What Washington Voters Should Learn From Los Angeles

Before you mark that August ballot, ask one question candidates rarely have to answer

There is a reality television personality currently polling in second place in the Los Angeles mayoral race. He entered the race on the one-year anniversary of the wildfire that destroyed his Pacific Palisades home. He has a detailed plan for homelessness. He has an audience of millions. He has never done anything resembling civic work in his life.

And he might win.

Before Washington voters dismiss this as a California story — something that happens to other states, other electorates, other kinds of people — August 4 is ten weeks away. There are races on your ballot right now where a similar dynamic is playing out at smaller scales, with less famous faces, and without the national press corps paying attention. The question Los Angeles is fumbling toward answering is one Washington voters have an opportunity to answer first, and better: What does it actually mean to be qualified to solve a problem you’ve never been close to?

The Plan That Asks the Wrong Questions

The LA candidate’s homelessness plan is, by the standards of political campaigns, unusually specific. Five steps. Named legislation. A pharmaceutical intervention. A theory of how the funding ecosystem is corrupt. It reads like someone did research.

But read it carefully and something becomes clear: every question the plan asks starts from the same place. How do we remove this from public view? How do we stop this from inconveniencing certain people who live here? How do we make the streets feel safe again for certain residents?

Not once does the plan ask: what made someone vulnerable to this in the first place? What does a person actually need in order to choose differently? What does recovery require that punishment can’t provide?

Those questions are absent — not because the candidate is stupid or even necessarily insincere — but because he has never been in a position where he needed to ask them. His experience of homelessness is as a neighbor, a taxpayer, a person whose quality of life has been disrupted. And so his solutions optimize precisely for that: removing the disruption.

This is what proximity does, or rather, what its absence does. It doesn’t just change your empathy. It changes your epistemology — what you know, which shapes what you think to ask, which determines what gets built.

Policy is only ever as good as the questions it starts from.

What Proximity Actually Looks Like

To be clear: this is not an argument that only people who have experienced a crisis firsthand can address it. That would be its own kind of reductive thinking.

What proximity actually looks like is more accessible than that — and more demanding. It looks like sustained time with people most affected by a problem, before the cameras, before the campaign, before there was anything to gain. It looks like the kinds of questions you learn to ask when someone’s dignity is the thing you’re most worried about protecting. It shows up in language — the difference between a candidate who talks about unhoused people as a problem to be managed versus people navigating a crisis that a functioning society has an obligation to address.

It looks like having changed your mind about something because of what you learned, not just what you felt.

None of this requires a degree or a title or even a formal role. Community organizers have it. Social workers have it. Teachers have it. Parents navigating broken systems for their children have it. What it requires is time, humility, and the willingness to center questions that don’t start with yourself.

Outrage Is Not a Qualification

There is a pipeline that has become disturbingly efficient in American politics. It runs from grievance to platform to candidacy, and it moves faster than it ever has. Social media doesn’t just amplify outrage — it rewards it economically, which means by the time someone converts their anger into a campaign, they’ve already built an audience and a revenue stream around the problem remaining unsolved.

Think about what that incentive structure produces. A candidate whose entire identity is built around a crisis has no political interest in that crisis quietly resolving. The visibility of the problem is the product.

This is different from saying these candidates are consciously cynical. Some are. Many genuinely believe their own anger is wisdom. But belief is not the same as qualification, and intensity is not the same as insight. The most dangerous version of this candidate is the one who is completely sincere — whose entire framework for the problem was formed by a single, personal, painful experience, and who has never stress-tested it against the complexity of what actually drives the crisis they’re claiming to fix.

The LA candidate grew up wealthy in Pacific Palisades. He lost his wealthy home in Pacific Palisades. His platform is, in almost every dimension, designed to restore what Pacific Palisades used to feel like. That’s not governance. That’s grief wearing a policy agenda.

It’s Not About Who They Are. It’s About What They’re Defending.

There’s a temptation — an understandable one — to respond to candidates like this by naming what they are. Calling them out. Attaching the labels their behavior earns.

Resist it. Not because the labels are always wrong, but because they end the conversation for exactly the people who most need to be in it. A voter who is still persuadable doesn’t move when they hear a name. They move when they understand a system.

Here’s the system worth naming: these candidates — the celebrity outsider in Los Angeles, the billionaire dismantling federal agencies from a laptop, the politician who made his entire brand out of aggrievement — are not the same person. But they share a structural position. They are wealthy people who experience public life as an imposition.

Taxes are an imposition. Regulations are an imposition. Unhoused people are an imposition. Public transit, public schools, public health infrastructure — anything that exists to serve collective needs at some cost to private comfort — is, inside this worldview, a problem to be solved. Not a system to be improved. A problem to be removed.

So when the LA candidate says that women can’t walk their dogs because of drug addicts, he is not simply being callous. He is articulating a philosophy, perhaps without even knowing it: that public space should function for people like him, and that the suffering of people unlike him is less real than his disruption.

That’s not a personality flaw unique to him. That’s a class position — one that has been showing up in American politics with increasing confidence and decreasing shame.

The move that actually works — the one that reaches persuadable voters rather than just confirming what the already-convinced already believe — is not to attack the person. It’s to name what they’re protecting. In this case: the idea that government exists primarily to insulate the comfortable from the consequences of a society that isn’t working for everyone.

That’s the argument. And it has the advantage of being true regardless of what you call the person making it.

What Washington Voters Can Do With This

Let’s be honest about something: Washington is not immune to this pattern. We don’t have a reality TV star polling second in a major race — but the pipeline that produces one is fully operational here. Our August 4 top-two primary puts every candidate on the same ballot regardless of party, which means the structure rewards name recognition, energy, and the loudest arrival. The grievance → platform → candidacy chain doesn’t require celebrity to function. It just requires the incentive structure. And we have that.

What Washington does have — and Los Angeles mostly doesn’t — is evidence of what the alternative looks like. Not in the form of a perfect candidate, but in the form of people who did the work before anyone was watching.

Mindy Woods is a Desert Storm Navy veteran and single mother who used her own experience of homelessness — hers and her son’s — to build something. She became a Human Services Program Manager for the City of Edmonds. She co-founded the Resident Action Project, a statewide network of people with lived experience of housing insecurity who organize, educate, and advocate to change policy.

She didn’t run for office on her story. She used it to ask better questions on behalf of people still living it.

That distinction matters. Because this year, Washington Governor Bob Ferguson signed HB 2266 — a law requiring local governments to allow homeless shelters and permanent supportive housing in residential areas, overriding years of procedural obstruction from cities that had used zoning rules to keep the problem out of sight. It was meaningful, hard-won policy. And it didn’t happen because a politician decided homelessness was a good campaign issue. It happened because people with proximity to the problem organized for years until the political calculus shifted enough for legislators to follow.

That’s the counterargument worth taking seriously: career politicians with proximity to none of these issues have also produced real policy change — eventually. That’s true. But look at what it took. Decades. Organized pressure from people with lived experience. A governor willing to sign something unpopular. The proximity didn’t come from the politicians. It came from the people who refused to let them look away.

Which brings us back to the ballot in your mailbox.

Here is a practical framework — three questions worth asking about every candidate on your August ballot, especially the ones who arrived loudly:

1. What were they doing before this moment of outrage? Not credentials for their own sake, but as evidence of sustained commitment. Anger is easy. Showing up before there’s anything to gain is harder.

2. Whose dignity is centered in their solutions? Read their plans carefully and ask: is this designed to help people experiencing the problem, or to help people like the candidate stop being bothered by it? The answer is usually in the first paragraph.

3. Have they ever been wrong about this and said so? Proximity teaches humility. Someone who has spent real time close to a complex problem has almost certainly had their assumptions challenged. If a candidate’s confidence has only ever increased, that’s worth noticing.

The Los Angeles story isn’t a cautionary tale about celebrity, or California, or even this particular candidate. It’s a story about what happens when a political culture mistakes intensity for insight and grievance for qualification — and what it costs the people whose lives depend on policy being designed with them in mind, not around them.

Washington has a chance to answer that differently. The standard isn’t perfection. It’s proximity, humility, and the willingness to ask questions that don’t start with yourself.

That’s what Mindy Woods did. It’s what good governance requires. And it’s what your August ballot deserves.