Community organizer Wilson – co-founder and executive director of the Transit Riders Union, an advocacy group focused on public transit, as well as issues like affordable housing and stronger renter protections – is challenging incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell. Wilson bested Harrell in the August primary and is seen as a strong progressive alternative to the more moderate Harrell.
“In the wake of the election, I think there’s a feeling that that style of Democratic Party politics failed to stop the train wreck that was [President Donald] Trump’s election,” Wilson told The Center Square in a phone interview. “I certainly see the parallels, and I’m very inspired by Mamdani’s race in New York City.”
Wilson and Mamdani are running on platforms that include more affordable transit, more progressive taxes, stronger renter protections, and universal affordable child care.
Wilson said she is fine with being called a Democrat, a socialist, or both, but notes she is not affiliated with the Seattle chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Mamdani, who has served in the New York State Assembly since 2021, is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He has been endorsed by prominent progressive politicians, including U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.
“Obviously the affordability crisis is a very strong parallel and commonality between my campaign and Mamdani’s campaign,” Wilson said. “We’re in this moment where everything is so expensive: housing, childcare, groceries, and I think we’re at this point where people who consider themselves middle-class are struggling to make ends meet.”
That’s not to say there is no daylight between the two candidates’ platforms.
“In terms of our goals I think there’s commonalities,” Wilson said. “I look at Mamdani’s platform and a lot of the issues he’s running on are also things that I worked on over the years like free to affordable transit; we want a lot of free and reduced transit programs in the Seattle area.”
Wilson said she wants free and reduced transit programs specifically, whereas Mamdani wants to permanently eliminate bus fares altogether.
“[I helped] establish the highest minimum wage in the country in Tukwila and several other cities, and we want stronger renters’ protection, so there’s definitely similarity just thematically in the work that I’ve done over the years and also my platform to what he’s running on in New York City as well,” she continued.
Mamdani has proposed raising New York City’s minimum wage to $30 per hour by 2030. Wilson has said in previous debates that that is not part of her platform.
The candidates also differ in their approach to rent control. Mamdani is a vocal proponent of a rent freeze in New York City, whereas Wilson supports strengthening tenant protections and limiting rent hikes in Seattle, where a statewide rent control law has recently been enacted.
Wilson told The Center Square that she and Mamdani share a similar vision of expanding public access to affordable or free childcare. Both candidates have linked affordable childcare to broader issues like workers’ wages and the overall cost of living.
Katie Wilson has supported the idea of publicly backed grocery stores in Seattle, drawing parallels to proposals by Mamdani. Wilson has proposed exploring public-option grocery stores to address food deserts.
When it comes to the issue of law enforcement, Wilson and Mamdani share similarities in that both have disavowed past comments to defund the police.
Mamdani has softened his rhetoric on law enforcement. During his New York City mayoral campaign this year, Mamdani described his 2020 statements as being made “out of step” and “at the height of frustration” following the murder of George Floyd.
Wilson, who supported efforts to defund the Seattle Police Department during the 2020 racial justice protests, has more recently said that her views have shifted since 2020. She has said she supports an adequately staffed police department and plans to continue hiring officers. She has also said she intends to expand alternative response services, such as the Community Assisted Response and Engagement, or CARE, department, to handle crises and allow police to focus on violent crime.
While Wilson doesn’t mind comparisons to Mamdani, the same can’t be said of comparisons to Kshama Sawant, the firebrand socialist who served on the Seattle City Council from 2014 until she left office at the end of 2023.
Sawant worked against people during her time on the council, according to Wilson.
“Sawant was very focused on disillusioning people with the Democratic Party, demonstrating that even the most progressive Democrat pretends to be your friend,” Wilson explained.
“It’s really about bringing people together and finding common ground even if we don’t agree on everything,” she added. “I’m very aware that if I’m successful in this race, I’m going to need to build relationships with [the business community].”
Sawant consistently took an oppositional stance toward big business. Her antagonism was based on the belief that corporate profits should be taxed to fund social services for the working class. Major tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft were often targeted by Sawant.
“I’m not a super ideological person,” Wilson told The Center Square. “I want to focus on actually getting things done that make peoples’ lives better.”
Seattle voters will decide who is the city’s next mayor on Nov. 4.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
