“I don’t want you to publish this,” Melissa Chaudhry, a candidate for US Congressional District 9, said during an explicitly on-the-record interview in The Stranger’s conference room, “but if elected, my personal plan and commitment is to be the first Green Party member of Congress that would switch parties while I’m in office.”
“This is on the record, by the way,” an SECB member said. “This whole meeting, this whole process is on the record so if there’s something if you don’t want something said, don’t say it in the meeting.”
She was also seated next to her opponent Kshama Sawant, who is not the first person I would tell my secrets to, and began to stare into the distance. It is hard to know, but she probably saw her campaign to unseat weapons enthusiast and ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee Rep. Adam Smith falling apart.
This planned switcheroo was in the paper’s endorsement of Sawant. So was the fact that Chaudhry did not have anything on her website about LGBTQ+ rights because, as she told the SECB, she “was careful about her Muslim constituents.”
When asked which LGBTQ rights she supported, her laundry list included justice, health care, and protections in housing and employment.
“Then why is that not on your website?” an SECB member asked.
“Because a lot of Muslims do not feel that way, unfortunately,” she said. According to a 2025 report from Pew Research Center, 41 percent of US Muslims believe homosexuality should be accepted by society. The only religious group included in the survey with a lower acceptance rate were Evangelical Christians, only 36 percent of them are cool with homosexuality.
The day The Stranger published its endorsements online, Andrew Ashiofu, the chair of Washington Stonewall Democrats, the caucus for LGBTQ+ Democrats, denounced Chaudhry on Facebook.
This is Chaudhry’s second time running against Smith. She made it through the primary in 2024, but lost with 33.8 percent of the vote. Last year, ICE detained her husband, Zahid Chaudhry, who is a decorated and disabled Army veteran, for months. Chaudhry worked tirelessly to get him released. Once he was out, she wrote a book about their experience. She presented herself as the better progressive in the race, the person with the experience and drive to fight racist federal immigration policy. Now her campaign may be in trouble.
“Our community is not expendable,” Ashiofu’s post read. “LGBTQ+ rights are not optional. They are foundational to any candidate seeking Democratic support.”
Chaudhry left a really, really long comment on Ashiofu’s post: “Friends, You deserve an explanation. My interview with The Stranger alongside Kshama Sawant was one of the least-proud moments of my life.”
Chaudhry made the case that it wasn’t what it looked like: She says she was a founding member of the Gay-Straight Alliance in high school. Her sister is “in a homosexual relationship, happily and committedly so,” and she would protect her life, liberty, and freedom to love her wife (committedly). How she is friends with a “disabled lesbian woman, her partner, and their autistic son.”
“If you are queer, and you are wondering if you and your rights are safe with me, I assure you from the bottom of my heart, you are, you have always been, and you always will be.” You will not find this reassurance on her website. But she has this explanation:
“In the midst of all that—as she laid the groundwork against me—I was, of course, fielding questions from reporters, who were hearing these attacks in real-time and getting influenced by these. Being a genuinely kind and warm person, I was trying to be nice to a bulldog who kept on tearing my flesh.”
“I decided not to respond,” Ashiofu says. “She’s throwing blame on other people and saying she has LGBTQ+ friends. That’s the same thing as a racist saying, ‘I have Black friends.’”
The Washington Stonewall Democrats did not endorse Chaudhry—because she hadn’t responded to their endorsement questionnaire, she wasn’t even considered. Ashiofu says she tried to speak at their meeting last month during the Washington State Democratic Party Convention in Spokane, but they “didn’t want to give room to candidates that did not take us seriously,” Ashiofu says.
“True Democrats organizations would not support someone that doesn’t think that LGBTQ+ people’s priorities are important,” Ashiofu says. He also thought Chaudhry’s Green Party gambit was “deceptive, and we are done with deceptive politics.”
The Stonewall Democrats want anyone who endorsed Chaudrhy to rescind their endorsement. The 33rd Legislative District is the only LD that has endorsed Chaudhry so far.
On Thursday, its board called a special emergency executive board meeting to discuss.
It seems like they’d really, really like to rescind, but, according to their bylaws, they can’t. “This situation and others like Graham Platner of Maine,” the statement reads, may change that. After the meeting, the board sent members a proposed bylaws amendment that would allow the 33rd to “do just that.”
“The 33rd LD Democrats Executive Board finds it concerning to hear that 9th Congressional District candidate Melissa Chaudhry has not denied that she would consider changing her political party affiliation after winning as a Democrat with our support,” the group said in an official statement. “Her dishonesty undermines our Democratic Party beliefs.“ The more alarming matter is her initial unwillingness to state her support for the LGBTQIA+ community. To support them as a marginalized community, we need leaders who will stand up and actively defend those who are facing daily attacks for being their authentic selves.”
Chaudhry did not respond to The Stranger’s request for comment.
