Trump casts shadow over Seattle’s city attorney race

Four years ago, Ann Davison’s victory in the race for Seattle city attorney was seen as an upset, fueled by voter distress over drug use and petty crime. Now Davison faces three challengers in her quest for a second term — and they’re banking on Seattle voters’ opposition to the second Trump administration.

Davison went public in 2020 with her disillusionment with the local Democratic party, which she accused of failing to address social disorder on the streets of Seattle. After a failed bid for lieutenant governor as a Republican in 2020, she won the race to become Seattle's city attorney in 2021.

The three Democrats running against her in this year's race are highlighting her Republican credentials to voters.

“I really do think it’s irrelevant,” she said in a recent interview. “This is a nonpartisan race and I’m a problem-solver.”

Davison said one of her biggest accomplishments was reducing the impact of what her office refers to as “high utilizers,” 118 people who generated thousands of misdemeanor criminal referrals. Those people weren’t getting booked into jail when she took office, and she worked to change that.

Davison said staying focused on local conditions is the best way to increase public safety. Early reports suggest crime is dropping in Seattle and King County this year, joining national trends.

“These three-and-a-half years I’ve been in office have been significant," she said. "I think the city has turned — we’ve shown that safety is important. We’re not done but that’s been kind of the most significant piece for me personally and professionally."

But in a city that has seen vigorous protests against Republican President Donald Trump’s administration, Davison’s three Democratic opponents say her party affiliation is relevant to voters.

Erika Evans worked as a prosecutor in the Seattle City Attorney’s Office mostly before Davison’s tenure, and then as a federal prosecutor.

“Some of the priorities and things that the current Republican city attorney has done are completely out of line” with the values of Seattle voters, Evans said at a candidate forum hosted by the Lakewood Seward Park Neighborhood Association in June.

Evans contrasted Davison’s party switch in 2020 with her own job the following year: Evans helped prosecute participants in the Jan. 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, after Trump failed to win reelection.

“I did the initial appearance in the Tacoma federal courthouse on two insurrectionists in our district,” Evans said. She called Davison’s decision to become a Republican the year before “disgraceful.”

Evans said she also disagreed with Davison’s decision to pull out of the Seattle Municipal Court’s alternative to prosecution known as “community court,” which Davison said was ineffective. Evans said that if elected, she would work to establish a new version of community court — possibly located in a different setting, such as a public library.

Another candidate, legal aid attorney Rory O’Sullivan, has defended clients from eviction and foreclosure. His current practice helps clients access unemployment benefits. He also helped author and defend Seattle’s democracy voucher initiative.

O’Sullivan said he found himself telling his young son not to just complain about problems but to take action, and he decided to follow that advice himself in running for office.

“I was complaining when Ann Davison shut down community court. I was complaining when she spent all of her political capital passing these laws to exclude people from different areas of our city. And I was complaining when she did absolutely nothing to prepare for an administration that we knew was going to do harm to our friends and neighbors,” O’Sullivan said.

He objected to Davison’s efforts to secure new court orders banning people from areas of prostitution and drug use. He’s also criticized her office for being too slow to act on cases involving domestic violence and driving under the influence, which he said can’t all be attributed to the state toxicology lab's testing backlog.

If elected, O’Sullivan said he’d work to more aggressively challenge the Trump administration on immigration enforcement and the withholding of federal grants.

“This is a place where the city attorney’s office can and should be stepping in to file a lawsuit to demand that that money get released,” he said. “This is something that our state attorney general Nick Brown has been doing from Day One.”

Davison may have identified as a Republican, but she has joined other blue cities in lawsuits over frozen federal grants related to World Cup preparations next summer, and over Trump’s attempt to penalize cities that don’t cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

But her third challenger, King County public defender Nathan Rouse, said Davison’s efforts to defend sanctuary cities are less aggressive than her predecessor, Pete Holmes, who Rouse said was the first to sue under the previous Trump administration.

“This time we were not the first to file — the city joined several weeks after the fact when a different city led the way,” Rouse said. “We need to be leading on these issues because the city is looked to as an example for how to fight back against Trump.”

Rouse also said he would expand the city attorney’s use of pre-filing diversion to route people away from court and jail entirely, if elected. As a public defender, he said, “I see firsthand, day in and day out, the way our current system is not working. I am in jails on a daily basis — jails where people are dying of neglect.”

Davison said her office has expanded the number of diversion programs available, but she said she pulled out of community court to prioritize diversion for younger people who do not have a significant case history.

Rouse also objected to Davison’s recent proposal for people facing drug charges, which would channel them toward services conditioned on their signing a “stay out of drug area” order. He said public defenders would not advise their clients to participate since that could lead to future criminal charges.

Davison condemns the federal government’s withholding of congressionally mandated funding as “incomprehensible” and “bizarre.” But she doesn’t call Trump out by name, and she said it’s not the role of her office to brainstorm additional lawsuits.

“We really are not the creative space for that, we are here to defend what the policymakers have designed from a programmatic standpoint, the laws here of the city,” she said. “That’s my job, and I will defend those fully, with the full weight of my office.”

Any impact from Davison’s reluctance to wade into national politics is unclear. City records indicate both she and Erika Evans have raised the maximum amount of money allowed under Seattle’s democracy voucher program. The top two candidates in the Aug. 5 primary will move on to the general election in November.

July 10, 2025: This story has been updated to reflect more recent campaign finance information.