Kshama Sawant ran for election to Seattle's City Counsel as a SOCIALIST - and today's updated count of votes puts her ahead of a 16-year Democratic incumbent! This is a real shock to the system. Sawant says the surge of late arriving mail in votes now getting counted are coming from poorer people and young voters, and that her taking the lead "is confirming our analysis that there is a deep hunger among people not just in Seattle but everywhere in the United States for a deep political change.” About 90 percent of all votes have now been counted, and the trend in counting since election day has favored Sawant 54 to 46, so it certainly looks like Sawant is going to be a new member of Seattle's City Council.
Seattle voters in the same election also overwhelmingly passed an initiative to change voting for city council from all at-large to all by district except for 2 members who can still run at-large. This change greatly reduces the entry cost and need to raise funds to get a real shot at winning a city counsel seat. This change comes after several previous failed tries to change the at-large voting to district-by-district voting.
These two developments hold great significance, I think, beyond the city of Seattle. They combine with Bill deBlasio winning 75% of the vote for mayor of New York. They combine with five rural counties in Colorado voting to secede from the urban-dominated state of Colorado (this was just a symbolic vote, for sure, but the point is that rural folk are recognizing what changes are coming as demographics start playing into our politics in real time, and they are very worried about this).
When Socialist Sawant's increasing prospect for winning this city council election was diaried on Daily Kos last week, the debate came up of whether this news is appropriate to comment on here, because someone from another political party beat an incumbent Democrat. But Sawant does not really belong to or lead "another political party," she is a Socialist in philosophy, and will vote as a progressive based on that political philosophy. We should view her the same way we view Bernie Sanders, the independent socialist Senator from Vermont - which is that he is a hero, speaking truth to power. Hopefully, when Sawant's win is official, and she takes office, she won't be treated as just a political anomaly in crazy-liberal Seattle, she will inspire other progressives to run for office. I haven't seen any comment in Daily Kos on another big change of poltiical direction that Rachel Maddow did a feature on a few days ago, in the 2013 election for mayors of major cities throughout the U.S., Democrats virtually wiped the slate clean of Republican mayors! Progressive politics is on a Surge at the local level. This can lead to big things at the state and national level by 2016!