It would be easy to dismiss Kshama Sawant as a far-left radical with pie-in-the-sky dreams, if not for the fact that she was elected three consecutive times to Seattle’s City Council, narrowly survived a recall campaign, and won victories while in office, such as establishing a $15 an hour minimum wage in 2014 and fighting for a historic tax on large corporations such as Amazon. Now Sawant—who was born in India, immigrated to the United States in 1996, and describes herself as a Marxist and a revolutionary socialist—has tossed her hat in the ring to run for the U.S. Congress seat currently held by fourteen-term incumbent Adam Smith in Washington State’s ninth Congressional district.