In just the past two weeks, four insurgent left-wing candidates - including three socialists - have won Democratic congressional primaries. The latest victor, 29-year-old Melat Kiros, defeated 15-term incumbent Diana DeGette Tuesday night.
In Ohio, the Trumbull County Historical Society had ambitious plans for local celebrations of the United States' 250th anniversary. But they encountered a major obstacle thanks to cuts that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) carried out earlier in President Donald Trump's second term. And on top of that, according to NOTUS reporter Anna Kramer, the president redirected Congress-approved funds from America 250 activities to "toward Trump's Freedom 250 pet projects.""While America 250 is now asking Congress for more money to fill a funding shortfall," Kramer explains in NOTUS, "Congress has already responded to last year's DOGE cuts by funding state humanities councils at their normal levels for the 2026 fiscal year. The Trump administration just hasn't dispersed those funds. As of June, the administration has only given the councils less than half of what Congress appropriated — and told them not to expect the rest, council leaders told NOTUS."Kramer adds, "Now, with the 250th anniversary just days away, the councils have been unable to fund anniversary projects. The Federation of State Humanities Councils, after a year of litigation against the Trump administration, just asked a federal judge in Oregon to declare that Trump is in violation of basic constitutional separation of powers rules by refusing to fully distribute what Congress intended."Trump, according to Kramer, "redirected tens of millions of dollars from the DOGE cuts toward" his "plans for a triumphal arch and a statuary garden of 'American heroes' in Washington D.C.""In the end," Kramer reports, "Trump's focus on the nation's landmark birthday made it harder for local groups across the country to plan their own celebratory projects."Meghan Reed, executive director of the Trumbull County Historical Society, is expressing her frustration. Reed told NOTUS, "There's certainly things that we could have done for America 250 if the funding was available. That just didn't work out how we thought it could have."Interviewed by NOTUS, Jessica Cyders — executive director of the Southeast Ohio History Center — said of the funding cuts, "It means that we are not able to do things that are extra, things that are bigger projects. A lot of humanities organizations would have had some incredible projects that none of us have been able to complete."According to Kramer, "local libraries and historical associations across the country" had to "abandon planning for ambitious history and civics initiatives" because the Trump administration "axed federal funding for state and local humanities projects last year."Rebecca Brown Asmo, executive director of Ohio Humanities, told NOTUS, "As the director of Ohio Humanities, I don't take any sort of position about those particular projects. But what I do think is important is that Americans have access to funding and have access to history and humanities experiences in their own communities. And we're missing that as a result of now a second year of this funding being held back. These are taxpayer dollars that are intended to go to local communities — and right now, they're being held back and funneled to projects in Washington D.C."
The primaries on Tuesday in Colorado weren’t a sweeping victory for the Democratic left like last week’s in New York, where three very progressive candidates won, knocking out two incumbent members of Congress along the way. But the defeats of Representative Diana DeGette and Senator Michael Bennet in his gubernatorial bid and the strong challenge to incumbent Senator John Hickenlooper are the latest signs of a shift happening across the country: It’s no longer enough for Democratic politicians to just vote the right way on key issues. The party base is looking for fighters and disrupters—and will cast aside solid politicians who they don’t think will aggressively battle Donald Trump, MAGA, and right-wing billionaires. Unlike New York, where there were three House candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and effectively running as a slate, Colorado’s primaries were more ideologically complicated. Melat Kiros, a democratic socialist who was backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, Senator Bernie Sanders, and other progressive leaders and groups both in Colorado and across the country, fairly easily defeated DeGette, who has represented the Denver area since 1997. Kiros will likely defeat the longtime incumbent by double digits, a result no one would have anticipated a few months ago. State Senator Julie Gonzales, who was not endorsed by the DSA but had the support of many progressive groups in the state, lost to Hickenlooper but received more than 45 percent of the vote, an unusually high number when facing an incumbent senator. Attorney General Phil Weiser won comfortably in the gubernatorial primary over Bennet, who had been considered the heavy front-runner until recently. Weiser isn’t much more liberal than Bennet but positioned himself as more anti-Trump. He hammered Bennet for his votes to confirm several of Trump’s executive branch nominees last year and won the backing of the state’s Indivisible chapter. It’s normal to have multiple candidates seeking an open governorship (incumbent Jared Polis is term-limited), so Weiser’s decision to take on Bennet wasn’t unusual or surprising. But House Democratic incumbents rarely face strong primary challenges, and Democratic senators almost never do. And it’s not as if Hickenlooper or DeGette are Joe Manchin–style centrists. They strongly backed Joe Biden’s agenda and have opposed most of Trump’s. DeGette is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. While neither of them has been a leading critic of Israel, they haven’t been vocally pro-Israel like Representative Dan Goldman, who was defeated last week in New York. So why did DeGette and Hickenlooper get primary challengers, and why were those challenges so popular with voters? How did a man (Bennet) who has voted against nearly all of Trump’s proposals in Washington lose a contest over who would be the most anti-Trump? For the same reasons Mamdani won the Democratic primary in New York last year, Graham Platner won in Maine earlier this year, Abdul El-Sayed has surged in Michigan Senate polls, and other progressive candidates are gaining ground and winning around the country. Democratic voters are mad at party leaders for not defeating Trump in 2024 and then last year having to be coaxed by the base into aggressively opposing him. They are also curious if newer politicians will do a better job than those from the party establishment in fighting MAGA. Those two factors provide an opening for challenges to incumbents and front-runners, even those with fairly liberal voting records.“A big difference in this race is, what’s your approach to the Trump administration? Are you committed to fighting back, standing for our rights? Or, as Sen. Bennet has said, do you want to support some of these Trump administration Cabinet picks because you think maybe it’ll get you a better relationship?” Weiser told Deseret News in a preelection interview. I know there’s a lot of talk about how Democratic voters increasingly like socialism and hate the Israeli government. The left-wing candidates have something of a playbook: Call for Medicare for All and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement; declare what Israel has done in Gaza a genocide; bash the outsize role of billionaires and corporations in American politics. But these primaries are not simply ideological referendums. Many insurgent candidates don’t identify themselves as socialists or even progressives. The Denver DSA chapter is nowhere near as organized and powerful as the one in New York City. The Gaza war isn’t a huge issue in some races that upstarts are winning, such as the Maine primary. I suspect that Kiros (and New York’s Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier) won many voters who aren’t die-hard democratic socialists but rather are traditional Democrats who want to see if a fresh face in Washington might be more effective than the kind of people they’ve been sending to Congress for a long time.
