The current Seattle City Council can be very progressive when compared to, uh, conservative cities. They've gotten good at entertaining banter from the dais. They wear fleece and ride bikes and pass feel-good resolutions. Sometimes they even tackle serious issues (minimum wage, public preschool).

But often, the council amounts to a bunch of rich older people answering letters from other rich older people. It's been that way for years now. A third of the council members have served for a decade or more. There are three former attorneys and a former CFO. Their average age is in the 60s. Nothing wrong with spending your golden years in public service, but the council rarely feels like a group in touch with what it's like to be, say, a renter in your 20s or 30s who lives paycheck to paycheck.

And that's a big demographic in Seattle.

When voters resoundingly passed a measure last year creating new geographical districts for city council races, it opened the door for a new kind of campaign. You can run an effective door-knocking ground game in a neighborhood-based district in a way you never could in the city at large. Which in turn could mean a new kind of candidate: younger, less wealthy, less entrenched with donations from the status quo donors, perhaps more in tune with a new generation of Seattleites.

Meet Halei Watkins.

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