Seattle’s media and political classes have inundated readers for months now with dubious stories about what the election of socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and a slate of aligned New York legislators means for left-wing politics in Seattle.
What none of these analyses have done is talk to the local affiliate of the nationwide socialist organization Mamdani and his slate are members of and owe their victory to, the Democratic Socialists of America. In the journalistic tradition of gathering information from people who know what they’re talking about, The Stranger sat down with the cochairs of Seattle DSA’s Electoral Working Group, who coordinate the organization’s efforts to win on the ballot.
What’s been the immediate effect of the Mamdani media circus on the organization? For starters, a large bump in membership over the past three months, says cochair Carlos Jimenez Guiza, from 2,000 to roughly 2,500.
“So we’re looking at like a 25 percent increase, which I think has been like the fastest spurt I’ve seen in the two years I’ve been here,” he says.
Jimenez Guiza is fairly new to DSA, first getting involved during Rep. Shaun Scott’s successful 2024 legislative campaign while living in Capitol Hill. Scott was the first DSA member elected to the Washington State Legislature. “Starting to organize to elect my own representative seemed like a kind of an organic way to get started,” Jimenez Guiza says.
While Seattle DSA has a number of working groups and committees devoted to socialist organizing across the community—from labor to Palestinian solidarity—most Americans experience politics through the lens of elections, and Jimenez Guiza credits electoral work as a specific tactic to attract and mobilize new members.
“It’s just like the lowest hanging fruit to engage with people about politics and changing the world,” he says.
Livey Beha, the Electoral Working Group’s other cochair, joined Silicon Valley DSA in 2019 and has been with the Seattle branch since 2022. She says that for people not paying attention to DSA, it may seem like the party’s big wins in New York came out of nowhere, when they were actually the result of years of electoral organizing and gradual victories. Seattle DSA wants to mimic that strategy and duplicate its success.
“We literally have a document that we reference as we train up our volunteers, from New York City, about their strategy, and it was written eight years ago, and we still reference that as like this is what they’re doing, and we’re trying to replicate, and we recognize we’re a few years behind,” she says.
In general, the idea is to devote member resources to a smaller number of winnable elections and use those victories to attract new members.
When that document was written, Mamdani was just another new DSA member working on unsuccessful election campaigns. But within a few years, he was one of nine DSA-endorsed candidates elected to New York’s state legislature. After helping Mamdani get reelected to his seat twice, NYC-DSA made a bid for the mayor’s office, and voters elected Mamdani in 2025, making him a household name.
Beha says that some of the group’s electoral strategy was “xeroxed over from New York to a certain extent” and helped them be strategic in how they approach races and choose candidates. “We’re not trying to win just one election. We’re trying to build a political machine,” she says.
After a long losing streak stretching back to the organization’s rekindling after Donald Trump’s election in 2016 (they had roughly 50 members at the time), Seattle DSA is going into the general election with two sure-thing legislative campaigns, doubling the number of socialists in the legislature within two years of electing their first representative.
Some of its success stems from the organization voting to amend their endorsement policy in early 2024 to focus solely on materially supporting candidates willing to get with DSA’s program and eschewing endorsements signalling general support to left-wing candidates outside the organization. A DSA endorsement isn’t just a sticker for a campaign flyer anymore. It is a commitment to join the organization and be accountable to its members in exchange for an army of organized campaigners. Even if for practical purposes trial and error has shown it’s critical to still run on the Democratic Party ticket, to construct a political machine, one must act like a party.
“We still want to run principled socialist campaigns, but we’re going to do what we can to make sure that they win, because that’s what actually drives growth. And I think those are just aspects of what’s kind of been emerging as a basic electoral strategy, diffusing initially from New York,” Jimenez Guiza says.
After years of losing elections, Seattle DSA won its first major victory in 2024, successfully mobilizing canvassers to first place a minimum wage increase on the ballot in Renton, and then getting voters to pass it.
“With Raise the Wage Renton, that was really our first big independent win, independent of too much outside support,” Beha says.
She says the first thing organizers have to do well is talk to voters—”Do you think the minimum wage should be higher? Why is it $4 less in Renton than it is in Seattle?”—and that the extended canvassing campaign in Renton informed their strategic door-knocking efforts and contributed to Shaun Scott’s subsequent win in the 43rd District.
What does this new endorsement process look like in practice? A recent example can be found in Seattle DSA’s vote to endorse Jaelynn Scott for the 37th Legislative District in the Washington House of Representatives this year, but not Katie Wilson for mayor last year.
The organization’s endorsement process is quite transparent. First, candidates fill out a detailed questionnaire. Then the Electoral Working Group questions them and offers a recommendation to members, and those members hold a Q&A with the candidates before a member-wide vote. Records of the process are posted online.
Jaelynn Scott was willing to go along with DSA’s requirements, she got the nod from the Electoral Working Group, and members voted to endorse her.
Katie Wilson’s application for an endorsement went quite opposite. According to Seattle DSA’s public records, Wilson wouldn’t commit to a number of key expectations of a DSA-endorsed candidate: She wouldn’t join DSA, identify publicly as a socialist in campaign materials, cross-endorse other DSA candidates, share election data such as volunteer lists and voter databases with the chapter, or commit to meeting with the Socialists in Office Committee that keeps DSA-endorsed candidates accountable to the organization (as Rep. Shaun Scott does on a regular basis).
Wilson’s policies on homeless sweeps, police funding, and Palestine were also out of alignment with the organization, according to the EWG Steering Committee’s recommendation not to endorse.
A resolution by elected chapter leaders recommending Seattle DSA not endorse Wilson also mentioned that the Transit Riders Union—cofounded and led at the time by Wilson—“sent an email encouraging its members to join Seattle DSA for the purpose of supporting Katie Wilson’s endorsement” (they weren’t thrilled by this).
In the chapter-wide vote, members chose not to endorse Wilson, though Seattle DSA still encouraged members to vote for her, and many members volunteered for her campaign. Come the general election, Wilson barely squeaked by with a 2,011-vote margin. Seattle DSA has since published a number of communiqués criticizing her sweeps of the homeless and flip-flopping on surveillance cameras. As for the independent socialist mayor’s stab at political endorsements (which many commentators compared to Mamdani’s), both her candidates lost badly in the primary election, while Seattle DSA’s won easily.
Despite years of support during elections from DSA, Seattle’s longtime socialist city council member Kshama Sawant also did not receive an endorsement from Seattle DSA for her congressional campaign, which did not survive the primary.
“Sawant was very clear that she was not interested in that type of endorsement,” Beha says.
A more recent application for endorsement was filed by 37th Legislative District candidate Kelabe Tewolde, a young progressive who beat long-term incumbent Democrat Rep. Sharon Tomiko Santos in the August primary.
Seattle DSA had scheduled endorsement Q&A meetings with Tewolde in late August, but he rescinded the application before they were held. Considering he’s in a good position to win the general election based on his primary performance, it could have been a good get for DSA to secure a third state legislator. (The group will be door-knocking in the 37th District for Jaelynn Scott anyway.)
“Shortly before he withdrew, he told us it was not the right time, and that he hopes to work with us in the future. We’re not really sure of the exact reason beyond that, so we don’t really want to speculate,” Jimenez Guiza says. “But just speaking for me, I hope that he just continues to engage with the organization in a way that hopefully in the future both he and our members think an endorsement is the right move.”
Asked by The Stranger why he rescinded his DSA endorsement application, Tewolde did not offer a direct reason.
“It’s exciting to see a generation of young, progressive leaders win primaries, and elected office nationwide. I’m inspired by these diverse voices, and the diverse viewpoints they bring to urgent policy and political discussions. Some of these leaders seek formal DSA support, and some do not. My campaign is building a broad-based coalition that is growing every day. I welcome support from all who want to be part of our growing movement for change, and I appreciate the support from DSA and others in this effort!” Tewolde wrote in an email.
So if Shaun Scott and Jaelynn Scott are both shoe-ins, and they’re not mobilizing to support Tewolde, what is Seattle DSA’s army of door-knockers going to do ahead of the November general election? While there will still be a field campaign for Jaelynn, members also voted to oppose hedge fund manager Brian Heywood’s right-wing ballot initiatives, so Seattle DSA members will be out fighting to preserve the Millionaires Tax and defeat the anti-trans agenda alongside the establishment left. All of it is useful experience building capacity for bigger campaigns down the line and creating a base of DSA-friendly voters in the 37th Legislative District, Jimenez Guiza says.
Seattle DSA is also planning to run a city council candidate during next year’s election—the first with ranked-choice voting—though there’s been no endorsement yet.
“I think the thing that gets me every time I just think about our work together is that it’s all volunteer,” Beha says. “Like, we are just normal people, like bartenders, bus drivers, office workers, who are just spending our evenings doing this together, and we’re up against folks who are professional politicals or the political class, and that we have seen some wins. To me, that is pretty astonishing.”
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