I own this domain. If you're organizing, you can use it.
A placeholder page from a Seattle resident who bought recallkatiewilson.com and would rather it was doing something than sitting parked.
I registered this domain on November 7, 2025 — before Katie Wilson had won anything. She was still trailing in the count, but the late ballots were breaking her way and anyone who's watched a Seattle election knew how it would end. Harrell conceded six days later.
I didn't have a plan. I still don't. I had a bad feeling about where this was going and it cost twelve dollars.
Seven months later I think the bad feeling was right, and I don't think it's a partisan read anymore. The people raising the alarm now include the city council president, the chair of the public safety committee, the Seattle Times editorial board, and longtime Democratic political consultants. On the worst thing that has happened on her watch, she has said it herself: she called the city's response unacceptable and apologized for it.
The record
Why I don't think she's capable of the job
Every mayor makes mistakes. What convinced me isn't any single one of these. It's that they keep happening, they keep happening the same way, and they're getting more expensive.
Nov 2025
Telling the city to boycott its own largest employer
Nine days after winning, before she had taken office or held any responsibility for the city's finances, she joined a picket line and told the crowd she wasn't buying Starbucks and neither should anyone else. In April, asked about businesses and wealthy residents leaving Seattle, she called the concern overblown and waved: "bye." Howard Schultz went after her in the Wall Street Journal for treating employers as political enemies. She later conceded to the New York Times that the boycott remarks had caused more harm than good. The signal was already sent. Those companies employ people who live here, and the taxes on those jobs and those paychecks are what pay for the shelter beds, the police and fire departments, the buses, the parks and libraries, the road repairs, the human services contracts, and most of the rest of what's on this page. You do not get to spend that money and treat the people generating it as an enemy.
Her chief of staff, a longtime friend, was replaced in May. Her chief adviser on homelessness resigned weeks later. In June she asked her communications director to resign after a stretch of bad press. Her press secretary quit in July, under seven months on the job. Then the police chief. A former state senator looking at the pattern said the turnover "doesn't instill confidence" and asked openly whether the administration had already hit a tipping point. This isn't a conservative talking point — PubliCola, KNKX, and KING 5 did the reporting.
Three people were killed and five wounded at the Bite of Seattle on July 26. For nearly five hours the public wasn't told whether the campus was secure or whether a shooter was still out there. The city's emergency alert system went unused, and she initially defended that before reversing. The explanation given on scene — that officials were waiting for dignitaries to arrive — was contradicted by records released from the governor's own office. She has since called the delay unacceptable and apologized. Sixteen days later, she asked the Inspector General to review it.
The CID and Little Saigon have been struggling for years with open-air drug dealing, stolen goods markets, and street disorder, and residents there say the city keeps sending the problem to them and calling it a solution. During the World Cup, with six matches drawing crowds to a stadium less than a mile away, business owners held a press conference to say visitors were avoiding the neighborhood entirely — put off by the open-air drug activity and street disorder that had been allowed to concentrate there — while the waterfront and Pioneer Square overflowed. Sales fell against the previous year. One advocate said the mayor had turned the neighborhood into a "human dumping ground." Another said it felt like a ghost town. An enforcement plan for 12th and Jackson had been announced two weeks earlier. Nothing about the neighborhood changed.
Firing the police chief four days later, mid-investigation, and refusing to say why
Detectives were still hunting suspects. Council President Joy Hollingsworth called the timing reckless. Councilmember Debora Juarez said she sees "a complete lack of leadership." Black community organizations marched on City Hall to protest. His severance cost the public more than half a million dollars. Asked repeatedly to explain, the mayor would only say she has "a different window" into the department. Worth noting what he was fired from: under Barnes, Seattle crime fell 18% in 2025, homicides hit their lowest level in over five years, the homicide clearance rate went from 57% to 86%, and June 2026 was the first month in more than fifty years with no homicides at all.
The shelter beds that never arrived, and the encampments that came back
She campaigned on 4,000 units of emergency housing. In March she promised 1,000 by year's end and 500 before the World Cup. I don't think more shelter beds were ever the answer — but set that aside, because this isn't about whether her plan was right. It was her plan, her number, her deadline. Council staff analysts warned her in writing that the timeline was not achievable. She promised it anyway, delivered 75 — missing her own deadline by 425 — and told the AP the number had at least been useful for "lighting that fire." A mayor who can't execute even the agenda she chose for herself doesn't have a policy problem. She has a competence problem. Meanwhile encampments came back across the city, not just in one neighborhood: Councilmember Dan Strauss said conditions were returning to levels not seen since the pandemic. In Ballard she personally paused a scheduled removal in January; the camp grew, nearby businesses absorbed roughly $25,000 in theft and vandalism, outreach found placements for about six of the fifteen people living there, and she cleared it in February anyway.
The homelessness piece deserves a note, because it isn't a complaint that she's been too harsh. It's the opposite. Seattle has spent more than a decade on the same cycle: clear a camp, watch it re-form a few blocks away, promise units that arrive late or not at all, and treat hard questions about drugs and enforcement as a moral failing on the part of whoever asked them. The lesson of that decade isn't that enforcement failed — it's that clearing a site and walking away was never enforcement. The city never held the ground it cleared and never enforced against the open drug activity that anchors the camps, while building a reputation as a place where camping would be tolerated indefinitely. And the caseload isn't even ours: in last fall's debates, the outgoing mayor said about 70 percent of the people homeless in Seattle became homeless outside the city — while Seattle provides over 60 percent of the region's shelter beds. This city has already put more than its share of money, land, and patience into the problem, and the answer is not more of it. Hold the ground that gets cleared, enforce against the dealing, and stop being the place where everyone else's crisis ends up. This affects the quality of life of everyone in the city — the people living in the tents most of all, but also the people whose businesses absorb the theft, whose parks and sidewalks and transit stops are unusable, and who are told that noticing this makes them a bad person.
The pattern
The thing that runs through all of it
She can't answer the question. When KOMO asked whether a shooting near an event she was attending had changed her mind on surveillance cameras, her staff physically stepped in and ended it — one of them told the reporter that his job was to ask questions and theirs was to decide which ones got answered. Asked about Starbucks moving jobs to Nashville, she said it wasn't the topic of the press conference. Asked why she'd endorsed against two Democratic incumbents, she said "I'm on the job right now" and pointed reporters to her social media. Asked five separate times why she fired the police chief, she said she has "a different window" into the department. The chair of the council's public safety committee answered that at a public hearing: she does not have a better window — not better than his, and probably not better than most of the council's. Another councilmember said he had been told about the window too, but never what she sees through it. A veteran Seattle political consultant — not a critic of hers by trade — called it a rookie mistake and bad press management.
A mayor whose first instinct is to decide which questions the public deserves answers to is the same mayor whose city waited five hours to learn whether a shooter was still at large.
The résumé
None of this was hard to see coming
She was 43 years old and had never held elected office — not city council, not a school board, not anything. She had never run anything close to this scale either: no company, no agency, no city department — never a sizable budget, never a large team. What she ran was a volunteer transit advocacy group. She had studied physics and philosophy at Oxford and left without finishing a degree. That was the résumé for a job overseeing 41 departments and roughly 13,000 employees, and voters were told the inexperience was the point: an outsider would do what career politicians hadn't. Look back at the list above and notice what kind of failures those are. Not one of them requires sharing my politics to see. They're failures of execution — staffing, coordination, deadlines, telling the public what's happening while it's happening. That is what inexperience looks like once it's in the chair.
The first sign came before she took office. In December the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission fined her campaign for failing to report more than $10,000 in in-kind contributions from her parents — money that covered her childcare while she ran. The commission ruled those payments were campaign contributions, subject to disclosure and to the city's contribution limits, which her parents had exceeded. The campaign refunded the difference and amended its filings. The fine was only $250, because the director treated it as a novel question that hadn't come up in a city election before. It's a small amount of money. It was also the first thing a candidate is asked to do — account accurately for who is paying for what — and it wasn't done right.
For the record, I'm not claiming she drove Starbucks to Nashville, or that she created the city's budget deficit — that one is structural and predates her. I don't think everything she's done is wrong.
But this is a city of about 750,000 people, the eighteenth largest in the country, running an $8.9 billion budget — and it's walking into a structural shortfall of roughly $175 million next year with genuinely hard choices attached to it. That job needs someone who can keep an office staffed, hold a deadline, and tell the public the truth on the worst night of the year — someone who can truly lead. On the evidence of seven months, that isn't her.
Which is what the accountability is for. It deserves a real effort — people with the organizing experience, the energy, and the time to do it properly. That's not a one-person job and it was never going to be mine. It's why the domain is sitting here waiting for whoever they turn out to be.
The offer
Borrow the domain
I'm one person with a domain name and an opinion. I'm not a committee, I'm not raising money, and I have no idea how a recall actually works.
So here's the offer. I'm not selling recallkatiewilson.com and I'm not handing over the registration. But if you're a group, a coalition, or a person with the time and experience to do this properly — an accountability effort, a recall campaign, or just a serious place to keep the record — you can use it. I'll point it wherever you need it pointed, for as long as you're actually doing the work, and it costs you nothing.