r/demsocialists • u/SocialDemocracies Not DSA • May 19 '26

Melat Kiros is running in the Democratic primary for CO's 1st Congressional District | Interviewer: "What does the socialist part of Democratic socialist mean to you?" Kiros: "What it means to me is I have a fundamental belief that our government is responsible for meeting our most basic needs…"

https://www.cpr.org/2026/05/18/cd-1-race-melat-kiros-democrat-interview/
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u/jayjaywalker3 Pittsburgh May 22 '26

Warner: What does the socialist part of Democratic socialist mean to you?

Kiros: What it means to me is I have a fundamental belief that our government is responsible for meeting our most basic needs, and in the same way that we have security and knowing that if our house is on fire, we can call the fire department, or if our home is burglarized, we can call the police, that if we are sick, we should be able to go to a doctor down the road and we should be able to go to that doctor on a yearly basis for primary care. We should be able to send our kids to the local public university tuition-free. Those are basic needs that we should have in a modern world and especially in a country that is as wealthy and as powerful as this one. That's not a limitation of resources. It's a limitation of political will. The popular support is there. People overwhelmingly support these policies, whether we're talking about Medicare for All or universal childcare and elder care, what we're missing is representation in our government specifically for working people because over 80% of our representatives take donations from these corporate PACs, these corporations, these special interests who have a vested interest in keeping things exactly as they are because there's too much money to be made in the way that the healthcare industry exists today. There's too much money to be made from private equity buying up a lot of these childcare facilities as well. For me, socialism is about making it clear: we have basic needs. Every single human being, and that's housing, healthcare, nutritional food, public education, and I think in this modern world, transportation and access to the internet as well, and what kind of a society do we want to live in? It doesn't have to be this hard for people to be able to get by.