Biography

Kshama Sawant was born in 1973 in Pune, Maharashtra, India, into a middle-class Tamil family. She grew up in Mumbai, earning a BS in computer science from the University of Mumbai in 1994, and moved to the United States to pursue graduate studies, earning a PhD in economics from North Carolina State University. She became a U.S. citizen and began teaching economics in Seattle.

In 2013, running as a candidate of Socialist Alternative against a 16-year incumbent on the Seattle City Council, she pulled off one of the most improbable upsets in Seattle's political history — winning the general election by a narrow margin and becoming the first socialist elected to a citywide office in Seattle since 1916. She was reelected in 2015 and 2019, and narrowly survived a well-funded recall effort in 2021 by just 310 votes.

On the Seattle City Council, Sawant delivered concrete, historic wins: She was the central force behind Seattle's landmark $15 minimum wage ordinance in 2014 — the first major city in the country to pass it — which became a national model and directly inspired the national Fight for $15 movement. She also won a 'millionaires tax' on large corporations (later overturned by courts), renter protections, and expanded public transit funding.

She did not seek reelection in 2023, instead founding Workers Strike Back and later Revolutionary Workers, focused on building an independent working-class political movement. She left Socialist Alternative to form her own organization. In 2025, she announced her congressional campaign against Rep. Adam Smith, who has represented Washington's 9th District since 1997 and sits on the House Armed Services Committee. She is running as an independent, making her path to victory genuinely difficult — but she is the most explicitly socialist candidate in any major federal race in 2026.

2026 Congressional Campaign

Sawant is challenging 29-year incumbent Rep. Adam Smith in Washington's 9th Congressional District — a diverse seat covering south Seattle, Renton, Kent, Tukwila, Des Moines, and parts of Bellevue. Smith sits on the House Armed Services Committee and has a long record of supporting U.S. military interventions and weapons funding, including for Israel's military operations in Gaza.

Running as an independent under her new Revolutionary Workers party, Sawant's path is steep: she must finish in the top two in Washington's all-party August primary to advance to November. Adam Smith and moderate Democrat Melissa Chaudhry are her main competitors. Republicans recruited a candidate specifically to try to keep Sawant out of the top two. Sawant has called for a $25 minimum wage, free universal healthcare funded by taxing corporations, national rent control, and a complete end to U.S. military aid to Israel.

'Both Democrats and Republicans have been purveyors of endless brutal wars throughout their history,' Sawant said at her campaign kickoff. 'The Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress spent more than $14 trillion on war since 9/11.' She has pledged, if elected, to 'flip the script on how to use elected office' — keeping only a worker's salary and donating the rest to social movements, as she did on the Seattle City Council.

Free healthcare (tax corporations)
$25 minimum wage
National rent control
End all foreign wars
Unionize all workers
Green public works

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