[ For many on the Left, last week’s elections came like a gut
punch. But zoom out beyond the high-profile races cable news pundits
fixated on, and Tuesday saw many significant victories for left-wing
candidates and policies.] [[link removed]]

LAST WEEK’S ELECTIONS ACTUALLY GAVE LEFTISTS PLENTY TO CHEER  
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Branko Marcetic
November 8, 2021
Jacobin
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_ For many on the Left, last week’s elections came like a gut
punch. But zoom out beyond the high-profile races cable news pundits
fixated on, and Tuesday saw many significant victories for left-wing
candidates and policies. _

Twin Cities DSA members Aisha Chughtai (pictured) and Jason Chavez
both handily beat their opponents for open seats on the Minneapolis
City Council. , (Brad Sigal)

 

The genuinely inspiring India Walton mayoral campaign deservedly got
the lion’s share of attention leading up to and following last
week’s elections. Her loss last week
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as a shock. But this intense focus has obscured the significant gains
socialist and socialist-allied candidates made that day in other
cities. In all, twenty-three of the thirty-three candidates endorsed
by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) that were on the ballot on
Tuesday won their elections.

Maybe the biggest wins came in the Massachusetts city of Somerville,
where four of Boston DSA’s seven-person-strong slate for city
council won, with Charlotte Kelly and Willie Burnley Jr winning two
at-large elections and J. T. Scott and Ben Ewen-Campen securing
reelection. It falls short of DSA’s ambition to make it the
country’s first socialist-majority city
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puts the city in a better position to deal with its affordable housing
crisis.

The victory of these self-described “sidewalk socialists
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builds on a wave that began in 2017, when Our Revolution, the
organization formed from the ashes of Bernie Sanders’s 2016
presidential campaign, ran five candidates for the council and
endorsed four incumbents, with all nine winning. That included Scott
and Ewen-Campen, Boston DSA members
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the time. Socialists took it home elsewhere in Massachusetts, too,
with Kendra Hicks winning her campaign for Boston City Council, and
Quinton Zondervan winning reelection to the Cambridge City Council.

 

In Minneapolis, all three Twin Cities DSA
[[link removed]] members
running for the thirteen-member city council won their races. Jason
Chavez and Aisha Chughtai both handily beat their opponents for open
seats, while Robin Wonsley Worlobah beat a sitting Green Party
incumbent and narrowly edged out a third opponent who’d been
endorsed by the _Star Tribune_. Though much of the conversation
focused on policing in the city — and the winners backed the failed
ballot measure to replace the city’s police with a department of
public safety — these candidates identified housing affordability as
a key issue for constituents.

The town of Hamden similarly elected Connecticut’s first socialist
slate in sixty years, with all three Central Connecticut DSA members
running for office coming out on top. Abdul Osmanu and Justin Farmer
[[link removed]] won
election and reelection, respectively, to the town council, while
Mariam Khan became the town board of education’s youngest-ever
member.

More high-profile were the socialist wins in New York. There, Alexa
Avilés
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the Thirty-Eighth District seat for the New York City Council, and
Tiffany Cabán won the Twenty-Second District seat representing
Astoria, only two years after a recount reversed her fortunes and left
her fifty-five votes
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of the Democratic nomination for Queens district attorney. The two
will make up only a fraction of the body’s fifty-one members but
represent a growing socialist foothold in one of the country’s most
politically powerful states.

Elsewhere in the state, in Ithaca, two of the local DSA
chapter–endorsed common council candidates running on the Solidarity
Slate won their seats: longtime local activist and organizer Phoebe
Brown and Ithaca DSA member Jorge DeFendini. In Rochester, two
DSA-endorsed candidates on the “People’s Slate” put together by
Black Lives Matter activists won seats on the nine-member city
council, along with three Democratic incumbents
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Democrats similarly swept
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Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, council races, where the DSA-endorsed
Anita Prizio won reelection with 54 percent of the vote. Xander
Orenstein, also backed by DSA, became the first nonbinary member of
the US judiciary by winning their seat on the county’s Magisterial
District Court, where they’ve pledged to use their power to protect
tenants from eviction.

It wasn’t only blue states. The DSA-endorsed Danny Nowell won his
race for town council in the North Carolina town of Carrboro,
while Richie Floyd
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teacher and Pinellas County DSA member, edged out his opponent by two
points to take a seat on the St. Petersburg City Council. Through
grassroots organizing and small-dollar fundraising, Floyd out
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and beat
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former councilman who received funding from PACs and developers; Floyd
had run on a pledge to improve public housing and strengthen
tenants’ rights.

Wins for Progressives

Beyond socialists and candidates endorsed by them, progressives
notched wins, too, perhaps most notably Michelle Wu in the Boston
mayoral race. Though Wu, a protégé of Elizabeth Warren, is no
socialist, she ran on a platform of rent control; a municipal Green
New Deal; free public transport; police reform; and replacing the
city’s unaccountable, developer-focused
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agency with a city planning department.

Wu, who served the last seven years on the Boston City Council, won
with 64 percent of the vote by cobbling together a different winning
coalition
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previous successful mayoral candidates, beating a centrist opponent
married to a real estate developer.

Des Moines, Iowa, saw Black Liberation Movement activist and
first-time candidate Indira Sheumaker run and win on a platform of
moving resources away from police department toward a broader
definition of public safety, defeating a two-term incumbent on the
city council. In Dayton, Ohio, the city commission saw two candidates,
Shenise Turner-Sloss and Darryl Fairchild, win while advancing
[[link removed]] progressive
ideas for the city: participatory budgets, reimagining public safety
and policing, municipal broadband, and a program putting vacant and
abandoned properties in community hands.

The Sanders and Walton races were bold plays to take power from the
top end first. But the patient, gradual work of building power from
the bottom up is carrying on apace.

Though decarceral candidates and measures have had mixed success
recently, progressive prosecutors have won several victories.
Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner cruised
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a second term by a more than two-to-one margin against a
tough-on-crime Republican challenger. In Manhattan, civil rights
lawyer Alvin Bragg became its first black attorney general, promising
leniency for low-level crimes and protection for tenants and workers.
Elsewhere, a slate of progressive judges won in Allegheny and Missoula
Counties, though they were held off by incumbents in Atlanta.

Boston DSA–endorsed candidates for Somerville City Council with
congresswoman Ayanna Pressley. Willie Burnley Jr (center left),
Charlotte Kelly (center right), and J.T. Scott (far right) all won
their races. (Willie for Somerville)

Ballot Measures

Finally, looking beyond the individuals elected to office,
long-standing left-wing policy wish lists were advanced through ballot
measures across the country.

To be sure, there were high-profile defeats, with Minneapolis’s
public safety department measure maybe the most notable. Voters in
Bellingham, Washington, also rejected
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of four measures that were endorsed by DSA, namely a rent control
measure and one requiring employers to pay $4-an-hour hazard pay and
compensate workers for sudden schedule changes. (The measures banning
facial recognition and predictive technology for police and banning
city funds from discouraging unionization passed, however.)

But these were arguably outnumbered by the major victories. Tucson —
the hometown of Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, famous for gleefully
voting against raising the federal minimum wage to $15 earlier this
year — voted 65 percent in favor of gradually raising its minimum
wage to that figure. It’s the second Arizona city to do so after
Flagstaff and adds to the more than seventy
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counties, and states that raised their minimum wage in 2021, a record
number since the Fight for $15 movement began in 2012.

 

In Minneapolis and St. Paul, voters backed separate rent control
ballot measures. Minneapolis’s merely authorizes the city council to
draft a rent control ordinance, an increasingly likely possibility
with the victory of three socialists to the council (though rent
control is opposed by its current mayor). St. Paul, on the other hand,
put a strict 3 percent yearly cap on most rent increases that won’t
change with inflation. The measures were fiercely opposed by
businesses, landlords, and the wider real estate industry.

And while Minneapolis’s public safety department idea was shot down,
measures enacted elsewhere will advance the cause of combating mass
incarceration. Austin residents defeated
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measure that would have poured up to $600 million into the city’s
police department over five years, mandating two police officers for
every one thousand residents, with a whopping 69 percent voting
against it (DSA endorsed the “no” vote). Detroit voters
decriminalized hallucinogenic mushrooms and entheogenic plants, and
measures decriminalizing marijuana in Ohio were approved and defeated
by seven different cities each.

The Struggle Continues

Like any election, Tuesday’s results were full of bitter
disappointments for the Left. Yet there is much to be encouraged by in
the results, which approved measures and handed power to candidates
all over the country focused on rolling back mass incarceration and
dealing with a growing housing affordability crisis, among others.

And despite high-profile defeats in recent years — from Bernie
Sanders and India Walton, to, not long ago, the now victorious Tiffany
Cabán — Tuesday’s results show that the socialist left is
continuing to incrementally grow its presence in the halls of power.
The Sanders and Walton races reflected bold plays to take power from
the top end first, inspiring and pathbreaking insurgent campaigns that
the Left should keep pursuing. But the patient, gradual work of
building power from the bottom up is carrying on apace.

_Branko Marcetic [[link removed]] is
a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday's Man: The Case
Against Joe Biden [[link removed]]. He
lives in Chicago, Illinois._

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