Bay Area progressive Lateefah Simon had hoped she would be entering Congress to help Kamala Harris pass her presidential agenda. Instead, after a resounding victory Tuesday night in the District 12 House race, she will be a prominent leader of the opposition party in Donald Trump’s second term.
The 47-year-old Simon, a BART board member since 2016, will enter her first congressional term in the wake of the Democratic Party’s disastrous losses in last week’s election. Yet the San Francisco activist’s background in community organizing for young women and racial justice puts her in a familiar position as she fights against what she calls the “hate and division” of the Republican agenda.
“With every bit of blood in my body, I’m going to walk into the Capitol with my colleagues to fight for our dignity; to fight for the most basic of rights that the Trump administration will work to strip away,” Simon said. “The ‘D’ in Democrat, to me, needs to be for deliver.”
Simon will represent California’s most progressive congressional district as she joins Democrats in an increasingly likely House minority. She is well aware that Republicans in the Trump administration and Congress will attempt to sideline Democrats’ priorities — from codifying reproductive rights to reining in gun violence to fighting climate change.
“The incoming freshmen, we are going to be taking on a monumental task of being a voice for disabled people, people of color, for queer folks, for homeless folks, for people who believe in good and all that is right in the world,” Simon said. “We are going to have to win back choice for young women like my daughters.”
Simon’s predecessor and mentor, Rep. Barbara Lee, was part of the Democratic opposition to the last Trump administration and was an outspoken progressive during President George W. Bush’s administration — she cast the only no-vote in the House on a bill enabling the War on Terror following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
District 10 Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, a member of the House Progressive Caucus, said Democrats will be limited in their ability to push their ideas in the upcoming Congress, and that new House members like Simon should focus on learning the ins and outs of Congress.
“I’ve been in the minority with this same dynamic if that ends up being what happens. You’re pretty limited in your role, other than in personal relationships with Republicans,” DeSaulnier said. “There’s not a lot in it for them to cooperate with us.”
Simon believes Democrats need to “shift the narrative” to rebuild the party’s coalition. She said Democrats must be the “party of peace” and put human dignity first, comparing the current challenges to past eras in America where marginalized communities were targeted with violence.
“We just have to look at what we’ve done during times of tyranny and what we must do moving forward,” Simon said. “I come from a legacy in this country when the opposition literally was hanging my uncles and grandfathers. We used faith and strategy and the courts in a larger movement to move forward.”
That larger movement, DeSaulnier said, needs to focus on economic inequality and respecting working-class people. Wages have been stagnant since the 1970s and many traditional working-class jobs have vanished. Addressing these realities will be difficult for Democrats, but it will be necessary moving forward to reorganize, he said.
“The biggest problem in this country is inequality. You can’t have this concentration of wealth and have democracy and a civil society,” DeSaulnier said. “One of the things that we really failed to do was explain what Republicans did the last time they controlled the Presidency. … They gave tax breaks to the 1%, so we didn’t do a good job of explaining what they did.”
DeSaulnier, Simon, and other House progressives’ primary task may not be legislation but redefining the values and policies of the Democratic Party. Simon recalled a West Virginia family she met in the waiting room of a cancer treatment center while her late husband was a patient. The family’s daughter had been diagnosed with cancer, and their insurance company declined further treatment.
“We were all there to save the lives of our loved ones. … So many of us want and need the same things,” Simon said. “The progressive platform that I’m talking about is really the platform for all Americans.”
Simon will fly to Washington, D.C., on Sunday to begin her congressional orientation with fellow freshmen representatives.
“Folks bill me as an activist and organizer, but I am also an institutionalist,” Simon said. “I started my career championing the rights of girls who are being trafficked, girls who are living and working on the streets. So I’m ready to go.”