India Walton Makes the Case for the Socialist Mayor [View all]

The Democratic nominee for mayor of Buffalo is campaigning to turn New York’s second-largest city around with a platform of progressive solutions.


In June, Buffalo mayoral candidate India Walton made national headlines when she became the first socialist major-party nominee of a large U.S city in more than a half a century, defeating four-time incumbent Byron W. Brown in the Democratic primary. With no Republican challenger running in the November general election, that upset made Walton — a 39-year-old single mother of four and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who has never held political office — an overwhelming favorite to lead New York’s second-largest city, and potentially the first woman to assume the mayor’s office in Buffalo.

And she did it without resorting to many of the conventional methods or verbiage used by other progressive candidates in U.S. races. For instance, in her recent Buffalo News op-ed detailing her public safety plans, you won’t find the words “defund” or “abolish” in reference to the police. On her campaign website, she only mentions the police at all by stating that as mayor she would bring “accountability, transparency, and community-centered service to” it. For Walton, urban survival is bigger than the badge.

A registered nurse who also served as the executive director of a local community land trust, Walton bases her approach to public safety on providing resources to help people meet their needs so that crime becomes less of an option. It involves taking police out of homeless outreach and traffic stops, and funding more violence prevention programs, bike and bus lanes, nurses and school guidance counselors. These are long-term fixes for a city that is now enduring bursts of gun violence, but they are what 52% of the city’s Democratic voters chose in June. She told New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg that negative sloganeering such as “defund” and its variants are not in her political upbringing or playbook, though she has proposed “reallocating” $7.5 million from the police budget for jobs and housing programs.

“When people have a vested stake in the success of their own neighborhoods, you see natural reductions in crime, natural increases in educational attainment and natural closure of the racial wealth and homeownership gaps,” Walton told CityLab.

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-18/is-buffalo-ready-to-elect-its-first-socialist-mayor