Victory and Defeat in Minneapolis

This past Tuesday saw twenty-two races where candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) National Election Commission (NEC) were on the ballot, eleven of whom have won their races so far. Two of those are on the Minneapolis City Council: socialist Robin Wonsley, who won reelection to her third term on the back of efforts like expanding antidiscrimination protection and banning the use of algorithms to raise rents, and Soren Stevenson, best known before this for winning a $2.4 million settlement from the city after Minneapolis police shot a “less than lethal” round at him during 2020’s George Floyd protests, costing him his eye.

This was his second tilt at the city council seat: in 2023, Stevenson, who backs rent control, fell just thirty-eight votes short of unseating council president Andrea Jenkins, who opposed it despite Minneapolis voters having expressly approved a measure instructing the council to put one in place. Jenkins chose not to seek reelection this year. Besides Wonsley, two other socialists, Aisha Chughtai and Jason Chavez, won reelection to their council seats, while a third victorious incumbent, Aurin Chowdhury, did not seek the local DSA chapter’s endorsement this year.

These wins mean progressives will hold onto a bare majority of the city council’s thirteen seats, which had been threatened by the retirement of one member of the progressive bloc and further eroded by the defeat of progressive ally Katie Cashman. That majority won’t be large enough to override the veto of the city’s corporate centrist mayor, Jacob Frey, however.

That may have been moot if DSA-backed mayoral candidate Omar Fateh had defeated Frey on Tuesday. But the incumbent held onto a third term in the second round of voting, beating Fateh, a two-term state senator who ran on rent control and increasing the city’s housing stock, by 6 points, and delivering national DSA endorsees one of nine total losses on Election Night so far. Frey and his allies were buoyed by outside spending from three PACs funded by a coalition of landlords, developers, business groups, Lyft, and some unions, which raised nearly three times that of the PACs backing progressives.

DSA-backed candidates have had success in the past winning the endorsement of the Minneapolis  Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL), essentially the local iteration of the Democratic Party, but this year was a mixed bag. Two candidates, Stevenson and Chavez, won the party’s endorsement, while Wonsley, who didn’t seek its endorsement, successfully maneuvered like she has previously to block an endorsement from going to a challenger.

Others sought the endorsement but didn’t get it. Chughtai, who won DFL’s endorsement in 2023, was denied it at this year’s Ward Ten convention despite winning more votes than her challenger and alleged that one of her opponent’s supporters assaulted her.

An even bigger controversy erupted at the Minneapolis DFL convention, where Fateh initially won the party’s endorsement over Frey in July — a major boon in a city where the DFL-backed candidate tends to win the overall race — only to be stripped of it a month later after a complicated series of events.

Frey had challenged the outcome in the wake of convention chaos caused partly by an electronic voting system on the fritz, even though he didn’t have the numbers to win. The state party then stepped in to overrule the Minneapolis chapter and revoke Fateh’s endorsement, even as it explicitly acknowledged that the outcome wouldn’t necessarily have been different, and ignoring the Minneapolis DFL’s call to simply reassemble the delegates and have them vote on the endorsement again.

The whole affair drew substantial outrage at the time, with more than a dozen Minnesota DFL elected officials, including Squad member Representative Ilhan Omar, publicly condemning the state party’s moves. The incident may get renewed scrutiny in the wake of the election result, where only eight thousand votes separated Fateh from Frey in the final round of ranked-choice voting in the overwhelmingly blue city.

Minneapolis saw other DSA defeats in the form of two unsuccessful bids, one endorsed by the Minneapolis DFL, to the city’s Park and Recreation Board. They were part of a wave of union-friendly candidates vying for the board following a twenty-day strike last year by the city’s park workers, the first in the board’s 140-year history, over stalled contract negotiations.

Municipal Socialism Rising

Socialists made high-profile gains in other cities too.

In Atlanta, DSA member and labor organizer Kelsea Bond became the city’s first ever socialist city council member with a convincing 64 percent of the vote, beating their real estate–backed closest challenger by more than 40 points, whom they had also narrowly out-fundraised through small-dollar donations. Bond, who says they were motivated to run by the mayor’s steamrolling of public opposition to Cop City, ran on building affordable housing and public transit.

Bond is only the second democratic socialist to ever win office in Georgia, the first being Georgia state house representative Gabriel Sanchez, whose successful run for office last year Bond served as campaign manager for. As with socialists in Minneapolis, Bond was able to draw support from both progressive groups and DSA together with several establishment Democrats.

While no other DSA members or nationally endorsed candidates ran in the city, several progressives recommended by the organization’s Atlanta chapter had success. Of the nine city council candidates the organization backed, three won their races, while two are now in runoff elections. Outside of Atlanta, twenty-four-year-old Sam Foster, whom Atlanta DSA called “the clear Democratic choice,” came within a hair’s breadth of unseating the city of Marietta’s four-term septuagenarian mayor, falling short by just eighty-seven votes on a campaign focused on lowering the cost of living through zoning reforms and building non-car infrastructure.

Over in Detroit, socialists upped their presence on the nine-member city council to two, after DSA member Denzel McCampbell, former communications director for Squad member Rashida Tlaib, cruised to victory with nearly 60 percent of the vote. McCampbell’s primary win was one of the big surprises of Michigan’s primary season this past August, having edged out both a challenger who had come within a sliver of taking the seat four years earlier and sitting state legislator Kate Whitsett, who was also his opponent in the general.

Whitsett has been a magnet for liberal frustration, a conservative Democrat who repeatedly bucked the party and sided with Republicans on key issues like abortion rights and health care funding, and missed nearly the entire last legislative session — saying that most of what happens in the state house is not worth the cost of travel and daycare for her dog. McCampbell, meanwhile, has said he modeled his run on Mamdani’s campaign, with DSA-led volunteers making more than ten thousand phone calls and texts and knocking between nine and fifteen thousand doors.

Though the city’s mayor-elect, twelve-year city council member Mary Sheffield, is the business community’s pick, there may be room for collaboration. As a city councilor, Sheffield spearheaded various measures related to affordable housing, tenant and worker rights, and assistance for the poor, and has said she would revive some that haven’t yet passed. McCampbell has said he has a good relationship with her going back to his time working on changes to the city’s constitution at the close of last decade.

Two socialists will similarly sit on Ithaca’s common council, after winning both of their races on Tuesday. Jorge DeFendini, who worked on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 primary run, had held a common council seat from 2021 to 2023, when he was unseated in an upset. He had been encouraged to make another run this year for a different ward by its outgoing alderperson, with whom DeFendini had worked on passing good cause eviction.

In the general election, DeFendini crushed a local right-wing activist by 79 points on a platform of, among other things, rent stabilization, building more affordable housing, and stronger enforcement of building codes. Hannah Shvets, a Cornell University junior who ran on a similar platform focused on rent stabilization, became the youngest socialist elected in US history when she beat her opponent by 29 points. (The opponent had called for cutting public spending and lowering property taxes.) Rent stabilization was also part of the platform of Mid-Hudson DSA’s Dutchess County cochair Daniel Atonna, who won a seat on the Poughkeepsie Common Council.

Mamdani’s victory and these upstate wins weren’t the only socialist successes in New York this week. Both of New York City DSA’s other endorsees cruised to reelection after overcoming a tidal wave of corporate spending during the primary season: city council incumbents Alexa Avilés, who won by nearly 50 points, and Tiffany Cabán, who ran unopposed. Some non-endorsee reelections can also be counted as wins for the socialist movement, like socialist city council incumbent Shahana Hanif, who easily won a third term despite not seeking DSA’s endorsement this year, and public advocate Jumaane Williams, a socialist who served as a key supporter of Mamdani in the primary race.

Since the election, two more DSA candidates have announced campaigns for the New York State Assembly. If successful, they will give the newly elected Mamdani more much-needed allies at the state level, where his agenda may ultimately sink or swim.

Go East

Election Day was more of a mixed bag for socialists in Massachusetts. DSA-endorsed Ayah Al-Zubi won the third-most first-place votes out of nineteen candidates in the Cambridge city council’s ranked-choice system, becoming one of only two victorious challengers in what was otherwise a good night for incumbents. Al-Zubi championed municipally owned social housing as a solution to the affordability crisis and was praised by vice mayor and top city council vote-getter Marc McGovern for her grassroots, door-knocking-focused campaign.

Also winning in Cambridge was Boston DSA–backed Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, who won his third term to the city council, though he didn’t receive the national DSA endorsement. Sobrinho-Wheeler was unseated from the council in 2021 but won back a seat in 2023 after the city’s then vice mayor decided not to seek a fourth term. He has sponsored ordinances to end broker fees, build bike lanes, and, most recently, strengthen Cambridge’s sanctuary city status in Donald Trump’s second term.

But in Somerville, where socialists have been a fixture on the thirteen-member city council since first winning two seats in 2017, the Left suffered disappointment, as two-term socialist city councilor Willie Burnley Jr was beaten in the mayor’s race by 11 points despite an endorsement from Senator Ed Markey. Burnley, who has credited both Jacobin magazine and his own financial struggles with converting him to socialism, had looked to replicate Mamdani’s approach in the ultraliberal Massachusetts, after having been involved in successful legislative efforts to forgive medical debt and expand tenant rights.

Burnley first won election in 2021, as part of a push in Somerville to win the country’s first socialist city council majority that resulted in four seats. That number has since been reduced to three, after socialist councilor Charlotte Kelly chose in 2023 to not seek reelection in favor of organizing outside of elected office. In another letdown for socialists, Boston DSA–endorsed candidate Marcos Candido narrowly lost his bid for a city council seat in the city of Lowell to an incumbent he had beaten in a preliminary race months earlier.

In brighter news for the Left, Somerville residents also approved a ballot measure divesting the city from Israel. Burnley’s victorious opponent has not endorsed the measure though, making its future uncertain.

Socialists made gains elsewhere onf the east coast. In the DC metro area, Frankie Fritz unseated a thirty-four-year incumbent on the Greenbelt city council in a high-turnout election that saw them win more votes than three incumbents. In the small North Carolina town of Carrboro, Danny Nowell won reelection to a second term on the town council, pointing to his role in building the town’s first municipal building in decades — a library — and promising to rewrite the town’s Land Use Ordinance to encourage affordable housing and environmentally friendly construction.

Still to be decided are Joel Brooks’s and Jake Ephros’s bids for Jersey City council; their races have gone to runoffs. Endorsed by progressive housing policy expert and winning state assembly candidate Katie Brennan, Brooks led the vote in his ward, while Ephros narrowly trails the top vote-getter in his, a social services lawyer whose father was a three-term mayor of the city.

Slow and Steady

This past Tuesday continues a consistent trend over the past five to ten years: of socialist candidates winning elections around the country, and slowly but surely building up their ranks in elected office. The major difference is that in previous years, these downballot victories have often been paired with high-profile defeats. In this case, they have, for a change, come with what is arguably the biggest election victory the socialist Left has ever had in the form of Mamdani’s New York mayoral win.

Mamdani’s campaign served as an explicit model for many of these downballot socialist campaigns, not just in terms of their emphasis on furious door-knocking and other volunteer efforts but also in their laser focus on affordability, particularly housing issues. Their success suggests that Mamdani’s campaign is pointing the way for socialists in the era of skyrocketing housing costs and a cost-of-living crisis.