Socialist Kshama Sawant Challenges Rep. Adam Smith

Courtesy of the campaign

She just couldn't stay away! Kshama Sawant, Seattle’s longtime socialist City Council member, is challenging U.S. Representative Adam Smith in the 2026 election for a congressional seat that represents the residents of Auburn, Kent, Renton, South Seattle, and parts of Bellevue. If she’s successful, Sawant said she will bring the same fighting strategy she used in Seattle City Hall to end the genocide in Gaza, secure free healthcare by taxing the rich, and institute a national rent control policy.

While she’s running on a straight-forward and popular platform, Sawant’s path to victory looks narrow. A reliable vote for arming Israel’s genocide, Smith will have the backing of the military-industrial complex, AIPAC, and maybe some Republicans after all the leftward punching he’s done on his right-wing media tour. Plus, Democrats, even those in the party’s mainstream, are scheming behind the scenes to prop up their own challenger. And Sawant's circle of lefty allies appears to be shrinking, potentially dividing whatever power they have in South King County between Sawant and Smith’s last anti-war challenger, Melissa Chaudhry. 

Sawant told The Burner she doesn’t expect an easy fight, and she won’t make any guarantees that she will win, but she’s got quite the track record of pulling off an underdog victory. 

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For The Uninitiated

Sawant’s a Marxist economist whose very name will send shivers down the backs of her fair share of Democrats. Over a decade on the Seattle City Council, she carved out a reputation as one of the country’s most visible and unflinching socialists — helping win the $15 minimum wage, taxing Amazon, passing historic renters rights, pushing issues of international significance including a strong ceasefire resolution in 2023 and the first anti-caste discrimination law outside of South Asia. Her political approach has always favored street heat over backroom deals, organizing (or glomming on to — depends who you ask) grassroots movements over playing nice with her Democrat colleagues. She left council in 2023, just after defeating a right-wing recall attempt against her. Many of her supporters, and eventually even Sawant herself, lamented the move as a mistake and loss of power for the left. 

Recently, Sawant returned to her old City Hall stomping grounds to defend her legislative legacy against repeals. Her efforts helped in part to kill Council Member Joy Hollingsworth’s attempt to permanently enshrine a subminimum wage for tipped workers at small businesses, and she can probably take even more credit for building the movement against Council Member Cathy Moore’s bill to lower the council’s ethical standards as a precursor to repealing renters’ rights.

Her continued presence at City Hall, and her habit of shaming her District 3 replacement,  sparked speculation that she may launch a bid for her seat in 2027. But Sawant’s thinking bigger.

We Need A Party For The Working Class

In an interview with The Burner, Sawant described a moment of deepening crisis — a U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza, skyrocketing costs of living, a profit-driven healthcare system, mass deportations, and the Democratic party goading it all on. 

New campaign lit just dropped

Sawant, as her organization Workers Strike Back explain at the end of every public testimony, believes that both the Democrats and Republicans serve corporations and the wealthy few over the working class. By Sawant’s analysis, the Democratic Party has failed to put up a legitimate fight against the Trump administration. So, the answer to Trump cannot include doubling down on the Democratic Party. Enter Sawant, a socialist running as an independent. 

With anti-Trump messaging a key part of her pitch, Sawant’s critics will be quick to note that she campaigned for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, knowing Stein would lose, and admitting that she wanted to defeat Democrat nominee Kamala Harris. Her open antagonism toward Harris earned Sawant a reputation for helping Trump win his election.To be clear, even if Harris had won every single Stein voter, she would have still lost to Trump. 

Sawant told The Burner she has “zero regrets” about campaigning against Harris and for Stein. She said she did “exactly what was needed for the working class.” In her retelling of the 2024 presidential race, the Democrats hid former President Joe Biden’s mental decline, then at the last moment gave Harris a coronation, and then Harris failed to drum up enough support to defeat the most unpopular president in U.S. history. 

“The defeat is entirely at [Harris’s] feet and at the feet of the Democratic Party as a whole for failing to offer even the slightest bit of solidarity with working people,” said Sawant. “If Harris had so much as put a nod towards a $15 an hour minimum wage federally, so much as allowed Palestinian anti-war activists to speak at the DNC, so much as said something against the domination of big business, it could have made the difference.”

But even if Harris had done any of those things, Sawant said that such an appeal to the working class would be disingenuous. As any Seattlite has heard her say countless times, the Democratic Party does not serve the interests of the working class. 

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Warhawk, Socialist, Or A Secret Third Thing?

Sawant says Smith has blood on his hands.

Sawant’s rival, 28-year incumbent Smith, has also become a vocal critic of the Democratic Party, particularly following Trump’s 2024 election. He went on a media blitz, claiming that the party caters to a small segment of far left radicals. Between Smith and Sawant, the race will pose an important question: In the face of fascism, should voters depend on a warhawk or a socialist? 

Well, Washington Congressional District 9 voters have already faced this very question before, several times, and they’ve picked the warhawk every time. Smith faced Democratic Socialist candidates Sarah Smith in 2018, Stephanie Gallardo in 2022, and Chaudhry in 2024, who said she’s running again in 2026. Chaudhry made it the furthest out of any of them, scoring a little more than 32.4% of the vote, likely propelled by the heightened anti-war sentiment.

Sawant thinks she’s got a better shot than his previous challengers because she’s running as an independent, not a Democrat. To her, that’s not just a label, it’s the very nature of her campaign.

“The only way you can actually create a real dynamic around your campaign is by making it very clear that you have nothing to do with these Democrats,” said Sawant. “You're not looking to be friends with them, and you don't care when the corporate media demonizes you, you are here to fight for and alongside working people.”

But the race won’t just be socialist vs. conservative Democrat. Rumor has it, progressive Democrats are scouting their own challenge to Smith. 

Sawant told The Burner she anticipates a candidate or two to carve out a lane between her and Smith. But she thinks her strategy and messaging will prove more compelling to voters. When she ran for re-election to Seattle City Council in 2019, progressive Democrats propped up Zachary DeWolf, a friendlier, less radical alternative that voters rejected. Ultimately, Sawant believes that, “Working people are hungry for a fight, and that is what we are offering.” 

It's certainly true that her socialist firebrand scored her ten years in Seattle City Hall despite efforts from across the political spectrum to kick her out. But that was also Seattle, and later in her career, just District 3, home to some of the most left-leaning voters in the city, the state, perhaps even the country. In her race against Smith, Sawant will be in front of a more centrist audience — you know, the kind of electorate that picks Smith over and over again, including during an active genocide. 

And she may not have the same financial backing she’s used to. Last year, Sawant left Socialist Alternative to form her own, smaller party, Revolutionary Workers. Socialist Alternative members ponied up serious cash and volunteered countless hours to keep Sawant in office over the years. It is unclear to what degree they will support her in her next endeavor. 

Oh, And Governing! 

If Sawant can defy the odds and win the race, the next hurdle will be finding an effective strategy to tackle the big issues she’s campaigning on. Sawant’s already taken her fair share of shots at politicians who seem like her natural collaborators — Rep. Alexander Ocasio Cortez (D-NY), Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). But, per usual, Sawant said her strategy won’t rely on making friends inside the halls of power, but rather mobilizing those historically shut out of them. A movement won the $15 minimum wage in Seattle, a movement won a payroll tax on Seattle’s largest corporations, and a movement has shown up to council chambers to block the new, conservative City Council’s egregious attacks on working people. So, Sawant said she won’t concern herself too much with how to best tailor her strategy to appease AOC. She’ll be busy thinking about how to mobilize thousands of people to pressure AOC and other members of congress.

And it will take some thought to scale the strategy! As one of just nine City Council members, Sawant had a much greater influence on the body than she would as just one of 435 in the House. Sawant admitted that it will be an uphill battle to bring her tactics to congress, but she doesn’t see any other choice. 

The strategy of playing nice with the party hasn’t ended the genocide, it hasn’t scored free healthcare, it hasn’t passed a rent control bill. In Sawant’s eyes, “a fighting strategy of mobilizing as many people as you can to fight for what's needed, and to force the ruling class and their political representatives to concede, that is the only strategy that works.”

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