There are now two Democrats and one Republican running against socialist Kshama Sawant in the Congressional District 9 race for Washington state.
Kshama is the only consistent antiwar, pro-worker candidate in this race. She is the only candidate in the race with a track record of defeating billionaires and winning working-class victories.
Democrat #1 is incumbent Adam Smith, who has spent his nearly three decades in office openly promoting endless war and being bankrolled by the weapons industry, AIPAC, and Big Tech executives. Smith has voted repeatedly to fund the genocide in Gaza and to block United Nations food aid to Gaza. He voted in December of 2025 to give Trump $906 billion for war — money that Trump has been using for the war on Iran and to fund Israel’s assault on Lebanon. Smith has voted to create and fund ICE. He also voted to slash Medicare and Medicaid funding by hundreds of billions of dollars. Adam Smith needs to go!
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 who filed in the race, Doug Basler, publicly admitted that he was recruited to try to keep Kshama out of Congress. As he entered the race, two other Republicans conveniently dropped out, clearing the field for Basler to get the entire Republican vote.
It’s not surprising the Republican leadership strongly prefers Adam Smith to Kshama Sawant, since Smith has been a dogged representative of the war profiteers, Zionist lobby, and the billionaire class. As one right-wing commenter remarked, Smith “sounds more like a Republican than a lot of Republicans.” For the Republican Party, this is not about defeating neoliberal warmonger Smith. No Republican has broken 30 percent of the vote against Smith in 15 years, including Basler himself, who has previously run against Smith many times.
Just this week, Adam Smith and Republican Mike Rogers, the chair of the House Armed Services Committee, jointly announced a new bipartisan war spending bill. If passed next week, it would mean over a trillion new dollars for wars and a shocking expansion in AI, cyber, biotech, and other weapons for Israel.
Smith shamelessly serves the war profiteers.
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 a detailed “Issues” page on her website, but nowhere on it does she call for universal public healthcare or Medicare for All. She does not call for an end to military aid to Israel. The words “genocide,” “Gaza,” or “Israel,” or “occupation” do not even appear on that page. Nowhere does she call to abolish or shut down ICE or to stop the deportations. She merely objects to detaining people “without process,” complaining that “that is not immigration enforcement.” Chaudhry does not demand student debt cancellation, instead saying “Cap repayments at 5% of discretionary income.” None of what Chaudhry is calling for is a threat to the Democratic Party establishment.
Kshama is the only candidate fighting for:
- Free universal public healthcare
- End all military aid to Israel
- Shut down ICE and the detention centers
- Stop the data centers
- Cancel student and medical debt
- Fight AI-related layoffs with a public-sector, living-wage jobs guarantee
- National rent control
These positions are supported by tens of millions of working people, but are frightening to the billionaires and both their political parties.
It’s no accident that Democratic Party candidates don’t run on demands like Kshama’s, because they are trying to build careers and don’t want to antagonize powerful people. They instead speak in vague generalities to which they can’t be held accountable. They know that running a campaign like Kshama’s would put them at odds with party powerbrokers and the billionaires and multimillionaires they serve.
Chaudhry recently spoke at a Democratic Party event, which included a mix of candidates, party establishment stalwarts like Democratic State Senator Jamie Pedersen, activists, and party insiders. She announced to those present: “I am a team player.”
The immediate question this statement raises is “which team?” Because there is no “team” in Congress right now that fights for working people. There are those who nakedly represent Wall Street and the war industry — in both parties. And then there are those who campaign for marginal change — who don’t want to antagonize party leaders or big business. Both teams are maintaining the rotten status quo in their own ways.
Kshama Sawant is not looking to join either “team,” but to go to war for working people against the billionaires and their political servants as she did for a decade on the Seattle City Council.
Far from having a strategy or willingness to fight the two warmongering parties, Chaudhry has made it clear she’s not prepared to fight in the way that Kshama did during her decade on Seattle City council.
Chaudhry also has said about Adam Smith: “Our incumbent has done some great work on housing.” She said about herself and Adam Smith: “In many fronts, we are aligned, honestly. So if you like how he votes for Green New Deal and housing and education stuff, you will like how I vote for all of that.”
NO, working people DON’T like how Adam Smith voted on all that stuff! Adam Smith voted to break the strike of the Railroad workers in 2022. He voted for hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. Under both Republican President Bush and Democratic President Obama, Adam Smith repeatedly voted to bail out the big banks after the Great Recession, which plundered the millions who faced home foreclosures and handed over tens of billions of dollars worth of real estate to private equity. This bipartisan robbery against working people is a big reason why rents have been skyrocketing. In 2011, Adam Smith voted to cut nearly a hundred billion dollars for various programs, including billions of dollars of cuts to publicly funded rent controlled housing.
How can working people trust someone who says they are in any way aligned with a politician who is literally bankrolling the genocide in Gaza and calling antiwar activists “left-wing fascists”?
Adam Smith needs to go. Anyone who thinks Smith has done “great work” is not going to fight for the fundamental change we desperately need. Kshama is the only consistently anti-war, 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.
Chaudhry said, in reference to Congress: “I cannot change the makeup of 535 people right now. I cannot convince 535 people of anything, but I can become one of them. Right?”
That’s exactly wrong. Kshama has shown what we need: a principled elected representative who will fight unambiguously for working people and use her elected office to build mass movements. Organized, militant, mass movements are what the Democrats and Republicans fear most of all and the only thing that forces them to concede. The last thing working and oppressed people need is another candidate campaigning to go to Congress to “become one of them.”
Seeking peace with the party leadership only leads to one thing: betraying working people.
We need to fight all out for every vote for Kshama in this election, by building the strongest grassroots canvassing campaign that Congressional District 9 has ever seen. We need to talk to hundreds of thousands of people about why our campaign represents the only real alternative to this rotten status quo, and why we need to elect a proven fighter like Kshama.
Volunteer, donate, and get involved in our historic campaign to elect the first-ever revolutionary socialist to the U.S. Congress.
In solidarity,
Kshama for Congress