By: Eli

Got another one for you! In Knoxville, TN we got a leftist DSA member elected to the City Council, Seema Singh Perez. This is the first time we’ve had a woman of color on City Council (and we have two now! a Black woman was elected in another district) and the first time a South Asian woman has been on City Council. She ran with the City Council Movement, a grassroots movement dedicated to participatory democracy, on a platform of affordable housing, affordable healthcare, and participatory budgeting. Our City Council has been run by real estate developers for a long time, and one of our movement’s primary goals is fighting the gentrification they’ve been pushing.

In an even wilder turn in this story, we also had another candidate running who tied in her primary, Amelia Parker. She’s a badass lawyer and organizer who cofounded Black Lives Matter Knoxville, served as a director for SOCM (a local community organizing group), and has generally spent the last few years pushing Knoxville public officials to do better. City Council decided to break the tie themselves and voted 9-0 for the other candidate, a white dude career politician (surprise!). So we ran Amelia as a write-in candidate and got more than 2,000 write-in votes, or 18% of the vote in a threeway race. Feels like a different kind of win to me.

Now that Seema is elected we’re going to form a cabinet of community members to work with her and hold her accountable to the goals we had during the election, and help her push City Council. This is our first election, and getting a candidate elected is a huge win for a leftist movement in Knoxville. I’m excited to see where we go from here (something I haven’t been able to say about Tennessee politics for a long time).

Our FB has more info and pics of the candidates https://www.facebook.com/citycouncilmovementknoxville/