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Transcript:

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

The biggest star on the U.S. men’s national soccer team has yet to play a full game at this year’s FIFA World Cup. Yet maybe no one is more important to the Americans’ ambitions of a deep run than their star, Christian Pulisic. That run could start tonight with their round of 32 game against Bosnia and Herzegovina. NPR’s Becky Sullivan has this story.

BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Christian Pulisic doesn’t love the media. By nature, he is a quiet, shy guy. But late last week, he was in a great mood for seemingly the first time this World Cup.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

CHRISTIAN PULISIC: Can I guess the first question?

(LAUGHTER)

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: You have an answer for it?

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Yes.

(LAUGHTER)

PULISIC: I’m just kidding. Go ahead.

SULLIVAN: Finally, he was back to practicing with the team after he’d been pulled at halftime of the Americans’ first game against Paraguay, when a defender kicked him hard in the calf. Then he’d had to miss the whole second game, too. Now every reporter wanted to know, was he good to go?

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PULISIC: Yeah. I’m feeling good. Yeah, I’ve obviously joined with the team in the last few days. So I’m feeling good, positive going into it. And hopefully I’ll be able to play a part in tomorrow.

SULLIVAN: Pulisic is used to all this fuss by now, all this attention to every little injury – well, to everything he does, really. For more than a decade, his slender shoulders have carried the weight of all of America’s soccer hopes and dreams. That excitement heard here on Fox back in 2016.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED SPORTSCASTER: Christian Pulisic, the youngest American in the modern era of the U.S. national team to score a goal, 17 years of age.

SULLIVAN: Not every promising teenager pans out. But for every daydream that U.S. soccer might’ve had about him, Pulisic has met it and more. At 27, he’s already scored more goals than any American before him in the big five European leagues. And he’s the first American to play in and win a Champions League final and a Super League final. Pretty much the only thing left to do is accomplish some World Cup glory.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

TYLER ADAMS: I can’t even imagine the weight that’s on his shoulders in terms of, from such a young age, he was, like, the hope of American soccer.

SULLIVAN: Here’s his longtime friend and teammate, midfielder Tyler Adams.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ADAMS: I mean, to step into a World Cup cycle going into 2018 and be the best player on the field at 17 years old, and be the person that they rely on, it’s been since then that the team has relied on him. I think now we have weapons around him to kind of relieve that. But he’s a star.

SULLIVAN: Pulisic is all grown up now. His baby-faced cheeks have a five-o’clock shadow. His left arm has a sleeve of tattoos. And he’s grown up on the field, too, says Marcelo Balboa, who captained the national team in the 1990s. For years when Pulisic was the only serious threat on the team, opponents would just swarm him and get really physical with him.

MARCELO BALBOA: At the end of the day, they all go kick him. They all take him down. They figure if they can slow down Christian, they can slow down the U.S. national team.

SULLIVAN: But now almost every U.S. starter has a key role on a team in a top European league. In other words, Pulisic no longer has to do it all himself. Balboa says that lets him play more calmly and freely.

BALBOA: It’s been fun to watch him mature on the emotional side, not get so emotional when he’s getting kicked. He gets up, he moves on, he keeps playing. And I think that’s a huge part of the game.

SULLIVAN: Recently, Pulisic was asked whether he felt that there was less weight on him. He stopped to think.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PULISIC: I don’t really know, to be honest. I don’t feel a difference in weight. I’m not sure – maybe less. I mean, I just feel like there’s so many good players around me. I genuinely don’t feel like I have to do anything on my own.

SULLIVAN: Sure enough, the national team qualified for the knockout stage mostly without him. They beat Paraguay with Pulisic only playing the first half, then they beat Australia with him on the bench. Now Pulisic says he’s ready for a full game. And the timing couldn’t be better. The last time the U.S. played in the World Cup knockout round four years ago, Pulisic had the assist on the Americans’ only goal in a loss to the Netherlands. Now, these four years later, he says he and the rest of his teammates are ready for a different ending.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PULISIC: As I’ve gotten older – like, your first time, you feel those nerves even more and it can be that much more difficult. And when you’ve been there before, you say, OK, I can handle this.

SULLIVAN: A win would mark the first knockout round win for the U.S. men since 2002. That would be a good start for Pulisic’s World Cup legacy, and many hope not the end.

Becky Sullivan, NPR News, Santa Clara, California.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

Transcript:

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

As America turns 250, historian Megan Kate Nelson has turned her attention to people typically overlooked in the story of the western frontier. At a recent public event in Crested Butte, she spoke to Colorado Public Radio’s Ryan Warner.

RYAN WARNER, BYLINE: Nelson’s suggested revisionist history is the history we learned in the first place.

MEGAN KATE NELSON: It’s basically the narrative of white Easterners moving westward in covered wagons with a nuclear family in tow, engaging with a series of challenges – Indigenous peoples, nature sometimes, disease – and overcoming all of those challenges, and that they are the ideal Americans.

WARNER: In “The Westerners,” Nelson profiles people who don’t fit that mold – pioneer Polly Bemis, trafficked from China to Idaho; 19th century Santa Fe saloon owner Maria Gertrudis Barcelo; and Sacagawea.

NELSON: I read through the Lewis and Clark journals. They mention her more than 150 times. And she is always doing something or saying something – digging for vegetables. She was bringing botanical specimens to Clark and explaining what they were. My favorite part – when they arrive on the western coast, they set up camp a couple miles away from the ocean, and she yells at William Clark – you are going to take me to go see the ocean. I did not travel all…

WARNER: Yeah.

NELSON: …This way not to see the ocean.

WARNER: Nelson says it’s more important than ever to elevate a fuller picture of the frontier.

NELSON: This erasure of history is really common with authoritarian regimes. They want one version of history, and the frontier myth helps with that. There’s only one white pioneer. There’s only one kind of story of American greatness.

WARNER: Two and a half centuries in, a chance to ask, what stories do we carry forward? For NPR News, I’m Ryan Warner in Crested Butte, Colorado.

(SOUNDBITE OF RHIANNON GIDDENS’ “MOUNTAIN BANJO”)

Transcript:

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

After releasing several blockbuster opinions this week, the Supreme Court has packed up for the summer. This term gave us major decisions where the current court’s conservative supermajority effectively further expanded the powers of the U.S. president. It also rejected some of President Trump’s signature policies and actions. Let’s recap that term with NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg, as well as legal expert Sarah Isgur of SCOTUSblog and Melissa Murray of NYU Law School. Hi to all of you.

NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Hi.

SARAH ISGUR: Hello.

MELISSA MURRAY: Hi.

SUMMERS: Nina, I want to start with you if we can. Can you briefly remind us of some of the big highlights of this term?

TOTENBERG: Well, the Supreme Court ended the term with cataclysmic decisions that included decisions on birthright citizenship. It got rid of, for all practical purposes, what’s left of the Voting Rights Act. It dramatically altered the structure of regulatory agencies. It eliminated temporary protective status for immigrants legally in the U.S. or at least allowed the president to do it without any court review, and much more.

SUMMERS: Yeah. There’s a lot to talk about. I mean, you’ve covered the court for so many years. So I do want to know – was there anything that surprised you?

TOTENBERG: I really was kind of surprised by the closeness of the birthright citizenship case because no judge in a century has ruled that birthright citizenship is unconstitutional, and for all practical purposes, a 5 to 4 vote. All the people that I talked to when I was doing my work yesterday said the thing that the president won from this is that – even though he technically lost on the issue – what he won was bringing a previously fringe theory into the mainstream.

SUMMERS: Sarah Isgur, I want to bring you in here, too. Do you agree with that take?

ISGUR: No. So the question was whether Donald Trump’s executive order changing birthright citizenship would go into effect, and that was a 6-3 decision against President Trump. The question of if someone’s here on a tourist visa for less than a month, has no intention of staying, has a child and has – you know, leaves with that child after a month, could Congress pass a law saying that they don’t automatically get birthright citizenship? Maybe. And there were four votes for that maybe. I don’t think that is nearly the massive landslide of legal thinking that others are saying it is.

SUMMERS: Melissa Murray, how about you?

MURRAY: So I think Sarah may overstate the case here. I, too, was surprised by the closeness of the decision. I was very surprised by Justice Kavanaugh writing a separate writing that was both a concurrence and a dissent in which he effectively joined the dissenters in the view that birthright citizenship can be rescinded, and he then provided a roadmap for Congress to effectively do that. And I think Nina is exactly right – this was a bedrock principle, and now it is unsettled and uncertain.

SUMMERS: As I’ve been following some of the major decisions in this term, I noticed that a number of them had to do with issues of race, like birthright citizenship, as we were just discussing. There was, of course, redistricting and temporary protected status. Melissa, I want to start with you here, but everyone else, feel free to chime in. How much of a role did race play in this term? How much of a focus was it?

MURRAY: It’s a good question. Race is something that this court only sees when it wants to see it. So in the voting rights cases, for example, Justice Alito effectively wrote that the possibility of drawing districts where minorities have the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice – you can’t do that. Like, to even consider race in that circumstance would be unlawful. And, you know, I think what he misses there in sort of prioritizing the authority of states to draw districts for partisan advantage is the way in which race and partisan advantage often run together, particularly in the South where African American voters are often Democrats. And again, you saw Justice Alito in the TPS case refusing to see race in the president’s invective against Haitian nationals. I mean, there was a lot of racial invective here, and this court refused to take account of it, something that Justice Kagan noted in her dissent.

SUMMERS: Sarah, I’d like to bring you in here if you have thoughts.

ISGUR: I think there’s an interesting and long-running debate within the Supreme Court about exactly what the purpose of the 14th Amendment was, and I think you’re seeing that play out in a lot of these cases. Was the 14th Amendment simply a reset, a refounding of America to stop racial discrimination moving forward? Or was the 14th Amendment meant to be remedial – not just to stop racial discrimination, but to actually allow for racial preferences or help on the basis of race moving forward? And that clash of visions for the 14th Amendment isn’t going to be resolved in any given case. It’s going to be resolved over the course of years and over the course of history.

SUMMERS: Nina, there are some other opinions I want to ask you about. We saw the court move to expand the president’s power by giving him the ability to fire anyone he wants to at independent agencies while, at the same time, the court said that the Fed was different. How should we think about this?

TOTENBERG: Because the court basically all but directed the lower court to say leave Lisa Cook in place. You can’t fuss with the Fed.

SUMMERS: And that’s the Fed governor that the president…

TOTENBERG: Yeah.

SUMMERS: …Tried to fire.

TOTENBERG: Right. You can’t fire somebody from the Federal Reserve Board. That’s going too far. What isn’t going too far, however, is that you can fire all the heads of so-called independent agencies. And it’s not just the heads – that it goes all the way down the line, possibly even to the level of secretaries. And it gives him enormous executive power. And when you put that together with what the court did two years ago in the immunity case, giving then-former President Donald Trump almost complete immunity from prosecution for anything he did as an official act while in Congress, when you put those two things together, you have a whopping, powerful executive branch.

ISGUR: Which is sort of funny because there’s two ways to look at this, right? On the one hand, they are saying that the president is going to be politically accountable for everything that happens in the executive branch. On the other hand, you look at cases like the tariffs decision, federalizing the National Guard or all the way back to, you know, Biden’s student loan debt forgiveness or the Clean Power Plan case, and they are actually shrinking the powers of the presidency, versus Congress, and saying presidents cannot look back to vague statutes to basically legislate themselves into policy and legislative, you know, solutions that they happen to want. You have to have Congress actually in the game here and passing real laws.

TOTENBERG: And a Congress that is very much like – at least Republicans view themselves – almost as part of a parliamentary system. But I did want to say one thing about the tariffs case…

SUMMERS: Yeah.

TOTENBERG: …And the birthright case. Both cases, which were losses for Trump, involve money. And business wants birthright citizenship. It needs more people in this country. We are not replacing ourself in population, and there are lots of very skilled people and some unskilled people that they want in this country. Those two cases, I think, are illustrative.”The big losses,” quote-unquote, for the president, in fact, are big wins for the Chamber of Commerce.

MURRAY: I think Nina’s right. There is a corporate bent to this court. I don’t know if I’d just call it about money. In Slaughter – the upshot of Slaughter is that we’re going to have less regulation of corporate interests and industries because we are going to have agencies that are aligned with the president’s priorities. And this president, in particular, prioritizes corporations. I think the distinction between Slaughter and Cook can be drawn by the fact that corporate interests, even as they disdain regulation, they’re very much in favor of stable, global economies and stable markets, and that is what Federal Reserve policy is supposed to do. And so they don’t want anyone realigning the Fed. And I think that also helps us to understand why the court ruled in the way that it did on tariffs. And so all three of those cases, I think, are places where what unites them is a through line that is about a court that is increasingly corporatist in its outlook.

SUMMERS: Just big picture – as we think about it, as someone on the outside looking in – one thing I find myself wondering is just how functional this court actually is. I want to hear you all weigh in on this one. Nina, I’ll start with you.

TOTENBERG: Well, this is a court that is composed of people who rather clearly do not like each other very much. And that, of course, makes it more difficult to shepherd everybody and get stuff done and have the court speak with a single voice in the majority. That’s much more difficult for the chief justice, and that’s part of his job.

SUMMERS: Sarah and Melissa, what do you think?

ISGUR: I still think this is the last branch doing its job in our constitutional order. We have a president that is trying to do way too much – this president, the last president, the president before that. And we have a Congress that has completely delegated all of its responsibilities away. And so the court, as a counter majoritarian branch, is trying to, you know, use the little paddles to try to get the separation of powers working again so that Congress will actually function. You know, 22% of the cases were 6-3 along ideological lines. Forty-two percent were unanimous decisions. And I think, for the most part, that’s a court that is functioning the way it is supposed to function, even if we disagree with some of the decisions that they may make.

MURRAY: So I will say that when you ask if the court is functioning, do you mean the court, or do you mean the courts? I do think the lower federal courts have done a great job in reading the Constitution, upholding the rule of law and really acting as a bulwark against this administration’s most excessive impulses. The Supreme Court, I think, has done a lot this year, and I don’t think I would call it functional. You know, there was just reporting from ProPublica about the way in which the court is doing many of its rulings, maybe the majority of its rulings, on the shadow docket, on the interim docket, where there is very little transparency, very little briefing and very little explanation to the public. And so I don’t dispute the court being a counter majoritarian branch. But, right now, we have a Congress that’s not really working, a president that’s being very muscular, and we have a court that sometimes gets in the game and sometimes doesn’t.

TOTENBERG: I just want to say one last thing. In announcing the last decision of the term – the birthright case – it was fascinating to me that Chief Justice Roberts went out of his way to sort of placate the executive branch and the president in saying, this is not a repudiation of them. I had never seen that sort of layup of an opinion announcement before. And I think he knew that he was gutting the president’s most important and muscular immigration policy, and he didn’t want blowback from the president on television, yelling his head off at them, like they got in the tariff case.

SUMMERS: That was NPR’s Nina Totenberg, here with Melissa Murray and Sarah Isgur. Thank you, everyone.

TOTENBERG: Thank you.

MURRAY: Thank you.

ISGUR: Thanks so much.

(SOUNDBITE OF MARISA ANDERSON’S “HESITATION THEME AND VARIATION BLUES”)

Transcript:

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

They are canary yellow, shaped like pills and guaranteed to prompt a giggle from most kids.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PIERRE COFFIN: (As The Minions, shouting).

DETROW: Minions. Critic Bob Mondello says their seventh big-screen adventure, “Minions & Monsters,” is arguably their best yet.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: We’d seen the little guys serving villains like Tyrannosaurus rex.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “MINIONS”)

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character, roaring).

COFFIN: (As The Minions, shouting).

MONDELLO: So we knew they’d been around since the dawn of time. Here we discovered they were also around at the dawn of cinema.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “MINIONS AND MONSTERS”)

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) In Hollywood, the new stars of the silver screen changed the face of the motion picture industry forever.

MONDELLO: Who knew? But there they are, Zelig-like in 1890s silent classics, apparently unnoticed until the 1920s when they accidentally caused a train wreck in a Western film shoot.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “MINIONS AND MONSTERS”)

COFFIN: (As The Minions) Toot, toot.

MONDELLO: The director is furious. But when his bosses at the studio think the wreckage is comic gold, he has a change of heart.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “MINIONS AND MONSTERS”)

CHRISTOPH WALTZ: (As Max) Look, Minions, my name is Max.

COFFIN: (As The Minions) Hello, Max.

WALTZ: (As Max) I’m so sorry about earlier. So I would like to work with you. We should make movies.

COFFIN: (As The Minions) Movies? Movies? Movies?

MONDELLO: Turns out, they’re naturals.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “MINIONS AND MONSTERS”)

WALTZ: (As Max) OK, action.

MONDELLO: They give slapstick ballet-like grace. Their timing is genius. There’s art to every crack fall, and a touch of chaos, of course.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “MINIONS AND MONSTERS”)

COFFIN: (As The Minions, speaking gibberish).

WALTZ: (As Max) That was perfect.

MONDELLO: All of which makes them the toast of silent Hollywood. They live in a grand mansion, appear on screen with Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, inspire fashion fads, until the advent of sound.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “MINIONS AND MONSTERS”)

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Oh, Humphrey.

WALTZ: (As The Minions) Pinata, carbonara, lasagna, (smooching).

MONDELLO: Dialogue, sadly, does not play to Minions’ strengths. So they’re at a loss until they come up with a comeback plan.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “MINIONS AND MONSTERS”)

WALTZ: (As Max) You wrote a monster movie?

COFFIN: (As The Minions, speaking gibberish).

WALTZ: (As Max) What are you going to use for your monster?

COFFIN: (As The Minions, blowing raspberry).

MONDELLO: A book of spells they saved from an evil wizard master allows them to conjure actual monsters.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “MINIONS AND MONSTERS”)

COFFIN: (As The Minions, speaking gibberish).

MONDELLO: And for the second half of the film, we’re in more conventional Minions territory. But that first half, a flat-out love letter to old Hollywood, is enough fun that writer and director and original creator and voice of all the Minions, Pierre Coffin, can afford to backslide.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “MINIONS AND MONSTERS”)

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Now in Minion Vision.

MONDELLO: Homages to B movies and film classics – a spin with Chaplin through the gears of “Modern Times,” a romance with a robot from “Day The Earth Stood Still,” not to mention an encounter with the shark straight out of “Jaws.”

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “MINIONS AND MONSTERS”)

COFFIN: (As The Minions, shouting).

MONDELLO: All goofy enough to delight kids who won’t get the references and sophisticated enough to please cinephiles who will, which is a lovely change. The Minions have been coasting on audience goodwill for a few movies now. Here, filmmaker Coffin has an actual idea, and a smart one, since these little agents of chaos have always been throwbacks to the slapstick glories that first made audiences fall for movies.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “MINIONS AND MONSTERS”)

COFFIN: (As The Minions, speaking gibberish).

MONDELLO: Weird to think that if the kids seeing “Minions & Monsters” now someday watch “Citizen Kane” or “Maltese Falcon” or “Safety Last!” they might flash briefly on little yellow guys in overalls. But, hey, as long as Tinseltown’s dream factory is still conjuring dreams, right? I’m Bob Mondello.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “ABRACADABRA”)

STEVE MILLER BAND: (Singing) Abra, abracadabra. Abracadabra. Every time you call my name, I heat up like a burning flame. Burning flame full of desire. Kiss me, baby, let the fire get higher, yeah.

Transcript:

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

The U.S. and Iran are trying to salvage a 60-day ceasefire with government officials blaming each other for violations, and nobody knows how long this war will last. The Indicator’s Darian Woods and Wailin Wong explain how battles from the past can give insight into how these kind of conflicts can get drawn out.

WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: This year’s war with Iran has cost the U.S. at least $132 billion. It’s also resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. service members, more than 3,400 Iranians, and dozens elsewhere in the Middle East.

DARIAN WOODS, BYLINE: Chris Blattman is an economist and political scientist at the University of Chicago who studies the roots of war and conflict. Chris is reluctant to make too many statements on the war in Iran. You know, we’re still in the middle of it. Who knows what’s going to happen? But he says most conflicts don’t last longer than a brief flare up.

CHRIS BLATTMAN: I think the average war in the last 200 years has been less than two months long, and so this fits that pattern.

WONG: So that raises a question. What went wrong in wars like Ukraine and Gaza?

BLATTMAN: If we start from the idea that wars are horrendously costly, then there has to be something that gives one side or the other an incentive, however temporary, to decide to turn to violence.

WOODS: Chris says the first reason is when leaders don’t have the incentives to work in the best interests of their country. Take Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

BLATTMAN: Putin wasn’t paying the costs of this war directly.

WONG: Democracies like the U.S. aren’t immune. President Trump’s sons, for example, own part of a drone manufacturing company. They might profit from war, even if it’s costly for the country.

WOODS: The second explanation Chris has for violence is something a little more psychological.

BLATTMAN: Values and ideals, things that only war can deliver – the extermination of an ideology or an ethnic group that you loathe – they’re not irrational. They’re just enduring preferences. I think of these as sort of intangible incentives.

WOODS: Reason No. 3, Chris says, is uncertainty.

BLATTMAN: How strong is Iran? How powerful are my forces? How likely is a decapitation event to create regime change? All of these things just have tremendous uncertainty.

WONG: Chris says you can think of countries as playing a game of poker. Sometimes they’re bluffing. Sometimes they’re not. And when countries misjudge others, that’s when long wars can start.

WOODS: The Trump administration said the war in Iran would be just a, quote, “short excursion.” That’s proven not to be the case.

WONG: Chris’ fourth reason for violence is commitment problems.

BLATTMAN: The classic commitment problem is this idea of a rising power facing a weakening one. If you’re a weakening power and you look forward to the day when that rising power is going to dominate you, you have a choice. Am I going to take you out now and prevent your rise and maintain my dominance? Or do I wait until the day when you might dominate me?

WOODS: Chris’ fifth and final reason for why we fight is misperceptions. Again, Chris brings up the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

BLATTMAN: Most people say that Putin was overconfident, either because of his psychological bias or because he was getting bad information.

WOODS: It’s all a bit gloomy, but Chris’ somewhat optimistic take, though, is that usually the high cost of war reduces the chance of all-out violence. Darian Woods.

WONG: Wailin Wong, NPR News.

Transcript:

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

Democratic socialists have been on a hot streak lately. Last week, a pair of democratic socialists won competitive primary matchups in New York, another one won in Philadelphia back in May, and on Tuesday, in Denver, it happened again.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MELAT KIROS: We won tonight, but this is about something so much bigger than this moment, than one moment. This is a movement.

(CHEERING)

SUMMERS: That is 29-year-old Melat Kiros, who unseated a 30-year incumbent Democrat. NPR political reporter Elena Moore has been following all this and is with us now. Hi.

ELENA MOORE, BYLINE: Hey.

SUMMERS: So, Elena, break it down for us. What makes a democratic socialist different from a progressive Democrat?

MOORE: Yeah. Well, first off, the Democratic Party is a registered political party, and the Democratic Socialists of America is not. It’s a membership organization, and that’s why you see DSA-endorsed candidates running as Democrats. Second, a lot of Democrats are running on affordability issues and railing against billionaires, but DSA-backed candidates are taking it a step further, Juana. They’re more likely to adopt an explicitly anticapitalist message and, more than that, an antipolitical establishment message. They’re also not shying away from more polarizing issues – pushing for ICE to be abolished and for the U.S. to stop sending military aid to Israel.

SUMMERS: All right. Let’s talk about what happened last night in Denver. How was that ideological difference on display?

MOORE: Yeah. Well, Kiros challenged Diana DeGette, who, to be clear, is far from a moderate and has a lengthy progressive record. But like many candidates this cycle, Kiros framed her bid around the need for a new type of politics. She swore off donations from corporate PACs and pro-Israel lobbying groups and criticized DeGette for accepting those same kind of donations in the past.

SUMMERS: So, Elena, what is it about this moment that’s making this message really resonate with Democratic voters?

MOORE: Well, we know economic concerns are paramount for voters and that many feel dissatisfied with their current political options. And some of the politicians who have been speaking most effectively to those issues are democratic socialists, from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. DSA leaders argue that all of these factors are what is making this movement so popular right now.

SUMMERS: To what extent, though, are there political drawbacks for Democrats in embracing DSA?

MOORE: Yeah. Well, some Democrats say it gives Republicans more reasons to paint the party as extreme and worry it could turn off voters in some key general election matchups that will determine control of Congress. Matt Bennett is a cofounder of the centrist think tank Third Way.

MATT BENNETT: Of course it’s possible to run as a left-leaning populace without adopting the maximalism of the extremes. But it is very hard for Democrats now to distinguish themselves.

MOORE: Because, he says, Republicans are going to tie those two things together. And sure enough, Juana, we have seen and are seeing that happen.

SUMMERS: Right. And if the Republican Party is already doing that, what is the political calculus for Democrats moving forward?

MOORE: Yeah. It’s tricky because DSA candidates have obviously tapped into a powerful feeling among voters, but these high-profile wins are concentrated in super-blue cities, and that democratic socialist message may just not resonate everywhere. In some races, we have seen Democrats try to toe the line. I’m thinking about places like Michigan, Maine, Texas, where candidates are campaigning on affordability issues without the DSA label. So it might come down to which approach resonates more. You know, Republicans have a successful history of painting Democrats as too extreme, but some voters might be so frustrated with the current state of politics that they’re willing to look past that.

SUMMERS: NPR political reporter Elena Moore, thank you.

MOORE: Thanks.