Kshama Sawant

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Sawant was born in Pune, India in 1973. She grew up in Mumbai, earning a B.S. in computer science from the University of Mumbai in 1994. After moving to the United States, she earned a graduate degree and a Ph.D in economics from North Carolina State University.[1][2]

Prior to her city council election in 2013, Sawant was an economics teacher at Seattle Central Community College. She is a member of the American Federation of Teachers Local 1789, representing them as delegate to the Martin Luther King County Labor Council.[3]

Who are you? Tell us about yourself.

I am running as an independent antiwar socialist for Washington State’s 9th Congressional District because working people are under attack. Trump has carried out a horrific assault on working and oppressed people, and the Democratic Party has refused to fight back. Tens of millions of working families face a cost-of-living crisis. In the world’s richest nation, half of American households can’t afford groceries. Both the Democrats and Republicans have presided over hundreds of billions of dollars of cuts to social programs while sending trillions for wars abroad and for the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. Both parties represent the war profiteering billionaires and multimillionaires. We urgently need a fighter for the working class in Congress.

I was the sole independent socialist on the Seattle City Council from 2014 through 2023, winning four elections. Alongside workers, I won the nation’s highest minimum wage (now $21.30/hour), the Amazon Tax, free abortion, and unparalleled renter victories. We won because I used my office NOT to make backdoor deals with the establishment, but to build movements. We urgently need such a shake-up in Congress.

My main opponent is warmongering incumbent Democrat Adam Smith, who has voted to fund ICE, Trump’s wars, and the Gaza genocide. He voted to slash Medicare and Medicaid funding. He is bankrolled by AIPAC and the Zionist lobby and by the war industry. My socialist campaign is the strongest-ever challenge to Adam Smith.

Please list below 3 key messages of your campaign. What are the main points you want voters to remember about your goals for your time in office?

I’m fighting for free healthcare for all, funded by taxing the rich; to end all military aid to Israel and for a permanent arms embargo on Israel; to shut down ICE; to stop the data centers; for national rent control.

I’m running for Congress to build mass movements, not to have cozy relations with the politicians who’ve betrayed us.

I used my Seattle City Council office to build movements to win historic working-class victories. That’s the strategy I’ll use if elected. I’ve pledged that I will turn my Congressional inauguration into a mass rally of 10,000 people in Washington D.C., and immediately use the momentum from the election to launch national mass movements for free healthcare, taxing the rich, and ending military aid to Israel.What we need in Congress is the fighting strategy I used to win historic victories with my Seattle City Council office. I organized working people to win the nation’s highest minimum wage (now at $21.30/hour). We also won the Amazon Tax.

We won unprecedented renters’ rights:

Cap late rent fees at $10

Six months’ notice for rent increases

Require landlords to pay economic evictions assistance

Ban winter evictions

Ban school-year evictions of children and public-school workers

Close loopholes in Seattle’s just-cause protections

Right to a lawyer for all renters facing eviction

Limit move-in fees and allow payment plans

Prohibit rent increases in bad quality housing

Require landlords to provide voter registration information to new tenantsI am the only consistent antiwar, pro-worker candidate in this race. I am also the only candidate who has defeated billionaires and won historic working-class victories.

My main opponent, incumbent Democrat Adam Smith, has spent his nearly three decades in office promoting genocide and war and being bankrolled by the war industry and Big Tech.

I’m the only candidate fighting for:

Free universal public healthcare

End all military aid to Israel — arms embargo

Shut down ICE

Stop the data centers

Cancel student and medical debt

Fight AI layoffs with a living-wage jobs guarantee

National rent control

It’s no accident Democratic Party candidates don’t run on such demands. They are building careers and don’t want to antagonize powerful people.

What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about?

We live in the wealthiest nation and tens of millions are struggling. We urgently need free universal public healthcare and an end to a private system in which billionaires get richer by denying us care.

I’m fighting for all healthcare to be free, funded by taxing the billionaires and multimillionaires: dental, vision, abortion and reproductive, disability, mental health, home care, and gender-affirming care, regardless of citizenship status.

I’m fighting the AI-related mass layoffs with a public-sector living-wage jobs guarantee funded by taxing the rich.

I’m fighting for a permanent end to all military aid to Israel and for a full arms embargo on Israel. I’m fighting to fund education, transit, and social services, not war.

What organizations or individuals have endorsed your campaign?

The Stranger newspaper, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, TrackAIPAC (the organization opposed to AIPAC and the Zionist lobby), Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, American Muslim Advancement Council, Voice of Muslims, Seattle Gay News, SeaTac City Councilmember Bedria Abdullahi, former Boeing engineers union President Paul Shearon, Socialist Action

Campaign websiteSawant's campaign website stated the following:Fight the Rich, Not Their Wars! End All Military Aid to IsraelKshama is running for Congress to build a movement that can end the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza and to put a stop to the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent by the U.S. to fund wars around the world. We need an immediate end to all military funding for the Israeli war machine and to the brutal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. We need an end to the military assault on Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and other nations.Kshama is the only candidate in this race fighting for an end to: All military aid to IsraelAll weapons and tech, including AI, for genocide and imperialist war All financing mechanisms for the Israeli military and violent occupationAll exports to, and imports from, Israel of weapons and goods that could serve military purposesKshama is the only candidate in the race calling for a permanent arms embargo on Israel. Kshama’s main opponent, 29-year incumbent Democratic Congressmember Adam Smith has the blood of hundreds of thousands Palestinians on his hands. He has voted for tens of billions of dollars for the genocide and has repeatedly voted to ban U.S. funding for United Nations food assistance for Gaza.Smith has called antiwar activists “left-wing fascists” and demanded that they be arrested. As the former chair and current ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, Smith has been one of the main leaders of war and genocide funding. Kshama’s campaign is a historic opportunity to throw this genocidal politician out of office.Both the Democratic and Republican parties continue to fund the genocide and the Israeli state — 173 House Democrats voted for the 2024 bill that gave over $26 billion to Israel for the genocide. The genocide in Gaza passed its 1,000-day mark in early July of this year. The violence and bloodshed has expanded to the West Bank and to Lebanon. Genocide and imperialist war is a source of obscene profits for the billionaires and multimillionaires. AI is now a central component of genocide and imperialist war, ICE terror, mass layoffs, the surveillance state, and climate crisis because AI is the new frontier for super-profits for the super-rich. The genocide will not be ended on the basis of electing Democratic politicians, because the Democratic Party, like the Republican Party, has supported the murderous ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people for nearly eight decades. The Democratic Party is not a “lesser evil”, but one of the two most powerful parties of global capitalism and imperialism. The American antiwar movement urgently needs leaders who understand the need to fight against both of the parties of the genocidal billionaire class. Not only have many self-described progressives in the Democratic Party voted to blatantly fund the genocide, virtually all of them, including AOC, have voted for Israeli military equipment such as the Iron Dome, Arrow, and David’s Sling, which they claim are “defensive.” No aspect of the genocidal project can be considered “defensive.” Iron Dome, Arrow, and David’s Sling are all part of the genocidal hardware of the Israeli state. They have allowed Israel to carry out slaughter in Gaza with impunity. They have also enabled Israel to brutally attack Lebanon, Iran, Syria, and Yemen. Israel has bombed Yemen on 16 separate occasions just last year. There is nothing defensive, or defensible, about any of this.We need elected leaders in the U.S. Congress who will not only consistently vote against funding the genocide, but also use their office to mobilize a grassroots army of hundreds of thousands of working people to fight the Democratic and Republican parties, the Zionist lobby, and the billionaires profiting from war and genocide. Democrats like AOC are doing none of this. Voting against war and genocide is the LOWEST possible bar, and politicians like AOC have repeatedly failed to even do that.Kshama has pledged that if elected to Congress, she will turn her Congressional inauguration into a mass rally of ten thousand people in Washington D.C., and immediately use her office to launch militant national movements to fight for an end to all military aid to Israel.The occupation of Palestinian lands has long been backed by U.S. imperialism because Western billionaires and multimillionaires see Israel as a strategic outpost in the oil-rich Middle East. The Israeli state was created in the first place in order to serve the interests of the capitalist class. This is why Democratic Party politician Joe Biden, long ago when he was a U.S. Senator, said that: “If there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one.” The Israeli state serves as a terrorizing check against any rebellions by working and oppressed people in a geopolitically and economically pivotal region of the world. While the policy of forever war is primarily driven by Western imperialism, it is aided by, and serves, not only the capitalist class in the West but also the ruling elite in nations like Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. Ending the occupation and bringing about the liberation of the Palestinian people are tied to the liberation of the working class in the Middle East and internationally. It will need revolutionary fightback by working people and the labor movement in the United States as well as in the Middle East in order to break U.S. military support for the ruling classes in Israel and neighboring countries like Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. By the same token, working people cannot have any faith in Chinese or Russian imperialism or in any nation’s capitalist class. Working people’s allies are other working people everywhere, not the capitalist class or their politicians anywhere. Our campaign also opposes the inter-imperialist proxy war in Ukraine. We don’t support U.S. imperialism, Russian imperialism, or Chinese imperialism in that bloody conflict, or either bloc in the larger US/China conflict. None of these imperialist powers represent the interests of working people in Ukraine, Russia, or anywhere else. We need money for healthcare, education, jobs, and housing, not for war.We need to build a global antiwar and workers’ movement made up of workers of all nations and ethnicities fighting against the bosses’ wars and for our common interests. Working-class action has stopped wars in the past. Today, working people and the labor movement need to organize a one-day general strike in the U.S., demanding an end to all military aid to Israel.As the only elected socialist on the Seattle City Council, Kshama fought for and won the nation’s second and strongest ceasefire resolution in November 2023 for a ceasefire in Gaza. It took a movement of Arab & Muslim community members, socialists, antiwar activists, union members, and other working people to win that resolution, overcoming the opposition of the Democratic Party Councilmembers. It will take an even bigger movement to defeat AIPAC, the weapons manufacturers, and the Democratic and Republican Parties to end U.S. military aid to Israel and the genocide.Free Healthcare for All — Tax the Rich!There has never been a clearer opportunity to launch a serious fight to win free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich, and take down the deeply dysfunctional, for-profit American healthcare system.We’re dying from unaffordable healthcare as the pharma bosses and for-profit health insurance industry make bank off our sickness. We need to tax the rich hundreds of billions of dollars a year to fund free healthcare for all — a fully public system covering all services, including preventive care, surgeries, vision, hearing, dental, gender-affirming care, free abortion, ambulances, and Emergency Room visits.We need to go beyond that, and build militant movements to win state-of-the-art, free healthcare for all owned and democratically run by working people. We need to bring big pharma and the hospitals into democratic public ownership, run by healthcare workers, with patients having the right to choose their physicians and specialists. We need to end the private insurance industry — no more denial of care, no more profits from sickness! As part of our free healthcare for all system, we need a major expansion of clinics and hospitals around the country.Despite being hugely popular with working people, the demand for Medicare for All has been stalled because of the utterly failed strategy of relying on “progressive” Democrats to fight for it. This will never happen, because the Democratic Party is tied at the hip to the insurance industry and Big Pharma. What’s needed instead is an independent, national movement that can harness the resurgent discussion around Medicare for All and growing anger at the health insurance corporations, and go on the offensive to win free healthcare for all by taxing the rich. This should include local and state ballot initiatives.Alongside her campaign for Congress, Kshama has launched a campaign for a Seattle ballot initiative to expand the Amazon Tax our movement won in 2020 by approximately $5 billion a year to make healthcare free. This can act as a launchpad to push forward the fight for Medicare for All nationally.Fight for National Rent ControlWe face an epidemic of unaffordable housing—the rent is too damn high! We need strong rent control with no rent increases above inflation for all rental properties. We need a massive expansion of publicly owned, high-quality, highly energy-efficient affordable housing by taxing the rich, as our movement won in Seattle when Kshama Sawant led the fight for the Amazon Tax. The Amazon Tax raises hundreds of millions of dollars a year to build affordable housing by taxing the city’s wealthiest corporations.We also need a movement to organize renters around the country to fight against exploitative corporate landlords and for a National Renters’ Bill of Rights. Kshama built movements to win landmark renters’ protections in Seattle — a $10/month cap on late rent fees, six months’ notice of rent increases, bans on winter and school-year evictions, caps on security deposits and move-in fees, and economic evictions assistance, which requires landlords to pay renters three-months rent if they are forced to move due to a 10%+ rent increase. We need to expand those victories nationally, and fight for more — including strong residential and commercial rent control. Kshama also helped renters to collectively organize to stop rent increases and force landlords to make needed repairs. We need fighting tenants’ unions nationally, and working-class leaders like Kshama who will stand with them.The private housing market has failed us—we need to take the big real estate corporations and banks into democratic public ownership. We need housing for all! New housing construction should be planned in coordination with free, frequent, and highly convenient mass transit routes. Every unit of new affordable housing should be built with good-paying union labor, like Kshama fought for with Seattle’s Amazon Tax.Shut Down ICE and the Detention Centers! Stop the Deportations!Working people must unite against the deportations being carried out by Trump and both parties of the billionaires, which represent a brutal attack on the entire working class. Kshama is fighting to shut down ICE (the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency) and the detention centers and to stop the deportations. Kshama’s campaign is also fighting to win a public-sector living-wage jobs guarantee, free healthcare for all, and a massive expansion of publicly-owned affordable housing, available to all working people regardless of citizenship status and funded by taxing the billionaires and multimillionaires.Trump is carrying out a horrific escalation against immigrant community members, with ICE arresting a shocking 10,000 people over a five-day period at the end of June. But attacks on the immigrant community have been a bipartisan agenda. Kshama’s main opponent Adam Smith voted in favor of Republican President George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Act, which created ICE. Smith and his fellow Democrats in the House and Senate have voted repeatedly to fund ICE. In fact, Smith has voted on a total of nearly $115 billion dollars for ICE funding since its inception. Democratic President Obama became known as the “Deporter-in-Chief” and Democratic President Biden deported four million people, far more than Trump did in his first term. According to a September 2024 National Immigrant Justice Center report, an estimated 37,000 people were detained each day under Biden, a 140 percent increase since Trump left office after his first term. In his last year in office, Biden approved $3.4 billion for ICE “to jail an average of 41,500 immigrants per day, historically high funding surpassing all four years of the Trump administration.” Most of that money went to private corporations like The GEO Group, which profit off brutally inhumane detention centers which are often deadly for vulnerable detainees (such as elderly, pregnant, youth, and those with serious medical conditions).Billionaires and multimillionaires make huge profits from ICE and the detention centers and receive lucrative contracts from both Democratic and Republican administrations. Palantir, the dystopian corporation owned by warmongering billionaires Peter Thiel, Alexander Karp, and Joe Lonsdale, has been an ICE contractor under Obama, Biden, and Trump. The bosses’ super-exploitation and marginalization of immigrants is used to undermine the wages and conditions of all workers, both native-born and immigrant, and as a weapon to divide us. Native-born and immigrant workers must stand together to fight for better wages and conditions, and defend the right of all workers to unionize without fear of retaliation, including deportation. We need mass action, including mass strike action and civil disobedience, to beat back workplace immigration raids and to stop the deportations. We need ICE out of our workplaces, schools and neighborhoods. We need to shut down the detention centers that both parties of the billionaires have been using to carry out their terror campaign against immigrants. We need to put those billions of dollars towards education, housing, and healthcare for all. The criminal ICE agents and private prison administrators directly responsible for the horrific conditions inside the detention centers should be prosecuted. As a City Councilmember, Kshama fought for and won the “Right to Counsel,” for free legal representation for all renters facing eviction. We need to do the same for immigrants: we need to fund free legal defense for any immigrant facing deportation.Kshama has a long track record of fighting in solidarity with immigrant community members and building movements against the billionaire class. Her campaign has strongly supported detainees on a courageous labor and hunger strike at Delaney Hall, the notorious immigrant detention center in New Jersey! Kshama also stands with anti-ICE protestors who have been facing off against the full weight not only of Trump’s ICE but also city and state police departments under both Democratic and Republican administrations.Most of the massive corporations are owned by the same handful of so-called “asset manager” corporations on Wall Street, such as Vanguard, which has $12 trillion in assets, and BlackRock, which owns majority shares in GEO and has $13 trillion in assets. Most of the wealth in these asset accumulations are, in turn, owned by the same small elite club. Many of the same billionaires and multimillionaires also have trillions of dollars at stake in AI. They are making AI an increasingly central component of war and bloodshed. Their investments in AI are now the principal reason for mass layoffs. AI is increasingly also the backbone of ICE terror. The fight to shut down ICE and the detention centers needs to go hand in hand with the antiwar movement to end the genocide, military aid to Israel, and the forever wars, the struggle to stop the proliferation of AI data centers, and the fight to take Big Tech and Big Energy into democratic public ownership of workers.The alternative to the bosses’ attacks on immigrants, and to anti-worker “free trade” agreements like NAFTA, is for the labor movement to launch mass organizing drives and build fighting unions not only in the United States, but also around the world. We must combat the race to the bottom by the bosses, which seeks to pit workers in different nations against each other. Instead of corporate globalization, economic nationalism, and imperialism, we need working-class internationalism. We need to build a militant international labor movement to unite all workers in the fight for living wages and good working conditions for all.Workers Need a Real Raise — $25/Hour Minimum WageDemocrats and Republicans in Congress keep giving themselves raises but won’t even pass a bare $15/hour federal minimum wage for working people. The federal minimum wage is still at a shocking poverty-level $7.25/hour.Kshama and our movement are fighting for a $25/hour federal minimum wage — in major cities, this should be at least $30/hour. With prices sky-high on everything from food to housing to transportation, we need to fight for an across-the-board 35% raise for all workers with automatic cost-of-living increases above inflation going forward.Kshama led the fight to make Seattle the first major city to win a $15/hour minimum wage, in 2014. Immediately after being elected in 2013, she launched the 15 Now movement. She won, despite vicious opposition from big business and the Democratic Party, and even opposition from some labor leaders. Because of the inflation adjustments that Kshama and our movement won as part of that victory, the minimum wage in Seattle is now $21.30 an hour, the highest in the country. This was a historic victory which set off the “Fight for 15” around the country, but after ten years of price-gouging, inflation, and record profits by big business, workers everywhere need a real raise.Instead of long hours and multiple jobs just to pay the bills, we need to shorten the workweek to 30 hours a week with no loss in pay or benefits. Unionized auto workers with UAW have recently raised a similar demand. A 30-hour work week is possible, but winning it will take a massive fight, including mass strike action and the revival of a fighting labor movement.Kshama pledges to take only the average worker’s wage, as she did in her decade on the Seattle City Council. Democrats and Republicans in Congress make nearly $200,000 a year and are completely out of touch with regular working people. Kshama will donate the rest of her six-figure salary to support strikes, worker organizing, and social movements.Fight Mass Layoffs! Public-Sector Living-Wage Jobs Guarantee — Protect the Right of Workers to Unionize and Strike!Billionaires and multimillionaires are making obscene profits at the expense of workers. We need a living-wage, unionized jobs guarantee, dramatically expanding union rights and vital public services by taxing the rich. Millions of jobs can be created by funding the urgent needs of society. Roads, bridges, public schools, and other infrastructure urgently need to be repaired or rebuilt. We need more teachers, teaching assistants, mental health specialists in public schools, most of which are severely and chronically underfunded. Winning free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich will also create hundreds of thousands of jobs in healthcare (not private insurance jobs denying coverage for community members facing illnesses). We need to fund a lightning-fast transition to clean energy and stop fossil fuel extraction while providing a just transition and guaranteed jobs for these workers.Unions are the key tool workers have to fight the bosses for the things we desperately need. Organize the unorganized—unionize Amazon and every workplace! We need representatives in Congress who unambiguously fight for working people and actively support unionization and strikes. As a City Councilmember in Seattle, Kshama used her office to build the workers’ movement, including winning historic victories for workers and by donating tens of thousands from her salary to support strike and unionization efforts. Republicans and Democrats in Congress, and President Biden, together blatantly carried out the bidding of billionaires and multimillionaires and broke the railroad workers’ strike in 2022. This shameful vote included all self-described progressive Democrats. In contrast, Kshama used her City Council office to unambiguously stand with the railroad workers and called out the progressive Democrats for their strikebreaking vote. We need to build a fighting workers’ movement that arms itself with clear, bold demands and is prepared to go on strike to win them. We don’t need more representatives in Congress who pay lip service to workers’ rights and then stab us in the back as the progressive Democrats did with the railroad workers. Instead they need representatives who will go all out to fight for their interests, actively support strikes, and use their platform to help organize and strengthen them. We need to repeal Right to Work and every anti-union law nationwide, and build a movement to win the PRO Act.We need to restore the traditions on which the American labor movement was built — class struggle not “class snuggle,” bold strike action that shuts down profits, and wide working-class unity against the bosses and billionaires. The labor movement needs to break with the Democrats once and for all and launch a new party for working people.Tech workers, and the working class as a whole, need to get organized against the mass layoffs happening throughout the nation.Mass layoffs of tens of thousands of workers, mainly in the tech sector, are becoming shockingly commonplace, making for what many are calling a “layoff bloodbath.” Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the main drivers of mass tech layoffs. On March 31st, between 20,000 and 30,000 Oracle workers, roughly 18% of the company’s global workforce, woke up to a cold five-line email from “Oracle Leadership” at 6am. No phone call. No meeting with HR. No warning from their managers. Just a message telling them their roles had been eliminated, that today was their last working day, and that their access to company systems had already been cut.Oracle is not a company in distress. It posted a 95 percent jump in profits last quarter, $6.13 billion in a single quarter. The principal owner of Oracle stock, Larry Ellison, owns $200 billion in wealth and is the sixth-richest person in the world. The layoffs are about mega profits — billionaires and multimillionaires hoarding wealth and redirecting tens of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure while discarding the workers who built the company.Oracle is far from an exception. It’s also Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, SalesForce, Ericsson, Block, Intel, Pinterest, Autodesk — the list goes on.The super rich people who own these corporations plan to spend nearly a trillion more dollars on AI infrastructure over the coming year, and the layoffs are becoming a primary avenue for their fundraising. On top of that is the fact that the bosses are trying to replace human workers with AI-driven machines. Workers in multiple industries — from drivers to actors and writers to teachers to tech workers — face the prospect of whole areas of employment completely disappearing. The capitalists who run Goldman Sachs and OpenAI have given sinister numbers, claiming that they think that 18 percent or 300 million jobs globally can soon be automated by AI. None of automation is being used to raise the living standards of working people, much less train and create new jobs for the millions of workers made jobless.We need to fight the billionaires and their mass layoffs with a public-sector living-wage jobs guarantee.Stop the AI Data Centers! Bring AI & B