In the years that followed, I helped found my local Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapter, where I and many other Bernie supporters came together to organize. We gained valuable skills running campaigns like “DSA for Bernie” supporting Bernie’s 2020 presidential campaign, and campaigning for ballot initiatives like Amendment 2 in 2020 that raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Florida. We hosted reading groups and other educational events that deepened our analysis of local and national conditions. Discussions about the history of the labor movement and the importance of rank-and-file labor organizing ultimately led to my decision to leave engineering and become a union public-school teacher.

Following the 2020 election, our DSA chapter began to search for candidates to compete in local elections, and — after a good bit of cajoling from comrades — I agreed to run for St Petersburg City Council in 2021. We built off the organizing lessons learned over the previous few years and set out to run a campaign funded by small-dollar donors and an army of door knockers, like the Bernie campaigns.

We focused on local policy demands that would empower working people like social housing, protecting tenants’ and workers’ rights, and fighting for environmental justice. We built momentum over the course of the campaign and ended with more than 30,000 doors knocked, and over 2,000 individual contributions averaging right around $27 — again, just like Bernie’s campaigns.

We ultimately received over 30,000 votes and defeated a former councilmember in a citywide race. I became the youngest person ever elected to St Petersburg City Council and the first openly socialist elected official in Florida in over a century.

Since getting elected, I’ve worked in collaboration with my DSA chapter, labor unions, and other progressive organizations to enact an agenda that centers the working people of our city. When pandemic housing inflation hit Florida, we fought for rent control, legal aid for tenants, and money for affordable housing projects. Because of our organizing, we won a program that provides legal aid to every tenant in the city that faces eviction, and we spent more money from the American Rescue Plan on affordable housing than any other city in Florida. Since then, we’ve successfully won funding for local initiatives like street safety and public arts, and we’ve put forward resolutions speaking out on national issues like abortion rights and a ceasefire in Gaza.

More recently, in 2024 I took an active role in another DSA member’s campaign for city council. Unfortunately, we came up just a few hundred votes short in the most conservative district in the city, but we learned valuable lessons through the process and trained new leaders in our chapter. Those leaders are now key to our campaign for the city to drop its investor-owned energy utility and move to public power. This summer, we successfully pushed the council to support my proposal to fund a feasibility study for the transition. And this year, I was reelected unopposed after launching another grassroots campaign that knocked on thousands of doors and collected hundreds of donations — more than any other campaign in the city — in just a few short months.

None of this would have happened if not for Bernie’s first presidential campaign. I and so many of the leaders on our organizing campaigns had never contemplated democratic socialist politics before Bernie brought it into the mainstream over a decade ago. Many of DSA’s newest members are too young to remember much of that first campaign, but they often have stories similar to mine about their first exposure to other socialist candidates: like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, or Oliver Larkin in Florida, who all worked on or volunteered for Bernie’s presidential campaigns themselves. It’s clear that the modern democratic socialist movement began on that lakefront in Burlington in 2015.

Much has changed since then. Two terms of Donald Trump as president have led to crisis after crisis, unchecked militarism from both parties has disillusioned large swaths of the electorate, and an explosion in the cost of living has left working people struggling to stay afloat. These factors have driven people to the socialist movement as well, and for those of us who joined thanks to electoral campaigns, recent crises have helped drive home the point that our organizing must go beyond the ballot box.

Still, nothing we do captures the attention of the public like high-profile socialist electoral campaigns. Continuing to elect DSA members to office will be crucial, and we can’t shy away from opportunities at attention-grabbing runs for executive office at the local, state, or even national level. Fortunately, we don’t have to start from scratch; we can begin by looking at the lessons learned during Bernie’s time as mayor of Burlington.

Bernie’s insistence that the world can get better — and that working people are the ones who can make that happen — ignited a movement that gives me hope for the future. His campaign changed my life. In time, I believe the socialist movement that it reinvigorated will change our world.