Meet Olympia City Council candidate Candace Mercer
Editor’s note: This is one in a series of interviews with candidates running for Olympia City Council. At the end of each interview, The Olympian asked every candidate two questions: what they pay in rent or mortgage, and if they could correctly state the median home sale price in Olympia, which is $430,000.
Candace Mercer describes herself as “extremely low income, fully disabled with moderate to severe chronic pain+ for 20+ years, mentally ill, gender nonconforming, LGBTQ, a college dropout and someone who depends fully on the safety net for her survival.”
Although she has done activist work with the Rachel Corrie Foundation and Olympia Rafah Solidarity Mural Project, and as a rape crisis counselor, if you’ve heard of Mercer it’s probably from her polemical Medium essay, “The Real Crisis in Olympia is not Homelessness,” which accuses Olympia’s leadership of practicing “tolerance for harm” and ignoring “public drug use” in the name of progressivism.
Mercer was also featured on an episode of the KNKX/Seattle Times podcast “Outsiders,” as an example of how homelessness has warped the political commitments of a famously left-wing community.
Mercer is running for Olympia City Council Position 4 against incumbent Clark Gilman.
Although she says she is a progressive, Mercer voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, which she described as a performative “act of desperation and rebellion.”
“I am running because they have surrendered our city,” Mercer wrote in an email to The Olympian, referring to the current city council. When asked to whom the city is being “surrendered,” Mercer paused, then said she hadn’t fully thought that part out.
In an email the following week, Mercer wrote that she views the city’s response as giving up on rehabilitating people who are addicted.
“I see them accepting substance abuse and normalising it,” Mercer wrote. “Now that is very good on a population level, to reduce stigma, ABSOLUTELY, but it does not serve the individual well. That person needs paths out, not to be made comfortable with being addicted.”
Unlike other city council candidates who oppose the idea of harm reduction and propose a tougher approach to homelessness, Mercer has herself experienced housing instability. She receives $1,020 per month in disability pay and pays $1,150 per month in rent. In the past she has crowdfunded her rent payments and said she is unable to get on the section 8 waitlist. Recently she got rent assistance through federal stimulus money.
“I live completely on the edge. I have lived with housing instability all my life, but right now it’s closer than ever,” Mercer said. “I use the food bank, I use Union Gospel [Mission] to help pay my water bill. I use the safety net so I know intimately what works with the safety net, what the gaps are, what is really helping people and what is hurting them, what agencies treat you with respect and dignity, and what agencies don’t treat you well.”
Mercer says she has been alienated from the progressive community in Olympia for her views, but she rejects the idea that her run for office is motivated by that alienation. Still, it’s an overriding theme of her writing, and in an hour-long interview with The Olympian, she explicitly connected her own “cancellation” by the left with her turn towards conservatism.
Voting for Trump, Mercer said, both was a “meaningless act” in solid-blue Washington and a stunt meant to make a point about the perceived excesses of leftism.
“It was an act of desperation and rebellion. Because I’m seeing what damage has been done to my community, I’m seeing the division that’s being sown, I’m seeing what cancel culture is like, I’ve experienced that first hand. ...
“Because of speaking out and trying to write honestly about homelessness, I’ve lost about 80% of my personal communities. They all broke up with me because of trying to tell the truth and I think there’s some real damage being done by that. And because of what happened to my community and to me personally, for me to vote for the Democrats this year would — it would have felt like I was participating in my own debasement.”
Her “cancellation,” Mercer says, began with being “fired” from Works in Progress, for which she wrote a series of articles about the 2015 shooting of Andre Thompson and Bryson Chaplin by Olympia police officer Ryan Donald. She said the alternative newspaper told her not to write for them anymore after she wrote an article about a homeless encampment near her home.
In her essay, “Why I Voted Trump: A Coming Out Story,” Mercer issues her most direct rebuke of how she believes she’s seen by the progressive community in Olympia.
“I am not a RACIST WHITE SUPREMACIST TRANSPHOBE TERF ALT RIGHT CHUD and neither are you,” Mercer wrote in October 2020. “Yes, there are right wing extremists, but they are rare, and do not have much cultural influence. The torches did not come out again after Charlottesville.”
The tipping point that convinced her to vote for Trump, Mercer has written, was his executive order banning federal funds from being used to teach “critical race theory,” which she believes is “trying to remedy past discrimination with current discrimination.”
“Anything that teaches you to judge people on the color of their skin is at least discriminatory,” she said.
Asked if she believes her views represent Olympia residents, Mercer said she considers herself an “indie nonpartisan.”
“I have no affiliation to anyone right now because no one deserves my affiliation,” she said. “What I’m finding is that the political binary is almost obsolete.”
How much do you pay in rent/mortgage?
She pays $1,150 in monthly rent.
Do you know what is the median home sale price is in Olympia?
$400,000.
This story was originally published May 27, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
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