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.
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.
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.