Welcome to a Friday edition of Progress Report.
Thanks to everyone who tuned into the conversation with future Rep. Melat Kiros on Wednesday — you can watch the whole conversation above or read up on it (and watch some clips) below.
Note: Due to my upcoming open-heart surgery, I’m temporarily offering paid subscriptions at 50% off. Your support means the world!
When the many books and expensive consultant-prompted postmortems are written about the ideological and generational uprising that is currently remaking the Democratic Party, the good ones will pay special attention to what happened in Colorado this summer. The progressive slate nearly ran the table in July, expanding the movement and giving it a beachhead in the Mountain West with upset victories in Congressional and gubernatorial primaries.
The left defied the overwhelming economic and institutional power of the Democratic establishment by harnessing the strength of anti-incumbent furor, grassroots organizing, and a mix of new candidates and experienced politicians. The most remarkable and initially unexpected win belonged to Congressional candidate Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old barista, PhD student, and former lawyer who defeated 15-term-incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette.
A democratic socialist, Kiros was everything DeGette has not been: opposed to corporate money in elections, deeply committed to Medicare for All, vehemently against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, and noteworthy more generally. Her movement — and it really became that — overwhelmed the millions of dollars that political action committees poured into the race in its final weeks, ensuring a nearly 10-point victory.
In the weeks since her win, Kiros has visited DC and campaigned on behalf of other leftist candidates. We spoke with her months before the election and caught up with her this week to learn more about how she pulled off the victory, Democrats’ reaction to her win, and some of the debates that have bubbled up around her and the democratic socialist uprising this summer.
Wither Woke?
We spoke a day after Wisconsin Rep. Francesca Hong unexpectedly fell short in the state’s gubernatorial primary, a result that many pundits have chalked up at least in part to old “woke” tweets that she struggled to explain in interviews down the stretch. Her loss, paired with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent effort to brush aside culture war questions by quipping that “Woke one was crazy,” further fueled a debate among Democrats over the relative electoral strengths and weaknesses of democratic socialism and the issues it champions.
For my part, I wrote last week that I believe that the left got more traction from economic populism than identity-driven issues, at least in swing districts. Kiros is a DSA member and ran as a proud democratic socialist (albeit in a very blue district), so I wanted to know what she made of Hong’s loss and the suggestion that some issues championed by the left might be more appealing to the public than others. Here’s what she said:
When we talk about some of these issues that maybe don’t translate as well in the public sphere — when we talk about the specifics of what “Defund the Police” actually means and we get into the nuance of it, it’s actually extremely popular. It’s also extremely successful when we’re talking about Baltimore or Chicago, where they’ve demonstrated that reinvestment of resources back into the community and into actual crime prevention instead of just policing is wildly successful.
And so the conversation around “Woke 1” has been really difficult and infuriating for me personally as an academic who understands the nuance behind what some of these things are trying to say. But I do think, when we’re talking about organizing the masses, you have to acknowledge when certain terms are just not translating in the way that we were hoping them to.
America has a very romanticized idea of what policing is. They think of law and order and all of the heroic ideas, and that’s not based in any real data, right? We know that policing does not actually do any work to prevent crime. In fact, it exacerbates it more often than not. So it is a difficult space to be in, and I think we’re all trying to figure out how to navigate some of these conversations as well.
I think that the simplest way is to just remember what my job is. And my job is, when we win in November, post-January will be to legislate. Which is actually talking about the specific policies, not getting bogged down in the question of “are you in favor of Defund the Police?” Our job is to just legislate and to talk about actual policies and programs that deliver on relief. So that's usually where I just default to.
The vacuum driving a new antisemitism
Kiros’s long journey to public office began with her opposition to the genocide in Gaza, a stand that cost her a promising legal job in New York and then became a central part of her campaign. The issue was both key to her rise and the source of one of the few hiccups she experienced, as Kiros ran into some criticism over an equivocating response when asked about the antisemitic firebombing at a synagogue in Boulder.
Since her victory, Kiros has worked to mend fences and refine her points; in a recent interview with PBS, pointed out that Democratic reticence to criticize Israel opened a lane for antisemites like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, whose anti-war rhetoric is steeped in Christian nationalism. I asked her to expand on that point, because I’ve noticed it myself — as a Jewish leftist, I should not be finding myself agreeing with Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Here’s her response, which you can also view above; we also discuss her recent conversations with Jewish organizations and community members, undertaken in an attempt to better communicate her position and clear misunderstandings.
I think a point of clarity that I’d want to say at the least is that I think there are a lot of really good people that see Tucker and Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes talking about this and they see it as a change and an opportunity for growth and like we can bring them all the way here. And at the end of the day, my philosophy has always been to believe the best in people. So I don’t want to take away from this idea that maybe there is a world where they genuinely are seeing what’s happening and they are feeling that empathy and that concern for the Palestinian people. So that’s one thing I do want to clarify.
But the reality is that how they’re getting there is from deeply conspiratorial anti-Semitic tropes that we cannot let go unchecked, not just for our commitment to fighting anti-Semitism, [also] for our commitment to the understanding that anti-Semitism never just stops at anti-Semitism. It always devolves into the greater form of fascism, which continues the actual white supremacist, Christian nationalist agenda.
I don’t think we’ve lost the left to them by any means, but I think it’s starting — maybe not with the left per se, but people who are disillusioned with politics generally and maybe don’t actually identify as leftists or right wing. And those are the folks that are actually an opportunity for us to bring in, to talk about how what you’re seeing in Palestine is not because of these ridiculous anti-Semitic tropes. It’s because of this long, long history of U.S. imperialism, of Western imperialism, of our role of extraction and exploitation of vulnerable populations. It is a product of capitalism.
Big, structural change and what’s on the horizon
And, among many other things, I asked Kiros about her biggest priorities when she gets to Congress and which policies she thinks are key to sparking true structural change in Washington DC.
So the way that I’m kind of envisioning it is that we have to have an immediate big win. It has to be the kind of win that we’ve been building towards already for over a decade, and that’s Medicare for All. That has to be something that we sign into law right out of the gate.
And doing that and coupling it with canceling all medical debt and breaking up Big Medicine, legislation that’s already been introduced and can be part of this Health Care for All package, that kind of immediate relief that we can deliver for working families.
Democrats have lost trust because we haven’t delivered for our voters since Obamacare. And Obamacare… I have a lot of complicated feelings about Obamacare. I think a lot of us on the left do. But at the end of the day, it did expand health insurance to tens of millions of Americans who didn’t have it before, including to young adults until 26.
The gratitude that I had for being able to stay on my dad’s health care until I was 26, that’s trust-building. And now we’re seeing that that last fabric of trust that we have, that last piece of goodwill that we’ve had with voters, isn’t even that strong anymore because we’ve lost out on the subsidies that were necessary because Obamacare was still just a Band-Aid to begin with. And so when we think about what it means to rebuild trust, it has to go back to the basics of just doing the job, to legislate for the relief of Americans.
And so when I think about this opportunity that we have for really expansive reforms that are already popular, I think what we've been missing is the political will. By making it clear that 2028 has to be about getting Medicare for All passed, and we can show the immediate goodwill that you earn with voters to be able to do that, we won't have as much fear, I think, from other members to say now we’ve got to expand the court, now we have to get publicly financed elections.
There’s much more to the conversation — watch the whole thing at the top of the newsletter.
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