Socialist Kelsea Bond Is Running for Atlanta City Council
Across the country, democratic socialists are continuing to build their presence in municipal government. Kelsea Bond is hoping to become the first socialist on Atlanta’s city council.

Candidate for Atlanta City Council Kelsea Bond (M) pledges to raise the standard of living, lower the cost of housing, and win a Green New Deal for Atlanta. (Kelsea Bond for Atlanta)
- Interview by
- Sara Wexler
Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s surprise ascent to front-runner status in New York City’s mayoral race has become a national political flash point this summer. But Mamdani is not the only socialist making inroads in municipal politics. In Minnesota, state senator and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member Omar Fateh has secured the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party’s endorsement in his campaign for mayor of Minneapolis against incumbent Jacob Frey.
DSA-backed candidates are also continuing to run for city council seats elsewhere across the country. In Atlanta, Georgia, labor activist and longtime DSA member Kelsea Bond is running to represent District 2 on the city council. Bond currently has the endorsement of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades District Council 77 as well as the Atlanta DSA chapter; if they win, they would be the first socialist elected to the Atlanta City Council.
Jacobin’s Sara Wexler spoke to Bond about why they decided to run, their platform to expand affordable housing and public transit, and how they hope grassroots activist support will help them fight the status quo in Atlanta politics.
What led you to decide to run for Atlanta City Council?
I grew up in the Metro Atlanta area, and I’ve lived in this district for ten years. I’ve been organizing since 2020; that’s also when I joined DSA, which was during the COVID-19 pandemic. Bernie Sanders [lost the Democratic presidential primary just before] all the Black Lives Matter protests. I had been a self-described socialist for a long time, but it was really the intersection of all these events happening at once that made me realize how connected racial justice is to fighting capitalism and climate change and for health care as a human right.
The first year of organizing, I was very involved in the fight to stop Cop City, and it was just heartbreaking the way that this ordinance to lease the land to the Atlanta Police Foundation was introduced. There was gaslighting of thousands of Atlanta residents. There was no opportunity for public comment or democratic input on this proposal. Seeing the way that our city council handled this was just heartbreaking. It also showed me that our government doesn’t work for working people and is not democratic or representative of who it’s supposed to represent.
Following that, I spent multiple years organizing in the local labor movement because my takeaway from that loss when the city council leased the land to the police foundation was that the Left in Atlanta was not strong enough — that progressives were not organized enough. I strongly felt that the Left lacked meaningful ties to the local labor movement, and that was part of our weakness.
So I got very involved in labor organizing. I joined a union, United Campus Workers, which is the public sector higher-ed union in Georgia. I helped organize the first few union Starbucks stores in Midtown Atlanta, which were very close to my district, and organized solidarity for the Teamsters during their 2023 UPS contract fight and ended up working with several unions around the city.
As the city council elections were approaching again, I finally felt like it was time to step up and be the person to run in those elections. The year before, I had been campaign manager for Gabriel Sanchez, who was the first democratic socialist elected to the Georgia State House. We won that election despite our opponent having a major fundraising advantage, and we knocked on about 17,000 doors during that primary election. It was great to see that we were able to elect a young democratic socialist out in Cobb County, Georgia, which is historically known to be one of the more conservative suburbs around Atlanta.
It was such a good feeling to win that election — to see that the seeming underdog can win if working people organize together and lead with a truly progressive message around housing and health care as human rights. That inspired me to run for Atlanta City Council and grow the contingent of young progressives holding office in Georgia.
Tell me about your platform.
District 2 is the smallest district in Atlanta. It’s incredibly dense. It’s about half renter; it’s very walkable. So this is a relatively young district, and we have seen a lot of gentrification in older, historically black neighborhoods in the district, like the Old Fourth Ward. There’s been a lot of development and housing that’s increasingly unaffordable for the people who work here. So a big part of my platform is fighting for affordable housing.
The Atlanta Beltline is basically a walking trail around Atlanta. It forms a circle and it’s built along a historic railroad around the city. This was a thesis project of a Georgia Tech graduate student a couple decades ago: the vision was to connect Atlanta’s disparate neighborhoods, which have been segregated and separated for such a long time. It was meant to be a transit corridor, and there were lots of promises made to build affordable housing and light rail along the Beltline — because Atlanta’s a very car-dependent city, we’re really lacking in public transit.
A lot of the promises around the Beltline have been broken. A lot of the housing we see going up is luxury condos and apartments that are not affordable for regular working people. The mayor has also recently pulled plans to build rail along the Beltline, specifically in the area that is in my district.
Atlanta has the highest wealth gap in the nation. We are also a blue city in a red state, meaning we have lots of preemptions on the state level: we can’t impose caps on rent, we can’t raise the minimum wage for Atlanta workers. We’re facing a lot of restrictions. That means if you’re a progressive who wants to tackle that wealth gap, you have to be creative in those solutions.
Part of my way of addressing that is thinking about how the cost of housing and transit make up the two biggest portions of any working person’s paycheck. If we can alleviate those costs for working people, that will improve people’s standard of living, even if we can’t increase the minimum wage in Atlanta.
This is why I’m a big advocate of building Beltline rail, because this is the most meaningful intervention that we can make in expanding public transit in Atlanta this decade. But instead, our city leaders continue to kick that can down the road and delay and come up with excuses to not build it — basically because corporate forces and real estate entities have consolidated to oppose building rail on the Beltline. So a lot of the issues in my district center around the Beltline. Housing and transit are the two issues that come up on the door again and again, and those are the two issues that we’re leading with.
In the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo ran very different campaigns. Zohran’s campaign was very volunteer-powered and relied heavily on door-knocking, while Cuomo’s focused on mailing flyers and airing TV ads.
I imagine that, as a democratic socialist, you are running a campaign that’s more similar to Zohran’s. Do you see your campaign as connected to a broader movement? And if so, what organizations do you think are helping build that connection to a popular base?
I’m a member of Democratic Socialists of America, the former cochair of the Atlanta chapter, and I have served on DSA’s National Labor Commission. So DSA has very much been a part of my campaign so far. But over the years, I’ve also built a lot of relationships with local labor unions and progressive organizations, and we’ve seen those people showing up to support my race as well.
I’m not just running because I want to run for city council as an individual. I’m running because I believe that we need a mass movement of working people if we really want to challenge the fascists in the White House, if we really want to challenge the way that our country is run by corporate elites — and the same for the city of Atlanta. I definitely see myself as part of that broader movement, and I wouldn’t have come this far in my race without members of the Democratic Socialists of America who are out there every weekend knocking doors, supporting my race, volunteering in so many ways for my campaign.
I would say we’re running our campaign very similarly to Zohran Mamdani’s. We’ve knocked on about 11,000 doors so far. Our campaign is almost entirely volunteer-led, and we are out there having face-to-face conversations with working people and reaching the types of people who aren’t normally talked to in traditional political campaigns.
As I said, this is a very young district — it’s heavily renters. We’re going out of our way to have those conversations with folks in apartment complexes who I can guarantee you our opponents in this election are not talking to. And in Atlanta, even during a contested mayoral race, voter turnout is only about 20 percent. But a lot of the people who are coming to us excited about our campaign, who live in the district, are not traditionally municipal election voters.
We’re very hopeful about the idea that we’re bringing people into the democratic process who don’t normally feel compelled to vote in these elections because they don’t feel like their values or their issues are being reflected in city hall. Hopefully this is our chance to bring those people into the democratic decision-making process and help them feel like they finally have a voice in local politics.
You would be the first socialist city council member in Atlanta. How does democratic socialism inform your platform and your approach to politics?
I think housing and health care are human rights; I think quality education is a human right. But importantly, democratic socialism, as well as being a union member, has taught me a lot about democracy. When you are a part of a democratic organization or a democratic union, you see what bottom-up democratic decision-making looks like in practice.
When you compare that to what we have at the city level, you see the stark contrast. We’re told time and time again growing up that we live in a democracy, but really we see corporate politicians whose decisions are swayed one way or another based on what corporate entities or developers are donating to their campaigns. That’s why, like most DSA candidates, I’m not taking contributions from corporations or private developers, [which] is super common in Atlanta politics.
I’m trying to make a statement: I am going into city hall to fight for regular working people, not real estate interests.
When I think about democracy in Atlanta, so many examples come up to show that we are not currently living in a democratic system. These last few years, there was a campaign to hold a referendum vote on Cop City, and organizers collected over a hundred thousand signatures to put Cop City on the ballot. Our mayor basically threw that referendum campaign in the trash and built Cop City anyway.
In 2016, there was a referendum to expand the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) under the umbrella of the More MARTA program, which included light rail on the Beltline. This referendum passed by overwhelming margins; we’ve been collecting a half-penny sales tax on it since then. The mayor, again, just unilaterally decided that we’re not going to do that anymore.
We recently have also seen corruption issues at city hall, with the mayor going after the Office of Inspector General after it began some ethics investigations into the mayor as well as other city council members. And any community member who has shown up to city hall these past few years for public comment can just see how undemocratically our city council meetings are run. They’re held in the middle of the day when the average working person can’t make it because they’re at work or they’re watching their kids, and then you usually wait about two or three hours through proclamations and ceremonial things before you can even make your two-minute comment.
Bringing my experience organizing within democratic institutions, I’m hoping to try to create more avenues and platforms for regular people to get involved in these democratic processes — to push for more opportunities for democratic referenda, democratic decision-making, public comment, town halls, and even participatory budgeting that we are not seeing in our city government right now.
You’ve discussed the construction of Cop City. What’s your relationship to the Stop Cop City campaign, and what do you plan on doing with respect to policing in Atlanta if elected?
This has been a major fight in Atlanta over the last several years, and it has politicized a lot of young people and progressives and just regular working people who weren’t really paying attention to city politics. It made them realize how undemocratically our city really operates. But it’s also brought to light how our city handles policing in a very counterintuitive way.
The ordinance to lease the Cop City land to the Atlanta Police Foundation passed only one year after the mass Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and after a man in Atlanta named Rayshard Brooks was killed by Atlanta police. This ordinance that [the city] introduced in 2021 just felt like a slap in the face to anybody who had gone out to march in the streets to give public comment and anybody who had reached out to city council in any way to ask for a more compassionate [approach to] public safety.
We have a program in Atlanta called Policing Alternatives and Diversion Services (PAD). The city council members who have advocated for PAD have struggled to maintain that funding and programming over these last few years. We’ve also seen the criminalization of houseless Atlantans and even the death of a houseless neighbor, Cornelius Taylor, during an encampment sweep earlier this year. And so more and more Atlanta residents, when you combine Cop City with the fight to close the Atlanta City Detention Center, alongside the criminalization of our homeless neighbors and the death of Cornelius Taylor, people are ready to see a different form of community safety here in Atlanta. There is a demand for it. We just need the willpower from the people in office to push for those diversion services.
And at the core of it, the leading cause of crime is poverty. If our city is the capital of income inequality, we can’t expect better until we meaningfully improve Atlanta residents’ quality of life, to try to keep Atlanta more affordable, to increase the supply of housing. We can’t expect to see different outcomes until we’re tackling income inequality head-on.
Atlanta is set to host the World Cup next year. To prepare for the event, many of Atlanta’s homeless are being forcibly pushed out by street sweeps. Like you mentioned, Cornelius Taylor was fatally injured by a bulldozer during one of the sweeps.
You’ve called for an end to street sweeps. What do you think is the correct way to fight homelessness in Atlanta?
Many of these street sweeps that happen downtown are really driven by either developer interests or the tourism industry. Cornelius Taylor died the week right before MLK Day weekend, when we have a big parade through the city as well as events at the old Ebenezer Baptist Church, which is right across from the Old Wheat Street [the site of the homeless encampment where Taylor was killed in a sweep]. The city makes these decisions at the behest of institutions that want to see our houseless neighbors disappeared instead of meaningfully solving these problems.
There have been new programs [launched] in the last year to do meaningful long-term outreach to our houseless community, which is something we want to get more funding for and see that expanded throughout the city. But right now, the mayor’s solution is to just get people out of the way. There is really no long-term plan to get these people housed, to get them the resources they need.
Now the mayor is claiming that we will eradicate homelessness in Atlanta by the time the World Cup comes around. There’s a coalition in Atlanta, Justice for Cornelius Taylor, which has been calling for justice for his family and justice for his neighbors that were there when he died. It has been a part of a task force with the mayor these past few months that has sought to solve the issues that led to his death. They’ve been really disappointed by the outcome of these meetings with the city and the mayor’s office and feel that the city is not interested in cooperating with them to come up with solutions.
Recently the coalition has come up with a plan to house the remaining neighbors on Old Wheat Street and to get them permanent housing. What it found in working with the mayor is that many of these folks that the city initially promised would get housing have just been waiting on a phone call and have not been housed. Last time I checked, there were eight residents of Old Wheat Street that were still waiting on housing.
So a lot of us are asking how the mayor can possibly house the three thousand–plus houseless individuals in Downtown Atlanta by next year if we can’t even house eight this month. What a lot of us are afraid of is that we will just repeat the mistakes of the 1996 Olympics, in which thousands of houseless Atlantans were incarcerated and thrown in the Atlanta City Detention Center. This is going to be a big fight in the coming year. We’re going to have to fight to make sure our houseless neighbors are not criminalized, that they’re not punished for simply being homeless. We need real solutions and cannot let the desire to turn Atlanta into a tourism capital [lead to treating] our houseless neighbors like they are disposable.
What would you say your biggest challenge will be should you get elected?
We have a strong mayoral system here in Atlanta, and that can make it difficult if you are a city council member who’s in the political minority. I think that means that I’m going to have to build bridges on city council; I’m going to have to find ways to work productively with my colleagues on issues that we agree on.
But something that I am excited about is that as the first democratic socialist on Atlanta City Council, I am a part of this larger movement. I have relationships with dozens of community organizations across the city. My hope is that having these relationships with organizers on the outside can help generate the public pressure that we need to actually get things passed. So when I’m in there, even when I’m making hard decisions, even when I have a minority viewpoint, I have hundreds of thousands of people on the outside who have my back and who are fighting for those things on the ground.
We’ve never really seen this type of inside-outside collaboration on Atlanta City Council before. This will be a new way of doing things that I think will be very effective and help bring even more people into the movement we’re building.
Anything else?
Atlanta has this very notorious way of doing business that we call “the Atlanta Way.” This is the way that politics in our city has been operating for the longest time, where there’s this partnership between the political elite and corporations in Atlanta. The Atlanta Way is exactly what brought us Cop City. The Atlanta Police Foundation is composed of Atlanta-based corporations like Home Depot, Coca-Cola, Waffle House, and so on. Time and again, we see these corporate interests pushing their agenda with basically no pushback from the people in power in Atlanta.
With this grassroots campaign where I’m refusing corporate money, where we are leading with this volunteer on-the-ground effort, my hope is that this is our first stab at chipping away at the Atlanta Way and the status quo here in Atlanta. I think more and more voters are starting to see the way our city policy is shaped by these corporate interests and they don’t like it. They want to see that change. That is why there is so much excitement on the ground about the platform that I’m running on, about the issues that I’m championing and what I believe in.