In the fall of 2024, Jorge DeFendini, a democratic socialist who had served on Ithaca, New York’s city council as a Cornell undergraduate and was now running again as an alumnus, spotted an opportunity to boost a like-minded politician. A council seat in Ward 5, which includes parts of the university’s campus and is made up of 70 percent students, had just opened up—the incumbent announced he would not be running for reelection. So DeFendini called up Sara Almosawi, who was the co-chair of Cornell’s Young Democratic Socialists of America (the DSA’s youth arm), and after weeks of exploratory discussions a candidate emerged: Hannah Shvets was a sophomore at the university, an Ithacan since 2016, and had helped reestablish Cornell YDSA the year before.
Shvets eked by in the Democratic primary, winning 40 percent of the vote against two more moderate candidates who likely split the vote. But when one of those candidates then ran as an independent in the general election—psychotherapist Gepe Zurenda, who graduated from Cornell in 1988—Shvets drubbed him by nearly 30 points. Her win caught national attention, albeit unfavorably, from The New York Post: “Upstate NY city one-ups Zohran Mamdani by electing Communist student, 20.” (It’s true: Shvets is a member of the Communist Party USA, though she told me, “I identify as a democratic socialist, and my work is most closely aligned with the priorities of the DSA.”)
“We sort of thought we were the first ones to have done this,” Sam Poole, a rising Cornell junior who served as Shvets’s campaign manager, told me. It wasn’t until Poole began having conversations with other chapters that he discovered there were at least three YDSA chapters since 2024 that had successfully put students up for city council seats: Marek Broderick at the University of Vermont in Burlington; Adrian Stancil-Martin at Lawrence University, in Appleton, Wisconsin; and UC Berkeley’s Cecilia Lunaparra. There was, it seemed, a well of student-majority districts across the country that the YDSA might compete in.
Since then, Almosawi, who now serves as a YDSA national co-chair, has fielded interest from dozens of YDSA chapters. Poole authored a resolution to revive the organization’s Youth Electoral Committee to target city council seats, and it passed with 68 percent of the vote at the YDSA national convention on August 1 (the committee was formed in 2024 to focus on student government elections, then went dormant last year). What emerged as a series of uncoordinated, campus-level ambitions has now become, as Almosawi put it, a “very new and unique organizing strategy” for the organization nationally—one that could play an important role in the 2028 presidential election.
In their time in office, these YDSAers have taken on a range of issues, but most frequently tenant protections and housing policy. Lunaparra co-drafted the 2024 Berkeley Tenant Protection and Right to Organize Act and authored an update to Berkeley’s demolition ordinance. Broderick is part of a progressive caucus pushing a property transfer tax to grow Burlington’s housing trust fund and authored legislation that led to the creation of a standardized complaint form allowing students to report dorm issues directly to both their schools and the city. Shvets said she helped the city create a reporting page for tenants to flag poorly maintained apartments and is working with DeFendini to push the state to pass the Rent Emergency Stabilization for Tenants Act. Stancil-Martin, who was elected in April and was the first undergraduate to do so in Appleton, introduced a resolution urging Wisconsin lawmakers to amend state law to allow municipalities to adopt ranked-choice voting; it came up one vote short.
These students have been met with mixed opinions from their older city council peers.
“In a college town like Burlington, a good amount of our small city population is made up of students ... so it’s important they have representation on the council,” said Ben Traverse, a Burlington city council member. He said the “only downside historically of students who have served on the council” is that they often aren’t long-term residents and subsequently create turnover. He noted that one of Broderick’s predecessors seemingly moved out of town during their term.
Ithaca council member Pat Sewell suggested that students aren’t interested in the “unsexy” work of local government. “There’s confusion about the purpose a city alderperson plays that has people running for the wrong reason,” he said. “A couple years ago we had a student come in and create a human rights thing, to make Ithaca a sanctuary city for LGBTQ folks, and that had already been done at the state level and we had bigger things to work on, like we had audits to do.”
Margaret Fabrizio, who represents Ithaca’s Ward 5 with Shvets, was similarly harsh. “I applaud anyone who has the impulse, the stamina, the tough skin that it takes to strive to be in government these days,” Fabrizio said. “I think that’s awesome, but I do think that we need people who have some experience, like more life experience than people who are college students.” She added, “I mean, you’re having people who are voting on a budget who have never even seen a tax bill, let alone paid taxes.”
Meanwhile, YDSA’s Youth Electoral Committee is working to elect more students to city councils around the country. Almosawi and Poole have begun identifying student-majority districts where YDSA might be able to field a candidate, and dozens of YDSA chapters—together representing more than 50 districts—have already expressed interest in doing so. Three campaigns are now being set up for 2027 (though Almosawi and Poole declined to say exactly where). Many YDSAers seemed to have been waiting for permission to pursue such seats, Almosawi said. “A lot of people just don’t realize that this is an option. It’s like oh, ‘We can run,’” she said.
In addition to advising interested chapters, the Youth Electoral Committee will focus on district research, analyzing maps and voter history to identify a minimum of five chapters that might be suited to put up candidates in local elections over the next year. Poole is aiming for districts “in key Democratic primary states for the 2028 presidential election,” the resolution reads. The door knocking and voter registration efforts that Shvets, Broderick, Stancil-Martin, and Lunaparra relied on to get elected, if scaled across the country, could provide serious leg work for a potential DSA candidate—Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps?—in the next presidential election.
“DSA chapters have this whole demographic that [the chapters] don’t necessarily have the skills to reach most effectively,” Poole said. “Young people are a huge part of the Democratic Party’s base, a huge part of DSA’s base, and a huge part of the future of the progressive movement.”
All of the other YDSAers I talked to emphasized the critical role these seats could play in helping YDSA pursue higher offices. “You show people in your town or your city that socialists can get elected and can succeed in government, of meeting the needs of people, and so you’re more likely to believe in that vision when we run people for state legislature and then for Congress,” Broderick said.
These electoral ambitions have been made possible by DSA and YDSA’s increasing membership amid the rise of Zohran Mamdani in New York City. Following years of steady decline, DSA membership increased from around 50,000 in October 2024 to nearly 130,000 as of July 2026. Similarly, over the past year, the number of YDSA chapters has increased from 100 to 150, and membership from 2,000 to 3,600, according to Almosawi.
The YDSAers currently in office have set the precedent for the efforts of the Youth Electoral Committee; as such, it seems critical that they show they can serve their terms in full. Lunaparra, who was the first undergraduate student to win a seat on the Berkeley City Council, is the only one of the four YDSAers in this story who has graduated since being elected. While she’s stuck around to finish her term, she said she’s not running for reelection: “I don’t want to be a politician.”
Shvets, who is on track to graduate from Cornell in May, said she is committed to seeing out her term through December 2029. “There have been Cornell students in the past who have run for office and left partway through their term, or not really shown up to meetings, and it just showed that they didn’t really care about the position or saw it as something to put on their resume,” she said, citing a council member who recently vacated his seat to attend graduate school.
Stancil-Martin, whose term will end before he graduates, said he is “probably not” going to run again since his “goal is to go to graduate school right after undergrad, and I wouldn’t want to leave my seat vacated.” Broderick, who is currently serving his second term, is on a leave of absence from UVM; he did not specify why or whether he’ll be returning to school.
All four say they intend to coordinate with their YDSA chapters to help a fellow YDSAer succeed them. That process has already started in Berkeley, where Lunaparra has endorsed YDSAer Syrak Micael, who will be running for the seat in November. “I wanted a young, passionate socialist,” said Lunaparra, explaining that her district, which has a median age of 19, “deserves a representative as close to their experiences as possible.”
Such continuity is critical to YDSA’s newly ambitious national goals. After all, recruiting new candidates to win seats won’t increase YDSA’s overall footprint if the group can’t retain the seats it has already won.
“All DSA and YDSA candidates see themselves as a part of a political project, and that’s why they’re also invested in leadership development and identifying ‘who is the person who’s going to replace me,’” Almosawi said. “Your job is to replace yourself.”
