Kshama Sawant is an economics instructor at Seattle Central Community College and Seattle University. She’s also the Socialist Alternative candidate challenging Democratic representative Jamie Pedersen in Seattle’s liberal 43rd District. She got 8.7 percent of the vote, as of the latest ballot returns, which thrills her supporters. They know she won’t win, but it’s nonetheless a respectable showing for a third-party candidate that advances Sawant to the general election.
But they’re also watching a parallel race—which also involves Sawant.
The Stranger endorsed her as a write-in candidate against house Speaker Frank Chopp. After all, Chopp is the Democratic leader responsible for the regressive-tax-passing, GOP-compromising tack that Socialists have criticized (while Pedersen, instead, has been an exemplary Democrat by leading efforts to pass marriage equality and fight anti-tax measures).
Now it looks like Sawant may—possibly—be able to switch races and run against Chopp in the general after all.
Here’s why: Ballot returns from King County Elections show that write-in candidates against Chopp total 10.3 percent of the vote. That’s more than the challenger who actually filed in the race, Gregory Gadow, who has only 8.6 percent of the vote. If Sawant has enough write-in votes to come in second against Chopp, “she could select the race she wanted going forward to the general election,” explains King County Elections spokeswoman Kim van Ekstrom.
So who are those write-in candidates against Chopp? As Sawant’s campaign points out, the large number of write-ins for Chopp’s race (10.3 percent compared to the tiny 0.7 percent in Pedersen’s race) suggests that voters were going for Sawant in huge numbers. If there are more write-ins than votes for Gadow after all of the ballots have been counted in the next week, King County Elections will canvass the ballots to determine whether Sawant got enough votes to switch races.
Sawant says the decision to switch races would be made by her organization’s voting members per their internal democratic rules (there go Socialists for ya). For now, she says, “mostly everybody is in favor of switching.”
If she qualifies, I hope she does.
This is exactly the sort of contest third-party progressives should be running in—not presidential races or gubernatorial races. And Chopp is the sort of person who should be challenged, someone who’s been the architect of the Democrats’ management of Olympia, overseeing enormous cuts to social programs and education despite more than a decade of warning about Washington State’s long-term revenue problems (these cuts weren’t all the recession’s fault). Smart, informed candidates like Sawant—not megalomaniacal nutjobs like Ron Paul or Ralph Nader—are exactly the sort of candidates who should run.
And to naysayers who point out that Democrats are the lesser of two evils or that she’s not actually going to win, Sawant is well aware. “Most people don’t help out Democrats because they have tremendous faith in them,” she says. “They keep voting for them because there are no other options. This is just a beginning of what politics should look like.” 