting inability to work consistently (which I was always able to depend on), and a vehicle that suddenly needed multiple repairs last week, we exceeded our capacity. Both my rent and my health insurance payments last week only got covered because of overdraft protection. I urgently need to pay those bills. And, so, on my birthday this year what I want and need more than anything else is one last burst of financial help.

I hate to ask once again, but it really is what I need – and I’m so close, in health, housing, and my ability to work more actively again in the community. Giving back has never been an issue, but changing the world is a gig that doesn’t pay well. (The rewards are less tangible.) The less time that I need to spend stressed out about whether I can afford groceries this week – and that’s a very real problem right now – the more I can focus on healing the infection, improving my overall health, and doing more writing and activism.

If you value the media, activism, and political work I do in the community, and would like to help me do more of it without the emotional and health stress of being unable to pay my bills, I’d really appreciate your help. Today is my 56th birthday. (Yes, I’m getting old. Who would’ve ever expected that?) If 56 of you can each donate $50 (see the PayPal button at lower right), that would raise about $3,000, which would help hugely in getting me over the immediate hump and more stable as I enter another year. But whatever amount you can offer will help.

All of the trauma of my life over the past 18 months has underscored, for me, how many vulnerable people in this unthinkably wealthy city and country are still living on the margins. It takes so little – a health issue, a relationship breakup, a predatory loan, a job loss – to put people on the streets. And, at the same time, this period has been an amazing lesson in the power of community, of how, as the rich get richer and the rest of us are left behind, our only real security is in each other. Thank you SO much for your help – and for helping to enable me to work for a more just and sane world.

Many, many thanks –

Geov

PS I’m not sufficiently recovered from the health and financial insanities of the last year yet that I’ve been able to buffer myself against this sort of cascading set of problems. Hopefully soon! And one of the other victims has been my social life – I haven’t been in nearly as close a contact with many of you as I’d like. Hit me up – by e-mail or phone or text (206-719-6947).

PPS GO, LISA!!!!

After today’s ballot drop, Lisa Herbold continued to close the gap with Shannon Braddock in their West Seattle city council race. However, her rate of closure slowed today. She now trails by 95 votes, with no more than 3500 per district left to count. The race is very much too close to call, and is likely headed for a recount – it’s currently well within the 1/2 percent margin threshold required. But Herbold’s chances still appear good.

However, in South Seattle, the news wasn’t as good. Bruce Harrell now leads Tammy Morales by 401 votes, a gap that is likely too large to surmount. It’ll still be extremely close, but at this point Harrell has to be heavily favored to hang onto his council seat.

Why is this so important? If Herbold wins, she joins Sawant, Juarez, and O’Brien as a progressive bloc of four votes on city council. IF MORALES HAD WON, THERE WOULD BE FIVE VOTES, or a majority – enough, on many issues, to enact strong progressive legislation, and enough to block really bad legislation.

Without Morales? A lot of votes would go 5-4 in the opposite direction. For guidance on how critical that fifth swing vote can be in an ideologically divided body, imagine what the US Supreme Court’s decisions would look like with one more Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia on it.

That difference, for the next two years of Seattle City Council, could easily come down to a couple hundred votes in the Harrell/Morales race in District 2. Now, in a race that close there’s a lot of coulda shoulda woulda factors that, if they’d only turned out differently, could swing the race. However, in D-2, one of the biggest factors is the single biggest outside group that provides doorbelling and phone-calling volunteers – the Democratic Party group of the 37th (state) Legislative District, which heavily overlaps city council’s District 2.

Both Morales and Harrell are Democratic Party, and 37th LD, members. Whomever won the group’s endorsement also won the automatic promotion of their campaign by the 37th’s precinct captains and other volunteers. The extra votes that generated will almost certainly have exceeded the margin of victory in this race.

So, remember this? When Harrell won that endorsement with tactics that were controversial, unethical, and quite possibly illegal? (Perfunctory SEEC
investigation notwithstanding.)

That little bit of apparent political fraudulence looks like it might be the difference between a progressive majority on city council, and more business as usual. Put another way, a lot of companies and people stand to receive a lot more public largesse over the next two years as a direct result of Harrell’s Chicagoland-style thuggery; the cowardice of the 37th’s executive board in refusing to re-examine the decision; and the timidity of SEEC (which, after all, is a city department that answers to Mayor Ed Murray, whose pliant council majority was at stake) in deciding that most aspects of the incident fell outside its jurisdiction.

For progressive activists looking for lessons in 2017 for the mayoral and two council races – the council incumbents will be Burgess and Gonzales, both Murray allies – understand that as Seattle grows and the monetary stakes continue to rise, these sorts of dirty tricks will only get worse. Count on it. Plan for it. Remember Jonathan Grant and Triad Capital’s blackmail scheme? Never, ever underestimate the lengths to which big business will go, or the ferocity with which it will defend its gravy train.

One of the more eventful local elections in Seattle history is now over. With a new district system for electing city council members, all nine council seats up for grabs, and an unprecedented infusion of corporate money, the biggest takeaway from the results was surprisingly pedestrian:

People who have made a lot of money really like the idea of making more of it.

The district system was designed to increase city council accountability, and in that it was successful. Seven of nine council seats faced strong challenges to the establishment candidate, as opposed to the somnambulent coronations that have been the Seattle norm in recent years. Four dozen people ran for those seats in the primary. And the single most important issue dominating the election – the city’s relentless push for density and its impact on decimating affordable housing – was the campaign centerpiece of every one of the challengers, including several strong progressives.

But in all nine races, the candidate who raised the most money also won. Six of those winning candidates shared the same campaign consultant, Christian Sinderman, who also ran Mayor Ed Murray’s 2013 campaign.

These results are being spun by urbanist backers of Seattle’s real-estate-driven politics as an electoral ratification of Seattle’s current infestation of construction cranes. That’s one way to read the results. Another is to conclude that most people don’t follow city council politics very closely, and name familiarity – which is driven by money – is a huge advantage. And another is to note that in eight of nine races, challengers got over 40 percent of the vote, in stark contrast to the 70 and 80 percent winning margins many council members have enjoyed in the past. Slowing the developer gravy train clearly has a significant local constituency, far more so than in the past.

It just wasn’t enough to win a majority of council seats.

As is, Seattle’s city council will be far more diverse in almost every respect than it has been in the past few decades. A majority are women and four are non-white. Even more importantly, both Kshama Sswant and Mike O’Brien were re-elected – in Sawant’s case, despite a ferociou establishment effort to unseat her led by Murray and council president Tim Burgess. Debora Juarez’s election in Northeast Seattle adds another progressive voice, and on some issues Lorena Gonzales, newly elected to a citywide seat, will be a progressive voice as well. Getting a fifth vote to pass progressive legislation won’t be an unthinkable non-starter any longer.

The days of a monolithic council and chronic 9-0 and 8-1 votes are over for a while to come. That unpredictability likely won’t extend to anything involving serious money. But that could change. With I-122 winning, complementing the district system, next time underfunded candidates will have another assist in waging competitive campaigns. Moreover, other local results had a decidedly progressive bent. I-122 passed easily, all four reform candidates won their school board races, and in Fred Felleman, the Port of Seattle will have an ardent environmentalist as a commissioner for the first time in its sordid history.

Those downticket races had more progressive results precisely because they didn’t draw as much corporate money. In the council races, that money was critical. Three of the four biggest beneficiaries of corporate soft money (Banks, Burgess, Braddock, and Johnson) held election night leads, and in the case of Braddock, Johnson, and Harrell, their leads were small enough that corporate money swung their elections. Cash still has a disproportionate influence on local elections, and most of the money is coming from people and companies who rely on elected officials to help them make more of it.

The other significant result, though, was the outlier to all of these trends. Kshama Sawant is shaping up to be a unique political talent, and her success is a genuine phenomenon: Consider these number from her campaign: Over 600 active volunteers; over 178,000 phone calls; knocked on 90,000+ doors throughout the campaign; 9,236 doors knocked on in the final weekend; and well over $450,000 in donations – without accepting any corporate cash – from 3,445 different donors, triple the number of any other candidate. Her donations were smaller, averaging half or less than that of other campaigns. But Sawant made it up with her sheer number of donors and volunteers.

That is utterly unprecedented in local politics. It’s why Sawant is returning to council while the candidates she worked most closely with fell short If what Sawant has could be bottled or cloned, progressives would dominate city politics. As is, they’re only an election away from being a determining force. Can public financing and campaign experience outpace Seattle’s steady exodus of voters who can no longer afford to live here? We’ll find out next time..

First of all, the enormous caveat: Nothing got decided tonight. Not really. Not with Seattle’s city council, the most important set of elections on the night, and not with the new district system in which fewer than 10,000 votes have been counted so far in some districts and four candidates – incumbents Bruce Harrell and Kshama Sawant and establishment favorites Shannon Braddock and Rob Johnson – having first-night leads of less than 1,100 votes.

Two years ago, Sawant won citywide despite trailing incumbent Richard Conlin by eight percent on election night. With two new factors this year – the much smaller electorates of districts and the unprecedented infusions of last-minute corporate cash into several races – plus an unusually low voter turnout leading up to the campaign’s final days, no district lead of than about 15 percent tonight should be considered safe.

That said, enough results are clear to draw a few early conclusions:

Business as usual in Seattle has nothing to worry about… The five people who clearly will be on council in 2017 – Tim Burgess, Lorena Gonzales, Debora Juarez, Mike O’Brien, and Sally Bagshaw -includes four near-automatic votes for whatever the developer/real estate lobby wants. In two other races, Bruce Harrell and Rob Johnson, both also developer favorites, have ten percent leads that will be hard to overcome. There’s thus a near-certain five-vote majority for business as usual, aka the rapid transformation of Seattle into a city of, by, and for the young, white and wealthy, to continue apace.

…Yet. In all seven of the seriously contested races involving allies of Mayor Ed Murray (and clients of his consultant, Christian Sinderman), the general election opponents were progressives whose campaigns centered on affordable housing. and six of those seven races – all but Gonzales/Bradburd – were closely contested. That in itself is unprecedented.

O’Brien, winner of the only race without a Sinderman client, has been solidly progressive on a number of issues not involving real estate. Juarez, the strongest of the progressive candidates, won comfortably. Sawant is in a closer race, but with a phenomenal get-out-the-vote effort (more on her later), she is well-situated to return to council. And Lisa Herbold, the long-term Licata aide who is in the night’s closest race, could well still win with a similar grass roots push. That’s four solid progressive votes, more than Seattle’s city council has had in a long time, and one short of a majority on any given issue. In all likelihood, the days of a monolithic council and chronic 9-0 and 8-1 votes are over for a while to come.

That unpredictability likely won’t extend to anything involving serious money. But that could change – on any issue where there’s a strong grass roots push, or, in two years, if another progressive or two can get into office to replace Burgess and/or Gonzales. And with I-122 winning, complementing the district system, underfunded candidates will have another assist in waging more competitive campaigns. Moreover, the local non-council races had a decidedly progressive bent -I-122 passed easily, all four reform candidates are leading in their school board races, and in Fred Felleman, the Port of Seattle will have an ardent environmentalist as a commissioner for the first time in its sordid, corrupt history.

But money still talks in politics. At the end of the day, despite all the corporate money assisting her, challenger Pamela Banks may still have been outfundraised by Sawant. If so, in every single one of the nine council races, the campaign that raised the most money will have held the lead on election night. Three of the four biggest beneficiaries of corporate soft money (Banks, Burgess, Braddock, and Johnson) hold election night leads, and in the case of Braddock, Johnson, and Harrell, the margins are small enough to have quite possibly swung their respective elections. Money still has a disproportionate influence on local election results, and most of the money is coming from people and companies who rely on elected officials to help them make more of it. Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s not corrupt as all hell. But then, there’s the outlier…

Kshama Sawant is a unique political talent, and her success is a genuine phenomenon: Maybe the media novelty has worn off of our city electing an open socialist. Maybe, as an incumbent, getting re-elected – despite a concerted establishment effort to unseat her, led by council president Tim Burgess and mayor Ed Murray – just isn’t as newsworthy. But get a load of these number from the Sawant campaign earlier this week:

Over 600 active volunteers; over 178,000 phone calls; knocked on 90,000+ doors throughout the campaign, resulting in over 16,000 Voter IDs; 9,236 doors knocked on in the final weekend, and 7,500 the previous weekend; well over $400,000 in donations – while not accepting any corporate cash – from 3,445 different donors . That last number is about triple that of any other council candidate. The donations themselves were on average much smaller – averaging about $50 a donor, half or less than that of any other campaign. But Sawant made it up with her sheer number of donors and volunteers.

That is utterly unprecedented in local politics. It’s why, despite a ferocious (and at times dirty) campaign by Banks and her establishment backers, Sawant is poised to return to council but the other progressive candidates she worked most closely with – Morales, Maddux, Herbold, Grant – didn’t do as well. If what Sawant has could be bottled or cloned, progressives would dominate city politics. As is, they’re only an election away from being a determining force. Whether public financing and campaign experience can outpace Seattle’s steady erosion of working class voters in two years is yet to be determined – but what the voter tallies are in the next few days will play an important role in determining it.