Blow to Amazon as Seattle socialist looks to have triumphed in key vote

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Blow to Amazon as Seattle socialist looks to have triumphed in key vote

Kshama Sawant seems to have beaten Amazon-backed Egan Orion in council race despite vast financial effort from tech giant

Hallie Golden in Seattle
Sat 9 Nov 2019 19.59 GMT
Last modified on Sat 9 Nov 2019 20.01 GMT

In a blow to Amazon, the socialist candidate Kshama Sawant appeared on Saturday to have beaten the business-backed Egan Orion for a seat on Seattle city council, despite an unprecedented financial effort from the tech giant.

Amazon is headquartered in the city. It ploughed $1.5m into the city council election through a political action committee sponsored by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce.

Civic Alliance For A Sound Economy dispensed about $440,000 in support of Orion and backed six other candidates considered business-friendly. In 2015, according to the New York Times, Amazon and its employees only contributed about $130,000 to city council candidates.

Sawant, a member of the Socialist Alternative party and a former tech worker, was elected six years ago as the first socialist on the Seattle council in almost 100 years. On election night she trailed Orion by 8%. But as more ballots were counted she closed the gap, and by Friday evening, with the vast majority of ballots counted, she was up by almost 4%, or about 1,500 votes.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/09/seattle-amazon-kshama-sawant-socialist-elections

[crickets]

1. Good for Sawant, and good for Seattle. I love it. nt