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The campaign proved to be a referendum less on the tax itself than on Seattle’s self-image. The Kingdome’s lack of pretension had always been seen by many citizens as its primary virtue—symbolic proof that Seattleites were not like the dimwitted citizens of Cleveland, Baltimore, Anaheim, and other typical American cities with the kind of misguided priorities that lead to taxpayer money being lavished on luxury boxes and caterers for wealthy people while more pressing needs like schools, highways and medical care for the poor go unfunded. The Kingdome proved that Seattleites choose to spend their money on more important, less status-symbolic things than pleasure palaces, that Northwest citizens reluctantly allow pro sports to trade in their hallowed land rather than pay them astronomically for the privilege, and that in any event Northwesterners prefer not to call attention to Seattle’s arrival among the major cities of the nation. The less attention Seattle calls to itself, the better. Lesser and Invisible Seattleites in particular saw the stadium vote as a vote on whether Seattle would remain Seattle or would turn into just another Houston, Especially Houston. Tampa Bay or Anaheim. To these citizens, nothing could be a more alarming signal of the decline of Seattle than the erection of one of these monstrosities.

The pro-stadium forces, realizing that an opportunity of this magnitude would never come again, played up the fear that Seattle would lose its baseball team forever this time if voters didn’t approve a new stadium, and as the election neared, polls showed that the large lead held by anti-stadium-tax forces was shrinking fast. But when the September election day came round at last, and the Mariners were in their customary place in the standings, a full 13 games behind the division-leading Anaheim Angels, the measure went down in defeat by a microprocessor-thin 1,082-vote margin.

It felt at first like the forces of pretension had finally been vanquished—that Seattle could jettison its major-league franchise and settle back into the disgruntled tranquility that sustained it through all its recorded and unrecorded history. Nothing would have been more true to the Seattle of Doc Maynard and Ivar Haglund than to declare the citizenry’s happy condition off limits to baseball and all its shams. But when team owners said they would put the franchise up for sale on October 30 unless plans for a stadium subsidy had been approved by someone, somewhere, Washington Governor Mike Lowry called the state legislature into special session to come up with a funding package. Lowry’s idea was to cobble together a combination of state and county funding that would call on the legislature to approve the state’s portion of the funding and the King County Council to approve county-only taxes that would cover its “responsibility.” The central element of the strategy was to invoke the Mariners’ deadline as an excuse to bypass the voters; the deadline created a “crisis” that called for bold, determined action by the region’s political leadership.