Curley predicts Sara Nelson will challenge Katie Wilson and run for Seattle mayor

Just six months into Katie Wilson’s four-year term as Seattle’s mayor, a handful of names are already being floated for a 2029 run at her job.

KIRO host John Curley fueled the fires of the 2029 mayoral election further during an interview with former Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson.

“Big, big announcement, I think, and [my producer] Joe will back at me on this, I think Sarah Nelson runs for office,” Curley said.

“I thought you were going to say you were running for office,” Nelson retorted.

“Would you run for office again?” Curley asked. “There’s too much fight and too much spunk in you. You’ve been to 50 Grateful Dead concerts; you can put up with a lot of annoying, repetitive stuff.”

“Well, here’s the thing, I’ve already run for city council, and you’ve already endorsed Bob Kettle,” Nelson replied.

Last month, Curley had Kettle, a member of the Seattle City Council since 2024, on the show to discuss whether Seattle would start to see some real differences in hot spots like Aurora Avenue and Little Saigon a year from now, but after Kettle gave a not-so-encouraging response, Curley told him that he sees a mayoral run in his near future.

“No, no, no, no, no, no. We didn’t endorse him,” Curley said. “I said, ‘You’re going to run,’ and then I said, ‘We get the sense you’re going to run.’ Then [Kettle] launched into a little campaign speech. I didn’t endorse him. I said that Joe voted for him. I watched him, and I said, ‘You look like you’re going to run for mayor.’ And then he did a little song and dance on being a mayor.”

“But it sounds like Sarah just confirmed that he’s going to run for mayor,” Joe Wallace, the producer of “The John Curley Show,” added.

“No, no, I don’t know anything,” Nelson said. “But the bottom line, here’s the problem: If I were to do that, I would have to spend the next three and a half years being nice. You always have to watch what you say, what is on the public record that detractors could use against you. And I’m not just trying to say that, ‘Oh, all politicians lie in office, or they whitewash what they’re saying, or they’re always trying to be mushy, but the fact is I don’t want to kill it in advance because somebody takes something I say the wrong way, and so that’s a decision to be made in a long time, but I still continue to fight for Seattle.”

John Curley makes bold prediction Sara Nelson runs for mayoral office

“OK, here’s my prediction. Ready?” Curley said. “Look at the PDC with Sarah Nelson. How much money Sarah Nelson still has in the bank, and will she decide to run again? She had $622,420.21 and spent almost all of it. You have independent expenditures. You have $5,000 in debt. It’s not exactly you have a war chest ready to go, but I predict, you ready? I predict that Sara Nelson runs for mayor of Seattle.”

“That is way too far in the future,” Nelson responded.

“I think that people will realize that this was a huge mistake to go far to the left, because the numbers speak for themselves,” Curley said. “Then they snap back the other way, and it’s going to be you and Kettle running for mayor.”

“Probably the mayor is going to run for mayor,” Nelson added.

“She’d run for mayor out of town on a cart,” Curley replied. “She’ll be out of here on a horse. They’ll run her out of town. She has no future in Seattle after what happened and what will continue to happen, unless she all of a sudden just bucks up and realizes, ‘Oh my god, I got to go in a different direction.'”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

Listen to John Curley weekday afternoons from 3 – 7 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

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