The election of Kshama Sawant, an economics professor and member of the Trotskyist group Socialist Alternative, to the Seattle City Council has drawn significant headlines recently. But in Minneapolis, another Socialist Alternative city council candidate, Ty Moore, also came close to victory.

Moore won 42 percent of the vote in Minneapolis’s Ward 9, just 229 votes behind Democrat Alondra Cano, who netted 47 percent of the votes in a six-way ranked choice election. For the past decade, Moore has been a major figure in the Minneapolis activist scene, organizing young people against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and military recruitment in schools, and more recently helping to found Occupy Homes MN, one of the most successful groups to emerge directly out of the Occupy movement.

Moore was interviewed for Jacobin by Anthony Rizutto, a union researcher in Washington, DC.