Seattle General Election Guide 2023

Maren Costa is a climate activist and former tech employee who said she was fired from Amazon for organizing around climate issues and warehouse worker safety. She is campaigning on making progress with public safety, homelessness, affordable housing and preparing for climate change.

Rob Saka is an attorney for Meta, a justice reform advocate and an Air Force veteran who spent part of his childhood in the foster care system. He is running to improve the city for his children and other children, serve the people of District 1 and “work on real solutions to issues like public safety and homelessness, rather than play politics with it.”

Tammy Morales is the current District 2 councilmember. On her campaign website, she highlights work she’s done to bring community voices into policy decisions and participatory budgeting work as well as efforts around pedestrian and bicyclist safety and housing affordability.

Tanya Woo is a Chinatown International District community advocate and cofounder of the CID Community Watch group. She said she was motivated to run for office after seeing seniors in the CID struggle with housing affordability and observing increasing homelessness and crime in the neighborhood, especially during the pandemic.

Joy Hollingsworth is a lifelong Central District resident and co-owner of her family’s cannabis farm and company. Her grandmother is Seattle civil rights leader Dorothy Hollingsworth. Her priorities include reducing property crime and gun violence, expanding mental health services, housing affordability, support for small businesses and youth outreach.

Alex Hudson is a First Hill resident and former executive director of the nonprofit Transportation Choices Coalition. Her priorities include increasing housing affordability, addressing homelessness, improving the transportation system and implementing a capital gains tax. 

Ron Davis is a tech entrepreneur, consultant and urbanist who’s served on the boards of Seattle Subway, Futurewise and the Roosevelt Neighborhood Association. His priorities include improving public safety by targeting root causes, increasing housing supply and affordability, homelessness, public transit, education and workers’ rights.

Maritza Rivera worked for former City Councilmember Tom Rasmussen and is currently the deputy director of Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture. Public safety is the centerpiece of her campaign, with goals of getting to five-minute response times for priority 911 calls; taking home and car break-ins more seriously; getting guns off the streets and out of schools and shutting down open-air drug markets.

Cathy Moore is a former King County Superior Court judge, a former Seattle public defender, and a former Chair of the Seattle Human Rights Commission. She wants to address the root causes of public safety issues with things like violence intervention programs, alternative police responders, and expansion of the police force. In addition she wants to work on housing affordability and support small businesses and entrepreneurs.

ChrisTiana ObeySumner is CEO of Epiphanies of Equity LLC, a social equity consulting firm; a former co-chair of the Seattle Disabilities commission; and a former co-chair of the Seattle Renters’ Commission. They want to expand the supply of affordable housing and preserve existing affordable housing; push a Housing First homelessness policy and increase funding for social services; and improve public safety with alternative responders and community policing.

Pete Hanning is the executive director of the Fremont Chamber of Commerce and the former owner of The Red Door, a brewpub which closed in early 2020. Hanning’s policy priorities include increasing shelter space and hotel-room programs for people without housing; expanding mental health and drug treatment programs; reestablishing community police teams; streamlining the housing development process; easing business regulations and prioritizing infrastructure.

Dan Strauss, elected to the seat in 2019, was the senior policy adviser for former City Councilmember Sally Bagshaw. Strauss highlighted his backing of Seattle police funding and hiring measures; helping to clear encampments in Ballard and Woodland Park without sweeps; expanding homelessness outreach to people who live in vehicles; and backing the expansion of affordable housing throughout his district. Strauss says priorities for this election include expansion of first responders, including parking enforcement, the mobile crisis team and park rangers; expanding the homelessness outreach and response; expediting permits for residential development and funding affordable housing.

Bob Kettle is a former Queen Anne Community Council board member and a veteran of the U.S. Navy. Kettle’s priorities include boosting funding for police and mental health treatment, easing access to shelters for people without housing, pushing for universal pre-K and expansion of community colleges, and protecting fishing and maritime jobs.

Andrew Lewis, a former assistant city attorney, has been on the council since 2020. He backs building more permanent supporting housing for people without homes, supporting city outreach programs to address encampments and launching a program to create shelters from extreme heat at community centers. He supported measures to protect businesses during the pandemic and is pushing for decreasing fossil-fuel usage in commercial developments. Current priorities include investments in transitional housing and social housing; boosting diversity in public safety ranks, including fire and police; creating a civilian program to respond to certain emergency calls; improving neighborhood walkability and incentivizing the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.