On Black Friday 2020, the day Americans traditionally worship at the altar of capitalism following the Thanksgiving holiday, Nomiki Konst is stuck at home with food poisoning—not that the avowed democratic socialist would have been partaking in the festivities anyway.
Unlike many in her millennial cohort, Konst doesn’t just talk the leftist talk— she has, throughout a career that began working on campaigns for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, made strides to the left, including a stint as an investigative reporter at The Young Turks network covering government corruption and a run for New York City public advocate in 2019.
Attacked by centrist Democrats
The path to her current role as a co-founder of the progressive answer to Emily’s List began to take shape, Konst says, when she lost that race. Much of her experience as a young woman running for office for the first time was characterized by ample pressure from New York’s more centrist Democratic Party machine.
“Coming out of that race and just seeing how aggressive [the Democrats] were toward me in attacking me, I just think they were not expecting me to do as well,” she says. “They just did everything they could to go after, smear me, attack me.”
Konst recognizes that the pushback against her Democratic Socialist of America-backed candidacy was “just classic New York politics,” but was troubled by the concept of other young progressive women facing similar obstacles.
“I do think this is very specific to women on the progressive side, working-class side, who don’t come from resources and don’t have resources, who aren’t part of the institutions because if you don’t have an institution behind you, it’s almost impossible to defend yourself,” she says.
After her race, Konst threw herself into contacting as many progressive women as she could—journalists, women who’d run, who are currently in office or had been in office before, union leaders, and other organizers—to begin power-mapping what they could do collectively to challenge the monolith of centrist parties.
Unsurprisingly, she found that many of the women she spoke to had similar stories.
“I’d had several women who’d run for office contact me and say, ‘oh my god, what they did to you, they did to me,’” Konst notes, “in a different way, in a different office.”
A new organization is born
From those conversations, Konst’s PAC, Matriarch, was born. The organization launched in 2019—earlier than expected—out of a growing need to support progressive women candidates who didn’t come from money or political capital.
Matriarch’s equity-focused vision has already seen big results with the election of Konst’s fellow co-founder Cori Bush, who in November was elected to Congress.
Like many groups founded in the Trump era, the PAC is already shifting its gaze to the Biden administration and is focused on pushing “a more labor-focused agenda” that pays extra attention to working women.
Though Biden’s biggest electorate outreach was to the working class, Konst notes, he and the rest of the Democratic Party fell for the myth that “working class” was synonymous with “white” and “male.”
“If you look at the pandemic, the people who’ve been hit the hardest on the front lines, many of these frontline industries are women-led, they’re made up of women—women of color in particular, and immigrant women,” she says. “Some of them are not unionized, some of them are prevented from being unionized, and some are. Whether it’s domestic workers, educators, or nurses, of course, or flight attendants. These are all majority-women unions and women-led unions.”
More voices in the room
Those forgotten demographics are the same ones the PAC wishes to represent, and with the election of Bush and the potential cabinet nod for Sara Nelson, the international president of CWA’s flight attendants’ union who also sits on Matriarch’s board, Konst is hopeful that there will be a few more voices in the room.
Beyond electoralism, however, Konst sees a need for the progressive movement to get back in touch with its working-class roots—the same ones that saw the ideology’s founding during the United States’ progressive era around the turn of the 20th century, which was characterized by huge and successful fights for workers rights by the burgeoning labor movement.
“I think for progressive organizations, we have to start associating progressive in the same sentence with working people,” Konst says. “It’s not part of the platform—it is what makes us progressive, recognizing working people first.”
“I’m a little worried that we’re not talking about labor enough in this moment,” she admits, “but this crisis demands it.”
