Sawant’s Street Game Is Under Attack

Kshama Sawant, Seattle’s former socialist councilwoman running for the District 9 congressional seat Adam Smith has held for nearly 30 years, is not at all happy about the fake posters and mudslinging stickers popping up around town. 

“I call them fake posters because they’re engineered to look like the posters from our campaign, but they aren’t,” says Sawant on my phone’s speaker. As we talk, the dreadful roar of Blue Angel fighter jets fills the room. Sometimes the machines of military propaganda are so loud that I have to ask Sawant to repeat something she just said. “Yes. Yes. That’s what I mean. Some of these posters copy elements of our posters, their graphic elements.”

There are, as far as I can tell, two types of these defacements: ones that clearly imitate her posters but scramble her key points, such as universal healthcare and higher wages; and stickers that are simply plastered over her legitimate posters that insult (she is running for “narcissistic supply”) and make unfounded claims, such as: “Sawant doesn’t want us to know she is a millionaire.”

“No, I am definitely not a millionaire,” says Sawant, when asked directly. “Additionally, during my decade on the Seattle City Council, I took home only the average worker’s wage. I donated the rest of my six-figure City Council salary, after taxes, into a working-class solidarity fund. I have pledged to do the same if elected to Congress.”

What harm could a few posters cause a congressional campaign in the digital age? As I’ve written, her ground game is everything. With little coverage from mainstream media (KOMO, KING 5, and the like), Sawant relies on the streets and local events to communicate her points and connect with voters.

If Sawant hopes to beat the deep pockets of Adam Smith, her campaign will need heavy lifting from South Seattle and Capitol Hill. And it is precisely these areas where her campaign has concentrated much of its energy, and it’s also in these areas the fake posters and stickers are spreading like a rash.

As the Blue Angels rip Seattle’s clear blue sky to shreds, I ask when her team began noticing these posters. “Right after The Stranger’s endorsement,” Sawant says. “That’s when they began cropping up. I think the political establishment, the Democratic party establishment, and the billionaire class saw the game significantly changed and became more worried.” 

Sawant has no idea who is putting up the posters, which offer a QR code that links to a 2024 article by Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat: “A Big Seattle name is in the election battlegrounds–helping Trump.” Like many articles of this kind, Westneat avoids mentioning that conventional Dems fucked up big on Gaza. Assuming the round of destruction was business as usual (“Israel has the right to exist”), they lost tons of votes on the left as Biden permitted the relentless decimation of a region with a population that, at the time, matched Seattle, Vancouver, and Portland combined. Sawant is often blamed for contributing to Kamala Harris’s loss because she, as Westneat correctly pointed out, stumped for Jill Stein in Michigan. There is no getting around that fact. But the Dems easily lost 2026 with no help from Sawant.

This relates to the sticker that concerns Sawant the most: “99 problems and y’all are fixated on the only one that involves Jews,” a Jay-Z parody that implies she is antisemitic for calling the ongoing flattening of Gaza a genocide.

“These stickers on our posters are accusing our campaign of antisemitism,” she says, “[and they] are a very right-wing talking point… ‘if you’re fighting against a genocide then you’re being antisemitic.’ No, we are anti-Zionist. We are an anti-Zionist campaign, and we’re very proud of it.”

Before going further, I must make it clear that I’m a stern pacifist. I oppose any form of armed struggle. The logic “Ballots or Bullets” is pure madness to me. Guns will never solve guns. Guns solve nothing.

Back to Sawant. 

For a candidate so ignored for her supposed extremism, her negative position on Israel is now mainstream. Pew found 60 percent of Americans hold an unfavorable view of Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu (this is a massive drop from 2022, when it stood at 55 percent favorable). According to the AP, Israel is now deeply concerned about its “weakening connection with younger Jewish Americans.” To make matters worse, a recent poll showed Jewish Americans have a more favorable opinion of Zohran Mamdani, the pro-Palestine mayor of NYC who called for the arrest of Netanyahu, than Netanyahu. Even her opponent, who at the cost of possibly losing support from AIPAC. is now trying to distance himself from Israel by voting to cut US military assistance to its war machine by $3.3 billion (this is clearly a case of too little too late) 

All of these developments can be linked directly to the human catastrophe called Swords of Iron, an operation that dramatically changed popular opinion of Israel and its prime minister. It wasn’t about Jews specifically, but about Zionism. Indeed, I will go as far as to say it was about humans in general—humans as a universal principle that should ground our values. 

Lastly, though Sawant is a socialist, she never pushes in her campaign points that are on the fringe. She has always been pragmatist when it comes to her ground game. 

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