I sat across from Ron Davis—dad, urbanist, bald—at Tailwind Cafe in Capitol Hill. He wasn’t going to eat during our interview, but then he saw the menu: the “finest” avocado toast in the city. He had to try it. But we weren’t here to discuss toast. We were here to discuss his latest candidacy.
Voters may remember the former tech start-up CEO from his 2023 city council campaign. He ran for the District 4 seat as a density champion, a progressive—aka everything 2023 voters rejected. Outspent by corporate PACs, he lost to Maritza Rivera. He’s been a constant poster since—skeets, TikToks, Reels, and Substacks (or just stacks?). Raise your hands, Rondezvous readers.
Even if you haven’t seen Davis, you’ve probably sensed him. He’s become a progressive mainstay in local politics. He even flirted with a mayoral run before Katie Wilson jumped in. A believer in the cause—and a casualty of corporate fundraising—he fundraised with Progressive People Power PAC (P3) which helped unseat Sara Nelson and kickstarted the PAC that supported Wilson with political consultant Stephen Paolini. (“He and I, together basically raised all the individual contributor money between the two of us,” says Paolini, the director of the Katie Wilson for an Affordable Seattle PAC.)
Now he’s hoping to knock Rep. Gerry Pollet out of Washington’s 46th District, the Northeast Seattle region he’s represented for 15 years.
Davis says he’s heard grumblings about this decision. Taking on a 15-year incumbent is expensive and there are actual swing districts where people want to put their energy and their dollars. But “good enough is not good enough, especially right now,” Davis says.
Pollet may be fine on taxes and education, but he’s also a NIMBY firmly standing in the way of change, Davis says. “There’s no suburb left in the district, it’s time to act like it,” he says, citing Pollet’s vote against an environmental review exemption to speed along patching the missing link in the Burke Gilman trail, and Pollet’s watering down of the “missing middle” housing bill back in 2022, which could have allowed denser buildings in more places.
Davis wants to build more housing, improve transportation, stick it to Donald Trump, pass progressive revenue. Even if it ruffles some feathers, he thinks he’s the better person for the job.
While writing this story, Pollet’s communications consultant Erik Houser texted me to say he heard I was writing about Davis, and Pollet wanted to respond to anything negative Davis said about him.
Pollet rejects Davis’ characterization. In a statement, Pollet said “he has long advocated for increasing density in Seattle and the 46th district” and has sponsored legislation to make that happen, including 2025’s “middle housing and transit oriented development bills.” He did vote against suspending the environmental review for the Burke Gilman Trail, but maintains “the legislature has put these environmental reviews in place for an important purpose.”
Paolini and Tiffani McCoy, the interim CEO of the Seattle Social Housing Developer, agree that Davis is a housing juggernaut. He’s already been in Olympia advocating for housing bills, like last year’s Parking Reform and Modernization Act which restricts how much parking cities and counties can require for new housing. Davis says he put together the coalition that got the bill passed.
“I realized this is a place I could really make a difference,” he says.
Davis is persistent to the point of being professionally annoying, he says. “It’s kind of a personality flaw, but it turns out, like in enterprise sales where I come from, and politics it has proven very, very useful, even if it drives some people nuts.”
Effective, but is that the personality of a guaranteed collaborator, or a pusher hungry for credit and adoration?
Wait. Hold on. Davis’ avocado toast arrived. He paused to take a photo. Two juicy fried eggs sat on the green bed of fluffed avocado, dusted with cracked pepper and spices.
“Oh, the lighting is bad,” he says, and readjusted, leaning back and lowering his body in the chair, twisting his phone to the landscape position.
“Do you always take photos of your food?”
“Not always but when I go—” he gasps— “then I get really excited about it,” he says. The pictures often go nowhere.
He pressed his knife into one fried egg. Yolk spilled over the toast.
He dug in the toast and his loftier goals: 1,000 miles of new bus-only lanes across the state, taxes on the rich to pay for universal child care (the millionaires’ tax doesn’t go far enough, he says), and myriad wonky housing proposals.
And then there’s that damn President and his gooners. Davis supports several of the anti-ICE bills making their way through the Legislature—a potentially unenforceable bill to unmask ICE, and another prohibiting agents from becoming cops in Washington. Though the latter doesn’t go far enough, he says.
“It should be a permanent ban from working for any state or locally-funded organization.”
“We should punish companies that collaborate [with ICE],” he says, waving his fork with a perfect bite of fried egg and avocado toast. This could mean taxing them more or, at the state level, cutting any contracts with businesses that are also working with ICE in any capacity.
Davis wants there to be a state run “office of people” to disrupt ICE operations. People “who are trained in interruption and de-escalation, and who have an understanding of the ways to maximize the difficulty for ICE.” He wants the people “ready and deployable” to make ICE operations more difficult and costlier in Washington.
That’s kind of fucking crazy. All I could say was, “Wow, I can only imagine the Truth Social posts.”
“[Conservatives] say all that shit about paid protesters—they make all that shit up anyway—why not do it?” Davis says.
“That was fucking amazing,” he says of his avocado toast. “Be sure to get the extra egg. I just love runny yolk. I had a whole spiritual experience while we were talking.”
Ed’s Note: This story has been updated to clarify that Davis fundraised for individual campaign contributions.
