Last night, in the first ballot drop of the general election, City of Tukwila Initiative Measure No. 1 leading with 82.5% of the vote. This landslide victory should serve as a wake up call for elected officials around King County: The statewide minimum wage is way too low for our increasingly high-cost region, and voters overwhelmingly support raising the floor.

I spent the past year coordinating this campaign, which was led by the Transit Riders Union, and brought together a broad coalition of community organizations, labor unions, small businesses, and Tukwila residents and workers. Here’s what we can learn from the decisive election night results.

A decade makes a difference. Back in 2013, nearly ten years ago, SeaTac Proposition 1 established the very first $15 an hour minimum wage in the country. Apart from the fact of winning, that campaign bore little resemblance to our experience in Tukwila this year. The SeaTac measure was decided by a mere 77-vote margin, after a hard-fought and high-dollar battle with Alaska Airlines and other large corporate employers, and it was followed by a lawsuit that took years to resolve. Fifteen dollars sounded really high back then!

By contrast, the notion that Tukwila’s minimum wage should be raised to parity with neighboring SeaTac and Seattle was a no-brainer for the vast majority of people we talked to this year in Tukwila. The kinds of fears we expected to hear at the doors – Won’t raising wages make prices go up even more? Won’t...

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