Across the country, a new layer of socialist candidates is emerging out of student organizing, testing whether the lessons of campus-based activism can be translated into durable political power. From Burlington to Madison, organizers like Marek Broderick, Hannah Shvets, Reese Armstrong, Will O’Dwyer, and now Gronert constitute this rising tide of young democratic socialists stepping into municipal races to represent their base of students and tenants. Gronert identifies with this movement. So much so that he chose to launch his campaign at a Zohran Mamdani election night watch party, linking it directly to the growing wave of socialist municipal campaigns.

University of Wisconsin Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), where Gronert has spent the past several years organizing around housing, labor, and campus politics, has become a local institution within this movement. Now running for city council in a district dominated by University of Wisconsin students, his campaign is rooted in a simple assessment: the city’s progressive image masks a housing system that overwhelmingly serves landlords and developers while leaving tenants with little real recourse. The issues of housing and affordability are central to Student Tribunes, whose politics are shaped in cities where landlord political machines cast students as the source of the housing crisis while extracting rising rents from them.