Sawant’s Ground Game Against Adam Smith Is Getting Red Hot 

On July 12, Columbia City experienced a hiphop/R&B/funk event organized by Beatwalk. A festival held primarily on a closed off section of South Ferdinand Street, Beatwalk includes participation from small area businesses (including Island Soul and Taco City) and a good number of  performances (including singer/pianist Darrius Willrich and The Double Dutch Divas). Because the weather was perfect—not too hot but lots of sun—people crowded the street, most of them Black, middle-aged, middle class, with kids and grandkids. Also in attendance was, much to the surprise of Beatwalk’s organizers, Kshama Sawant’s team. They had three tables and about 10 volunteers searching for voters in the race for Congressional District 9, a seat that Adam Smith has held since 1997. 

Now, why is this at all important? For one, as Beatwalk’s director Tisha Gallow pointed out to me in a text: “The fact that [Sawant] even knew about Beatwalk is impressive because it is small and all about community… It’s a mini Black Festival in South Seattle.” It’s mostly absent from Seattle’s main cultural radar. But somehow it’s on Sawant’s. But it’s clearly not on that of her main rival in the race, the conventional and pro-war Dem Adam Smith (Melissa Chaudhry, the third main candidate in the race can be dismissed for reasons relating to her non-public position on LGBTQ rights and her bizarre plan to eventually do a party “switcheroo” if she wins a slot in the primaries.)  

Why wasn’t Smith in Columbia City on Sunday? Kate Bond, Beatwalk’s operations manager, has this answer: “Adam Smith not showing might loosely relate to a lack of visibility into what happens in SE Seattle because we are so often overlooked.” In an email sent the day after Beatwalk, Smith’s team countered her interpretation by claiming that Team Smith is actually very plugged in. They had attended “Auburn 4th, Federal Way 4th, Kent Cornucopia, Mercer Island Summer, and Seattle Pride.” But Sawant’s team not only attended two of those mentioned events (Kent Cornucopia, Pride), but also, and get ready, attended: Green River Farm Stand, Federal Way Farmers Market, SeaTack Farmers Market, Music at Angle Lake Park, Kent Music at Morrill Meadows Park, Auburn Farmers Market, Trans Pride, and 13 more events. And while Smith was attending the Auburn 4th, Sawant attended the Somali Independence Day in Rainier Beach on July 4th. What a class difference.

Despite the criticisms Seattle’s most-famous socialist faces from the left and right, and criticisms that often appear with racist and sexist baggage—scolds from the “know your place” crowd, if I may borrow an expression by the LA/Seattle-based filmmaker Zia Mohajerjasbi—it’s impossible to dismiss Sawant’s determination, resolution, and organizational finesse. 

It’s not enough to say she is divisive. That explains next to nothing. Nor can Sawant’s past successes (she was elected once for what used to be Position 2 on the Seattle City Council, and two times for what became and still is the 3rd District in City Council) be attributed to her strictly leftist positions. Sawant means business, and so easily stands out among the wafflers and the candidates who take voters for granted. For her, every vote counts.

Combine that ground game in an emerging political climate that’s become more and more anti-war and critical of Israel’s total destruction of Gaza and swaths of Lebanon, and you have a real recipe for an Adam Smith disaster. Indeed, his kind (established Dems), have recently been dethroned by social democrats and progressives in New York and Colorado—in part because they have yet to provide an answer to the “Palestinian question” that involves peace; and in part because the Democratic Socialists of America’s candidates are, like Sawant, serious political organizers. 

To make matters worse for Smith, mainstream media is facing Israeli messaging with tougher questions, as exemplified by the recent appearance of Israel’s ambassador to the US, Michael Leiter on CBS’s Face The Nation With Margaret Brennan. During the show, Leiter, who claimed J Street (a liberal Jewish American organization that doesn’t support the current Israeli government) was “irrelevant” and not really Jewish. Brennan did not at all hide her shock at this brazen assertion. 

But Sawant’s position on Gaza, her push for higher wages and affordable housing for the working classes, and her call to end Immigration and Customs Enforcement are not enough to beat Smith. Indeed, Melissa Chaudhry held similar positions when she ran against Smith in 2024, but she still lost by a whopping 33 percent. Why? Because Chaudhry didn’t have Sawant’s organizational capacity. In the coming days, her team will be found at the main Link stops, at a grocery store in Skyway, and, of course, the next Beatwalk.

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