Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

Since the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016, there's been a wave of leftist activism and organizing across the United States. The Democratic Socialists of America have seen their membership go from approximately 6,000 to nearly 100,000,

and dozens of DSA members have been elected to office around the country,

from city councilors and judges at the local level to congressional representatives like Alexandria

Ocasio-Cortez and Jamal Bowman. It's not completely unprecedented. In the early 1900s, the U.S.

Socialist Party held nearly a thousand elected offices around the country, but it is the greatest

rise in socialist electoral power in this country for a century.

The socialists in office are still a small fraction of the whole.

There are about 500,000 elected officials at the local, state, and federal level in total,

meaning the left has a long way to go to consolidate its power.

But having any meaningful power at all represents a new experience for socialists, and the

ones who now hold office have to figure out how to use the limited resources at their disposal

to advance a left agenda.

To find out more about how leftists have successfully reached elected office and how they're

using those offices, and to figure

out lessons for others who want to follow the same path, I spoke to some of them. I asked them

about their backgrounds, their campaigns, and what it's been like trying to use and increase

their political power. I hope these conversations with DSA elected officials

can be encouraging to those of our listeners

who themselves want to work toward a better world.

Sarah Inamarado is a Pennsylvania state representative for the 21st district, which includes Pittsburgh.

So I wondered if I could maybe start with you just telling me how you ended up running for elected office. How did this come into your life? You know, I was, it was,

...