“I cannot tell you how many focus groups I have sat in and someone says, ‘I just vote how The Stranger tells me,’” said Heather Weiner, a political consultant who works on progressive campaigns.
A school board candidate, Joe Mizrahi, came to his summer meeting with the Stranger Election Control Board carrying a cake he had baked with his sister that looked uncannily like a basket of apples. He had prepared for a “battle royale” with rival candidates in the room, and the paper’s board peppered them with rapid-fire questions.
“There were moments of like ‘How do you solve the budget crisis? You have 40 seconds,’” he recalled. “Forty seconds, oh my god!”
He got the newspaper’s nod: “That commitment to ‘Is it cake?’ shows the dedication that runs through Mizrahi,” the paper wrote.
The Stranger is perhaps best known outside Seattle as the longtime home of the writer Dan Savage and his unique brand of sex advice. But its irreverent endorsements are the heart of the paper as it rebuilds under Noisy Creek, an ownership group that bought the publication last year.
In many cities, news organizations, including The New York Times, have pulled back from endorsing local candidates. But The Stranger’s staff see endorsements as one of its biggest drivers of readership and essential to its identity.
“The way people relate to their alt-weekly is a little bit more of this edgy, cool friend who’s in the know,” said Brady Walkinshaw, a former state lawmaker who leads the paper’s new ownership group.
Brady Walkinshaw, founder of Noisy Creek, at his office in Seattle.Credit…Chona Kasinger for The New York Times
The Stranger was created in 1991 by Tim Keck, who had co-founded the satirical newspaper The Onion a few years earlier in college. It was a rollicking time in the capital of grunge music, and the paper set up shop in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, the heart of the city’s music and gay culture.
Over the years, the small publication’s writers hammered politicians on issues close to their heart, like a teen dance ordinance effectively banning all-ages concerts that Seattle’s City Council overturned in 2002.
The small staff drafted the political endorsements, then Mr. Savage tweaked them to be funny, mean and foul-mouthed. “It just made it fun to read,” Mr. Keck said.
The Stranger’s influence grew in 2009 when The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which had a liberal point of view, stopped printing and left The Seattle Times, which supported more conservative candidates, as the sole daily newspaper in town.
The left lane of local endorsements “was basically ceded to us,” Mr. Keck said. In that year’s mayoral race The Stranger threw its weight behind a transit activist, Mike McGinn, with a cover vaguely reminiscent of artist Shepard Fairey’s “Hope” portrait of Barack Obama.
Mr. McGinn went from underdog with almost no campaign to mayor. But he later lost re-election as voters found him divisive.
The Stranger’s influence has been a double-edged sword for the city’s political left. The candidates they’ve backed have enacted a $15 minimum wage, legalized marijuana, and pushed through new taxes on Amazon and other large employers. But The Stranger also endorsed candidates who ultimately proved too fringe to prevail in general elections.
It is also hardly the only voice in town that matters, particularly in the biggest races, where business and labor campaigns also shape public opinion. The Stranger’s endorsement “is another point of information,” said Brier Dudley, a media columnist at The Seattle Times.
By 2020, The Stranger was struggling like most local newspapers. During the pandemic, it had layoffs and ended its print edition. Much of its remaining relevancy was the endorsements, particularly in primaries, where in Washington State the top two vote-getters advance.
In the 2021 primary, as the city was still roiling from Black Lives Matter protests, The Stranger endorsed Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, a former public defender, for city attorney. She campaigned as a police abolitionist, and the board supported her despite “extreme skepticism” by some at her proposal to gut the office’s criminal division.
They conceded that the incumbent, Pete Holmes, “has frankly done a pretty good job on the issues.” They assumed he was a shoo-in, but wanted her to make it though to the general election.
Instead, the candidates split the left. Ms. Thomas-Kennedy got the most votes, and Mr. Holmes fell about 4,000 votes shy of a law-and-order Republican candidate, Ann Davison, who went on to win the general election.
“They handed the city attorney’s office to a Republican because they were so high on their own supply about how important and powerful they were,” said Sandeep Kaushik, a former reporter at The Stranger who worked on a campaign supporting Ms. Davison.
Noisy Creek bought the paper and its sister businesses last year for an undisclosed sum. Mr. Walkinshaw, who had been the chief executive of Grist, a nonprofit climate news site, said he is the majority owner, using funds from his savings. About three dozen investors split a small minority stake.
In addition to its online version, The Stranger is back in print, distributing 50,000 free copies a month. Its revenue comes from advertising and events. The staff of Noisy Creek has grown from 36 to about 60, not including The Chicago Reader, which Noisy Creek bought in August. Mr. Walkinshaw hopes the soon-to-be-announced editor of The Chicago Reader will add an endorsement board.
It’s part of his vision as he looks to acquire other publications. Last fall, when Portland, Ore., overhauled the structure of its government, the news staff of three at The Stranger’s sibling publication, The Portland Mercury, sifted through 120 candidates to provide a voting guide.
When Dionne Foster — who would go on to unseat the business-backed Seattle City Council president in last week’s election — showed up for her interview with the newspaper in June, she was first grilled about her favorite movies (answer: bad Jennifer Lopez movies) and what could get her canceled in Seattle (“Maybe that I drive?”), with her replies filmed for an Instagram video. But once she got in the room, she said the conversation dove into policy.
“Reading the editorials you’d think it was just a bunch of people drunk talking around a fire, but it’s not,” Ms. Weiner said.
Hannah Murphy Winter, the new editor appointed by Mr. Walkinshaw, called the endorsement process “enormous, exhausting, and so much fun.”
Practicality has become part of the mix. “The decisions we make in that room are driven by a central question of, Can this person get the city closer to the city that we think we deserve,” she said.
Going into the primary, she said they knew Ms. Wilson polled as the only viable challenger to Mr. Harrell for mayor, but the endorsement process still mattered.
“We do have to say so specifically, and emphatically, why this is our person, and it can’t just be ‘Not Bruce Harrell,’” she said.
There are signs The Stranger has learned from its misses. This year, it endorsed Erica Evans, a former federal prosecutor whose use of props “gave Model-UN vibes.” In last week’s election, Ms. Evans defeated the Republican that The Stranger had unintentionally aided four years ago.
Notably, the publication’s board did not endorse two candidates who positioned themselves furthest to the left, saying they didn’t have convincing experience and were unlikely to win. However, the board did thank one of them for the Pop-Tarts.
The Stranger is typical Seattle. That is: all hat and no cattle. I am sorry to hear that The Stranger has such political power here but it really should not surprise me. It will continue to stymy our political process much like Murdoch stymies the Republicans. It would be nice if we could grow up and pick people who had realistic plans that do not involve overthrowing capitalistic pigs or defunding police. In stead we will continue to behave as Danny Weastneat described as pogo stick voters hoping from one extreme to the other.