A Socialist ‘Strike Back’: Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant Won’t Seek Reelection to a Fourth Term

Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant will not seek reelection to a fourth term. Instead, after serving on the council for a decade, the Indian American lawmaker will focus on helping launch a new national labor movement called Workers Strike Back. The national campaign aims “to win better lives and conditions for workers,” according to an op-ed she wrote for The Stranger. 

“We have no illusions that a mass movement can be built overnight, but we urgently need to get started. Working people have set a powerful example in this city,” she wrote. “It is time to build on that nationally, to widen and strengthen the class struggle. Workers Strike Back will be launched in early March in cities around the country—from Seattle to New York to Chicago to Minneapolis to Oakland to Houston and beyond.”

During her decade at the Seattle City Council, Sawant made headlines for her progressive policies and her unapologetic left-leaning agenda. At a press conference, following her Jan. 19 announcement, she said she’s won election after election “not on the basis of go-along-to-get-along politics, not on the basis of wine and cheese with the Chamber of Commerce and the rest of the establishment, but by fighting back and becoming a thorn in the side of the Seattle ruling class,” as reported by The Seattle Times. 

Until her final term ends in December, Sawant said her council office “will continue fighting relentlessly for working people, bringing rent control for a vote.” And alongside Workers Strike Back, “we will be building our movement for renters’ and workers’ rights,” she said. “And when this term is over, we will continue to be disturbers of the political peace in Seattle, as well as nationally, whether inside or outside City Hall.”

The Mumbai-born and raised Sawant worked as a software engineer there, before migrating to the U.S., where she was “radicalized by the inequality and poverty” that she saw.

However, she added that Socialist Alternative will not run another candidate to fill her seat. “The party believes the time and money it takes to run a candidate would be better spent organizing their new movement,” she said. 

Sawant, 46, is Seattle’s most famous, outspoken and controversial politician. A veteran of the Occupy movement she was elected to the Seattle City Council in 2013. Jacobin magazine says that “three years before Bernie Sanders entered the national stage with his 2016 bid for the Democratic primary, Sawant brought socialism back to the American vocabulary by becoming the first open socialist in nearly a century to win a citywide election in Seattle.”

In 2021, an effort to recall Sawant made it to the ballot with three charges of alleged “misfeasance, malfeasance and violation of oath of office.” Among the allegations brought on by her opponents was one accusing Sawant of using city resources to support a proposed “Tax Amazon” ballot initiative, and acting out of compliance with public disclosure requirements, for which she settled with the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission for $3,516. Sawant admitted to this charge but said she was unaware it was a violation. She eventually survived the recall.

The Mumbai-born and raised Sawant worked as a software engineer there, before migrating to the U.S., where she was “radicalized by the inequality and poverty” that she saw. After earning her Ph.D., Sawant moved to Seattle and began teaching at Seattle Central Community College, Seattle University, and the University of Washington Tacoma. She joined Socialist Alternative in 2006, and since then has helped organize demonstrations for marriage equality, participated in the movement to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was a visible presence in the Occupy Movement. She has also been an activist in her union, the American Federation of Teachers Local 1789, fighting against budget cuts and tuition hikes. 

In 2012, she ran as a Socialist Alternative candidate for Washington State Legislature where she won 29 percent of the vote. During her run for the Seattle City Council, she ran on a platform of fighting for a $15/hr minimum wage, rent control and taxing the super-rich to fund mass transit and education. Sawant was first elected to the council in 2013, defeating long-time incumbent Richard Conlin by the narrowest of margins: 51 percent to 49 percent.

In her first election to the city council in 2013, Sawant “pulled ahead” to victory after trailing longtime incumbent Councilmember Richard Conlin “by 7 percentage points in a citywide race on election night,” Crosscut reported. Two years later, she had to run for re-election where she convincingly defeated Pamela Banks, then president of the Seattle Urban League — 58 percent to 44 percent. 

She was re-elected in 2019 in a close contest against Egan Orion, organizer of Seattle PrideFest, which she won by 52 percent. “She trailed Orion by 8 percentage points, only to beat him by 4 percentage points and 2,000 votes when all the votes were counted,” the Crosscut report said. At the time she told The Guardian that “the fact that a socialist who has been an unapologetic fighter for ordinary people and who has doggedly used a movement-building approach and shown herself to be extremely effective and successful, that you can win three elections, that should be extremely empowering for our movements.”