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Kshama Sawant, a socialist and then-member of the Seattle City Council, holding a press conference at City Hall to propose a “Tax Amazon” payroll tax, Feb. 12, 2020. Credit: Seattle City Council via Creative Commons. (July 20, 2026 / JNS)
Doug Basler, the Republican seeking to unseat Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), said his immediate focus is not on defeating the longtime congressman but on preventing socialist Kshama Sawant from advancing past the Aug.
4 primary. Basler told JNS on Monday that Sawant, a former Seattle City Council member, and Democratic challenger Melissa Chaudhry are “antisemitic.”
“They see Jews as oppressors. They see everything through their Marxist lens,” he said. “You’re either an oppressor or oppressed. They see Israel as an oppressor.”
“Marxists don’t like God,” Basler added. “Marxists want the state to be God, and anything that stands between the state and the people has to be eliminated.
That’s why they don’t like Jewish people and they don’t like Christians.”
Basler, a former senior vice chairman of the King County Republican Party and current vice president of the Eastside Republican Club, has made opposition to socialism a central theme of his campaign. His campaign website includes a section titled “Socialism Revealed” that targets Sawant, who is running as an independent socialist. “It’s actually shocking that Marxists are working with radical Muslims, because they are diametrically opposed to each other,” Basler told JNS.
“They’re willing to work together to defeat America, which is odd, but I guess my enemy’s enemy is my friend.”
Basler also highlighted his support for Israel in a social media post on Monday, writing that “Hamas is a terrorist organization, if possible worse than the Nazis of World War II.”
“What they did on Oct. 7 was one of the most heinous acts since the Nazi death camps,” he wrote . Basler has previously challenged Smith, who has represented Washington’s 9th Congressional District since 1997.
Smith defeated Basler by wide margins in the 2020 and 2022 general elections, receiving 74.1% and 71.6% of the vote, respectively. Sawant has accused both Democratic and Republican leaders of working together to help Basler advance in order to prevent her from reaching the general election. Sawant’s campaign has focused heavily on opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel and calls for an arms embargo. Copy
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Jessica Russak-Hoffman is a reporter for JNS in Seattle.