As Kshama Sawant runs for US Congress, she’s hoping to shake up both Democrats and Republicans

Kshama Sawant is known to many South Asians in the US as the politician who introduced the first ordinance against caste discrimination in the country. The ordinance, which was passed by the Seattle city council in February 2023, set an important precedent in recognising caste as an exclusionary system in a country with a vast number of people with origins in the subcontinent.

Three years on, Sawant, a Mumbai-born economist and former tech worker who has lived in the United States since 1996, is making the jump to national politics.

She is contesting as an independent socialist candidate from Washington State’s 9th Congressional District, hoping to become the first South Asian elected to the United States Congress from outside the Democratic and Republican parties.

Sawant, who describes herself as a “revolutionary socialist” and “Marxist”, said that the caste discrimination bill is one part of a broader politics for social and economic justice. She served three terms on the Seattle city council from 2014 to 2024, where her legislative wins included wresting the highest minimum wage and having a tax imposed on Amazon to fund affordable housing.

“We were not there to help administer the capitalist state,” she told Scroll, reflecting on her time as a city council member in Seattle. “Our task was to go and disrupt politics as usual and it is precisely that approach that allowed us to win what I think are unparalleled victories in our times.”

In 2014, Seattle became the first major American city to commit to a $15 an hour minimum wage, a figure that was initially dismissed as “utopian”. It went on to influence a mainstream movement The Fight for 15 with Democratic politician Bernie Sanders including the $15 minimum wage as a central part of his platform during his run for president in 2016.

In 2020, Sawant’s office pushed through the “Amazon Tax”, a tax on the city’s biggest corporations that raises hundreds of millions of dollars a year, used to fund publicly owned, affordable housing in a city where rents had climbed sharply over the past decade.

Sawant says the anti-caste bill followed naturally from her fight for labour. “Oppression of any kind is really ultimately a working class issue,” she said. “It is meant to allow capitalism to continue its exploitation and extraction.”

This year, Sawant’s campaign on the national stage comes at a time when both the Democratic and Republican parties are deeply unpopular with American voters. A CNN poll conducted in late March 2026 found that just 28% of Americans hold a favourable view of the Democratic Party, with the Republican Party only marginally higher at 32%.

Her candidature reflects a question that has come to define the midterm elections in the US this year. Should voters be looking for someone to steady the course, or someone to energise supporters, antagonise opponents – Republicans, big business, and even the Democratic establishment – and promise sweeping change?

For Sawant, the answer is unambiguous. “If you want to defeat Trumpism, you have to defeat the Democratic Party also,” Sawant told Scroll. “We didn’t want to put faith in the utterly failed strategy of trying to reform the Democratic Party or winning over these politicians through moral persuasion,” she said.

A report commissioned by the Democratic Party reportedly found that the Biden administration’s handling of the genocide in Gaza cost the party significant support in the 2024 presidential elections. “Voters were angry about the genocide and the cost-of-living crisis in the US,” Sawant said.

She believes these disaffected voters can help build a national movement against the two major parties. “It is definitely an effort on our part to take the strategy that we used in Seattle so successfully to a national stage, because we believe that tens of millions of working class people in the US, especially younger people, are absolutely fed up and angry at the system around them,” Sawant said

“They know that this system, whether they call it specifically capitalism or not, they understand that life is not working for them.

“What we need is a left working class leadership as an alternative to the Democrats and Republicans. People are angry at both parties but they don’t know where to turn because there isn’t any other alternative.”

After leaving the Seattle city council in 2023, Sawant launched Workers Strike Back, a national organisation fighting for a $25 federal minimum wage and free healthcare funded by taxing the rich. The following year, Workers Strike Back endorsed the Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s presidential run over the Democratic ticket – a decision Sawant states was the only viable option on offer at the time.

“That election year was a story of the crying need for an independent left alternative,” she said.

Sawant is now running against incumbent Adam Smith, a Democrat who has held the seat in the 9th Congressional District since 1997. Washington uses a top-two primary system, in which all candidates appear on a single ballot regardless of party and the top two vote-getters advance to the general election.

The primary is scheduled for August 4.

If she wins, Sawant would join the ranks of Ami Bera, Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna, Raja Krishnamoorthi, Suhas Subramanyam and Shri Thanedar, who are people of Indian origin elected to the US Congress.

All six of them are Democrats. But unlike the newer wave of Democratic socialists (New York mayor Zohran Mamdan among them) who are working towards reforming the beleaguered Democratic party leadership, Sawant is hoping that the idea of a third alternative gains momentum.