Our campaign was by far the strongest ever by an openly Marxist candidate for the U.S. Congress.
We’ve so far won a historic 16.9 percent of the vote in a five-way race, in Washington’s sprawling Ninth Congressional District, which spans suburban areas with a significant proportion of Republican voters in addition to large parts of the major urban areas of Seattle and Bellevue.
We ran on electrifying demands like free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich, ending all military aid to Israel and a permanent arms embargo on Israel, and national rent control. All of these are extremely popular among the working class in this district and nationally.
We achieved this result despite the many obstacles we faced.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties maneuvered by running candidates specifically to block our campaign from getting into the November election, which would have resulted in a head-to-head battle between our campaign and genocidal Democrat Adam Smith.
We faced a corporate media blackout, and hostility and outright attacks from DSA leaders and many “progressive” podcasters.
Many labor leaders shamelessly endorsed Adam Smith, while others remained silent, effectively supporting Smith.
All of these obstacles were predictable. Our decade on the Seattle City Council showed what a threat we are to the political establishment and those who give them cover. We used our decade on the Seattle City Council to relentlessly build working-class movements, winning four elections and unparalleled victories such as the nation’s highest minimum wage, which also led to substantive raises for tens of millions of workers across the United States, defeating Jeff Bezos to win the Amazon Tax, and repeatedly beating corporate landlords to win unprecedented renters’ rights.
Despite not making it into the November election, we’ve provided a powerful example of what’s possible by running an openly Marxist independent campaign based on class struggle rather than making peace with the political establishment or its legions of gatekeepers.
The DSA strategy of appeasing and, worse, rehabilitating the discredited Democratic leadership and their rotten party is a dead end. In this age of imperialist war, genocide, and climate catastrophe, we simply have no time to fuck around.
We urgently need militant movements of the working class and a new mass party that can defeat the billionaires and both their parties. And we need revolutionary socialist campaigns like mine that don’t try to join the establishment and help administer the capitalist system, but instead fight to overthrow it.
— Kshama Sawant
WATCH KSHAMA’S ELECTION NIGHT SPEECH
Free healthcare for all
Tax the rich!
End all military aid to Israel—full arms embargo
End the occupation of Palestine!
No weapons or tech for genocide or imperialist war!
STOP THE DATA CENTERS & AI LAYOFFS
Take the big tech and energy corporations into democratic public ownership!
National Rent Control
Build millions of affordable homes!
What working-class demands are the candidates fighting for?
Kshama Sawant
Independent socialist
vs.
Adam Smith
Democrat incumbent
Melissa Chaudhry
Democrat
Doug Basler
Republican
-
Free universal public healthcare
✔ Yes
✘ No
-
End all military aid to Israel—full arms embargo
✔ Yes
✘ No
-
Shut down ICE & the detention centers
✔ Yes
✘ No
-
Stop the data centers
✔ Yes
✘ No
-
Cancel all student & medical debt
✔ Yes
✘ No
-
Fight AI-related layoffs with a public-sector, living-wage jobs guarantee
✔ Yes
✘ No
-
National rent control
✔ Yes
✘ No
There’s only one consistent antiwar, pro-worker candidate in this race.
There are two Democrats and one Republican running against Kshama Sawant in the Congressional District 9 race for Washington state.
Democrat #1 is incumbent Adam Smith, who has spent his nearly three decades in office supporting and funding endless war. Smith has voted repeatedly to fund the genocide in Gaza and to block United Nations food aid to Gaza.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties are using every avenue to try to block Kshama from becoming the first revolutionary socialist in Congress. The Republican candidate, Doug Basler, publicly admitted that he was recruited into the race to try to keep Kshama out of Congress.
Democrat #2 in the race is Melissa Chaudhry. While purportedly running as an alternative to establishment Democrat Adam Smith, Chaudhry is running a remarkably establishment-friendly campaign. Chaudhry has not been campaigning to end military aid to Israel, to shut down ICE, or for universal public healthcare. As The Stranger noted when they endorsed Kshama, Chaudhry “admitted her website lacked policy on protecting LGBTQ rights because it would alienate” a particular community. This is shocking especially in the context of horrific attacks on trans and queer people by Trump and the right wing.
If a politician is unwilling to even call for demands in support of oppressed communities and the antiwar movement during their election campaign, they’re certainly not going to fight for them once in office. Chaudhry said about herself and Adam Smith: “In many fronts, we are aligned, honestly.” In front of a room full of Democratic Party officials, she proudly announced, “I will be a team player.”
Congress is already full of team players: they play for Team Billionaires and Team Genocide. Working people need someone on our team. It’s no accident that Democratic Party candidates don’t run on demands like Kshama’s, because they are trying to build their careers and don’t want to antagonize powerful people.
Kshama is the only consistently antiwar, pro-worker candidate in this race. And she’s the only candidate with a record of taking on the billionaires and their political servants and defeating them.
Kshama’s historic victories
The nation’s highest minimum wage at $21.30/hr
The Amazon Tax
Economic evictions assistance for working-class renters
Winter & school year eviction bans
Millions of dollars from an increase in the Amazon Tax
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kshama sawant: The socialist money can’t buy
Most of the time, working people have no political representation under capitalism. It’s the worst kept secret in the world. A plurality of Americans believe neither the Democrats nor the Republicans represent them. The approval ratings of both Trump and Congressional Democrats are in the gutter.
In stark contrast, for a decade in Seattle, working people had one independent representative who fought for them. Former socialist City Councilmember Kshama Sawant led movements to win historic victories, including the highest minimum wage of any major city in the country (now $20.76/hour), the Amazon Tax to fund affordable housing, a slew of landmark renters’ rights laws, the nation’s strongest resolution against the genocide in Gaza, and much more. Unlike virtually every other politician in the country, Kshama kept her promises.
In Washington D.C., working people are being screwed over every day, not only by Trump but by both parties of big business. Kshama will go to the mat for working people in D.C., as she did in Seattle, to fight for free healthcare for all, national rent control, and for an end to the genocide in Gaza.
We need an immediate end to the genocidal war and occupation of Gaza. We need money for healthcare, jobs, and schools, not for war. Kshama is fighting to end all military aid to both the Israeli state and the bloody inter-imperialist proxy war in Ukraine. Current Congressional District 9 Representative Adam Smith is bought-and-paid for by big business and the weapons industry.
As she did during her decade in office, Kshama will accept only the average worker’s wage, and donate the rest of her congressional salary to workers’ and social justice movements.
We’re getting nowhere by supporting the parties of the billionaires. Instead, let’s send the socialist money can’t buy to U.S. Congress to fight the rich.