Seattle business lobby hires leftist firebrand who speaks mayor's language

When a recruiter first approached Joe Nguyen last fall about being CEO of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, his first reaction was, "You guys know who I am, right?"

The Chamber had sought out the onetime darling of the progressive left who rose to prominence on promises to tax the rich and bulldoze anyone who got in his way, and who pushed the Washington Legislature to enact some of the same laws opposed by the organization he now leads.

At first blush it's an odd fit for the region's most prominent business advocacy organization, with more than 2,500 members ranging from restaurateurs to Amazon. But with a self-described socialist in Mayor Katie Wilson and after years of losing political fights, Seattle's business lobbyists hope that hiring Nguyen, a man who speaks the mayor's language, can help them win on social and economic issues that have evaded them in recent years.

Or at least slow their march.

The pairing is also a sign that Nguyen has shifted politically. Nguyen, who left the state Senate last year to lead the state's Department of Commerce under Gov. Bob Ferguson, has become skeptical about the tax-happy campaigns he and others ran and recalibrated his ideas on what makes for effective policymaking. He still views himself as a progressive who could support new taxes, but puts greater expectations on what those dollars should buy.

"It wasn't that my values or my perspectives changed," he said. "It is the level of rigor that is required to do a good job."

By the standards of most chambers, Seattle's is among the country's most left-wing - backing and helping fund measures to build transit and housing - but they also regularly oppose tax increases. Chamber leaders note that Seattle's fortunes have been made by business behemoths and the city is populated with their wealthy employees. Yet Wilson's election was a sign Seattle voters are not aligned with the business lobby's positions.

Still unsure of what they will get in Wilson, the Chamber hired Nguyen unanimously late last year in many ways to lay one possible path they hope she may follow, from progressive organizer to staid legislator. Board members have watched over the last year as the appetite for new taxes against the rich and the corporate - at the state, county and city levels - has grown and fear being boxed out of the conversation.

Howard S. Wright III, founder and CEO of the Seattle Hospitality Group and major stakeholder in the Space Needle, said he's been frustrated with business's ground game in Seattle politics. Despite pouring hundreds of thousands into local races, the results haven't been there.

In the way that the progressive left is fielding candidates, we're not fielding candidates," he said. "We're waiting for candidates to emerge and then a PAC emerges to try to support them."

He doesn't know Nguyen, but said he's open to the idea that business writ large needs someone who can better speak the language of the left.

"Let's get somebody in here who understands how the progressive left is thinking and let's figure out how we can work together," he said.

Chamber's losses pile up

As Nguyen was running his 2018 state Senate campaign, the Chamber was gearing up for a fight against candidates just like him running for Seattle city offices.

The organization's political action committee spent more than $2.5 million in 2019 trying to sway the City Council away from "tax Amazon" candidates - mostly financed by Amazon itself.

The effort backfired. Voters rebelled against Amazon's attempt to buy a more friendly local government and rejected nearly all the Chamber's endorsed candidates.

It was a tail-between-the-legs moment for the Chamber, which dissolved its political committee in the aftermath and stopped endorsing candidates.

In the 2021 and 2023 elections, City Hall swung toward a more business friendly slate of council members, city attorney and mayor. And yet, the city's appetite for taxing property and local corporations did not abate.

The new council and Mayor Bruce Harrell happily spent a payroll tax passed in 2020, and the public voted in favor of a new tax on high-paying companies to fund social housing in 2024.

Then came the mayoral showdown of 2025. The Chamber did not formally weigh in, but some prominent Chamber members helped finance a committee opposing Wilson, the progressive challenger.

Wilson's surprisingly strong campaign was borne out of her observation that voters wanted to tax the people they see as increasing the cost of living if it meant more affordable housing or adding city amenities. She centered her early advocacy for a payroll tax on Amazon and other large corporations in her campaign.

Harrell never countered, and in fact offered his own proposed tax on high-grossing businesses in Seattle, in exchange for lowering them on the smaller ones. Taxing the rich has become a net benefit to candidates.

Since Wilson's inauguration, business voices have been heartened by her overtures toward collaboration, promises of new emergency shelter, internal budget exercises and her decision to retain police Chief Shon Barnes. She brought on friend-of-business Brian Surratt to be her deputy mayor - a sort-of mirror to Nguyen's hiring at the Chamber - and her tax-cautious speech recently to the Downtown Seattle Association was met with applause.

But there's also a fear of what may come next, Nguyen said. Her early calls at a picket line to boycott Starbucks were jarring to some at the time, and have taken on even more weight since the company announced new office space in Nashville.

"It's kind of a wait and see moment," Nguyen said. "But I do think there's a lot of nervousness."

From tax-happy to toned down

Before Wilson, Nguyen was hailed as the face of a young wave of new Democrats.

A child of refugees from Vietnam, Nguyen grew up in public housing, with help from publicly funded family welfare programs. That upbringing informed his view that government can be a force for good.

His family also ran a billiards hall, which helped ground them in their new home. Coupled with his time as a senior program manager in Seattle's tech world - Expedia, then Microsoft - Nguyen knows business success can be a path to personal success.

Nguyen came hot out of the gate when he was first elected to the Legislature, proposing a payroll tax on large businesses in Washington and an "excise tax" on earnings over $1 million, similar to the income tax passed into law this year.

"He had this ongoing list of taxes that he wanted me to pass," said Christine Rolfes, who worked closely and lived with Nguyen when they were in the Senate together, and is now a Kitsap County commissioner. She was the lead budget writer in the Senate and would gently counsel her friend that he needed to think about the delicate balance of priorities as he pushed his tax increases. "He would run them by me, and I'd say ‘not yet. No, Joe. No, Joe.' "

For progressive advocacy groups in Olympia, he was a trophy. His convictions seemed rooted in real-life experience, and he famously slept only five hours a night.

"He was one of our go-to guys for tough stuff because he was willing to take it on and challenge the status quo," said Marcy Bowers, director of the Statewide Poverty Action Network, which pushes for expansions of anti-poverty programs in Olympia.

His drive caught the attention of local and national left-wing media. He gave peacocking quotes to The Stranger, which compared him to New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a story that follows Nguyen today.

But after the initial frenzy, Nguyen found his chest-thumping got in the way. He doesn't regret it, but said it became more difficult to win leadership positions and people seemed to presume he'd make hard-line demands.

"I think speaking your truth is important and you should always be authentic," he said, "but also how you do it is going to be important, because you have people who judge you."

So he toned it down, with Rolfes serving as guide and mentor, immersing himself in budget negotiations and the nitty-gritty of Olympia.

It was a disappointment to some.

"We used to just be able to tell Joe and he'd run with it," Bowers said of their policy pushes. "And now we have to convince him all the time."

But Rolfes saw the shift in practical terms.

"He realized pretty quickly that you can't burn bridges and be effective so he stopped the burning bridges part," she said.

An ambassador to the left

Nguyen acknowledges he would not likely be in his new position had Harrell won reelection.

Following the departure of former CEO Rachel Smith last summer, the Chamber's board started with more than 30 applicants to replace her.

The job sought Nguyen out more than the other way around. While leading the Department of Commerce, a recruiter called him to seek his "advice" on who might be good for the Chamber role. The call ended with the recruiter suggesting perhaps Nguyen himself apply.

Even as some board members voiced concern about his past vigor for taxes, his background with Microsoft and time in public office made him an appealing choice.

But his progressive roots helped push him over the top.

Bob Donegan, CEO of Ivar's and a member of the Chamber's board, sees a Seattle City Council and its mayor, King County Council and its executive, and state Legislature as all more left than the business community. So he was heartened when Nguyen said he talked to Wilson and County Executive Girmay Zahilay regularly.

"I think that's going to matter a lot in the next few years," Donegan said.

Nguyen likes to talk.

His days involve a lot of meetings: on Sound Transit coming to Westlake; with a reporter from KUOW; with Seattle Councilmember Debora Juarez. He has people around him, nudging him to his next thing, but his transitions are slow because he tends to run into friends, colleagues and important people between any two points.

"We're still kind of figuring out this dance," he said of his employer of five months. "I mean, honestly, I am kind of figuring it out."

It's a different time than when he was proposing taxes on millionaires and corporations, Nguyen insists.

Seattle's payroll tax hadn't passed yet; there were no tariffs, no unemployment insurance for striking workers; the pandemic hadn't happened. The "millionaires tax" that the Legislature passed this year was still a pipe dream for progressives.

"I think a lot of folks are trying to figure out what it means to be a company in Seattle," Nguyen said.

He looks at the state of the commercial real estate market and the ease with which Amazon and other companies have laid off or relocated workers and worries about what that means.

"This is not doom and gloom," he said. "I actually think that we're in a very good position. I just want to make sure that we stay in that position."

Bowers, Nguyen's onetime collaborator on progressive policy, views the moment differently.

There are more taxes on business, yes, but the economy is radically different and wealth has concentrated even more at the top than when Nguyen was first elected. Meanwhile, the cost of living for everyone else has become an even greater burden.

"I think Washington's kind of looking around saying, I'm not sure how else we're going to do this if we don't figure out how to tax some of this extreme wealth," she said.

Nguyen's main job now is to figure out how to posture himself as a business booster and position business interests as a winner in Wilson's Seattle. The questions are familiar to him: Is she the progressive stalwart who pushed the city to pass a payroll tax on Amazon? Who calls the city "filthy rich"?

Or is she the mayor who recently assured business groups that Seattle's taxes should not be an outlier in the region?

Smith, the Chamber's former CEO, now head of the business friendly Washington Roundtable, said Nguyen is a good figure for the current limbo period because he's capable of pivoting when needed.

"You have to be prepared to work with people and you have to be prepared to fight," she said. "You want to hire a leader who can do both, who is skilled at both and who is strategic and knows when to use both.

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This story was originally published May 5, 2026 at 11:29 AM.