Look, I used to live in Kshama Sawant's district. I can definitely believe that her getting elected was a bit of the case of the dog catching the car and not knowing what to do with it; that's definitely an aspect of it.
But what I remember more is the constant attempts to ratfuck her by the local establishment from the constant suspiciously well-funded opponents, the direct changing of election laws1, and the attempts to impeach her for completely bullshit reasons and force her to run in special out of band elections.
I also remember the several other candidates inspired to run by her success that failed to win because it turns out that for all the talk that Seattle liberals do, they are still liberals at heart.
I remember her being right there at protests and the whole excuse of one of her impeachments being leading people to city hall during the BLM protests.
If your understanding of the situation is whatever dribbled out to the national press through our own cop loving press that feared her from day one, I can see you concluding it was a bad strategy.
But I lived here, and I don't think it was, especially when I consider how hard they had to fight her to burn up all those resources. Sawant did what all liberals cluck at leftists to do instead of "upsetting" violent protest, and only got hatred from the mainstream in response.
Like, I am sorry for breaking my silence on this but while I was not always deep into the full events that unfolded around me, I was present and active for most of it. The actions of the Seattle establishment around Sawant and other challengers to the status quo here was one of the reasons I've given up on electoralism.
I refuse to let it just become "silly leftist didn't pick the right strategy" when that's not what this was a case of in my opinion. At least only in the sense that it was a strategy built on assuming fairness from the establishment.
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looking things up and I think I really missed the timeline of when some of these things happened. The election law change I complained about happened before her first successful election and was actually part of how she managed to win because of her overwhelming support in her district. But the impeachment and full court press against her? That still came after. I still feel my opinions and experiences are warranted here even with my historical error.