Ahead of Colorado’s primary elections, June 30, the IJN spoke with three Democratic candidates for Attorney General: Michael Dougherty, Jena Griswold and David Seligman. The IJN also spoke with two Republican candidates for Attorney General: Michael Allen and David Willson, and reached out to Democratic candidate Hetal Doshi.
David Seligman is a labor attorney and executive director of Towards Justice, a nonprofit law firm. He is a former president of Cong. Rodef Shalom.
The current Attorney General has made suing the Trump administration a priority. Would you continue that?
I agree with Attorney General Weiser’s policy approach to these issues. When the Trump administration is breaking the law and harming Coloradans, we need to fight back. We need to hold them accountable.
We also have to have a positive vision for our future. We need to make sure that everybody who lives in Colorado has a meaningful opportunity to thrive.
Many of the folks that I’ve dedicated my career to standing up in court and fighting for, working families across Colorado, many of them voted for Donald Trump because they felt fed up with the system that feels rigged against them.
We need to go after a healthcare system that puts profits over people. We need to fight back against the forces of AI that are spying on us to charge us more and pay us less. So absolutely we need to hold the Trump administration accountable and protect Coloradans. That’s the job of the Attorney General.
What are your top three priorities as Attorney General? How do they impact Coloradans’ daily lives?
I am terrified by where we are right now with respect to the weaponization of our immigration enforcement scheme against people across Colorado.
I’ve got clients who are scared to call 911, scared to report their boss for wage theft. People have been ripped away from their families because they look Latino, because they speak Spanish, because they work a low wage job. We have to take on our brutal weaponized immigration enforcement scheme.
Second, working families are getting crushed in Colorado by an economy that is tilted against them. We have big tech companies spying on them and crushing their unions and our small businesses, and a broken healthcare system.
We’ve got almost a million Coloradans drowning in medical debt to billion-dollar hospital systems.
Lots of time it’s medical debt they don’t even owe. One of the wealthiest states in the wealthiest country in the history of the world — we don’t need to be living this way.
Very often the affordability crisis is an accountability crisis. Those with wealth and power are trampling our rights and they’re getting away with it. That is going to be a core part of my work, how we use the tools of our workers’ rights laws, our antitrust laws, our consumer protection laws to level the playing field, to put the law on the side of working families.
Third, we can’t lose track of the existential threat of climate change and of the pervasive dangers of corporate pollution right here in Colorado, right here in North Denver at Suncor, making hundreds of kids sick, polluting our air and engaging in thousands of violations of our clean air laws.
There is a lot that the Attorney General can do on those fronts.
You mentioned affordability and a number of working families voting for Trump. How do you square that with the circle of Democratic leadership in the state? Has it done a great job if working families feel the government here isn’t supporting them?
Because of the corporate power or corporate influence in our politics, because of the burgeoning monopoly power across our economy, we have a ton of really entrenched problems that we need to take on.
The Democratic Party has not done enough over the last couple of decades to take it on. The Democratic Party, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, was very much complicit in the sort of corporate takeover of our politics.
Donald Trump played into a dissatisfaction that a lot of people have had for a very long time.
But I don’t lay that at the feet of Democratic Party leadership here in Colorado alone, certainly not over the last couple of years.
The attorney general’s office [under Phil Weiser] has taken lots of really important steps in the right direction. Those are the kinds of things I want to build on.
Democrats in Colorado need to do much more. We’ve got a Democratic governor here who vetoed the Worker Protection Act, making it easier for workers to unionize.
There are lots of people who are struggling to get by here in Colorado. Everybody feels it. It can feel hard to put food on the table.
When I speak to the dissatisfaction a lot of working class people have had, that’s a broader problem of where our politics have been.
The ways in which Donald Trump and the forces of MAGA have hijacked our politics through algorithms and played into a right-wing populism that is too often rooted in bigotry is really dangerous.
We need to offer real tools to help working people and working families and which Donald Trump is not offering. We need to put the law on the side of working people. We need to offer a vision of how all of us can have safety, freedom, health and the basic things.
You have less institutional experience than some of the other candidates in this race.
It is critical that we get somebody in this office who has used the law and served as a lawyer and has dedicated every day of their career to standing up in court and using the law in bold and courageous ways.
Not just that, but somebody who has dedicated their career to doing it on behalf of the underdog, of working families across Colorado and across the country, taking on some of the biggest fights of their lives against the biggest corporations in the world, against the Trump administration and sometimes even against the Polis administration and winning.
That is the experience we need now — somebody who understands how the law is tilted in favor of the wealthy and powerful and who will be focused like a laser on taking on that system to level the playing field.
You have campaigned with candidates who are viewed by many as anti-Israel. As a progressive candidate who is active in the Jewish community, aren’t you well placed to share with those candidates why so many Jewish people are Zionist, instead of seeming to endorse their views?
It’s something I’m working on and finding opportunities to share.
I think for the vast majority of people on the left in progressive spaces, who have deep concerns about how the Israeli government has conducted itself, especially over the last few years, when I speak to them about the critical importance of Jews across the world and Jews in Israel having peace, safety, health and self-determination, too — that is something the Jewish people deserve — that is something that they find compelling. That’s something that the vast majority of people agree with.
I’m open with people that I also think that the Palestinian people living in the land deserve peace, safety, health and self-determination. The vast majority of Jews and Zionist Jews agree with that.
I want to find opportunities to articulate that and opportunities to bring folks together around seeing the humanity in one another around these issues.
You can and should be horrified by the absurd amount of death of innocent Palestinian people in Gaza, by the oppression of Palestinian people in the West Bank.
You can be horrified by those things and also recognize that anti-Semitism is on the rise and it is dangerous and it’s happening right here in Colorado where people have died because of it.
And also recognize that Oct. 7 was a brutal, horrific anti-Semitic attack that should be condemned and has left real trauma among Israeli Jews and Jews across the world.
We have the rise of Islamophobia and of anti-Semitism and the real pain and harm it’s causing. I see it in my social media comments, [which are] constantly calling me a Zionist and talking about what my last name is and my nose.
It’s dangerous that that’s an acceptable part of our discourse.
When you are in these conversations among anti-Zionist circles, there’s room to listen to the point of view that you just shared?
Totally, especially when you get offline. It’s really important for us to have these conversations as much as possible face-to-face and to reflect the nuance and the pain of these conversations.
The vast majority of people are responsive and curious, and invested in fighting for a future where everybody has peace, safety, health and self-determination.
I want to be the kind of leader that helps bring people together to recognize the humanity in one another.
It’s so easy to get lost in the “hashtagification” of these issues, especially when we’re having these fights in online spaces.
The path forward for politics in general and when it comes to anti-Semitism and the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment has to involve careful, honest and nuanced conversation where we express the complexity of our views.
We should not shut down the voices of those who are outraged, for example, by the destruction of Gaza. At the same time, we need to offer a real and honest and important dialogue around these issues where see the humanity in one another.
It is so important to me that my kids grow up in a Jewish community here in Colorado where they are proud to be Jewish and not afraid to be Jewish.
It is important to me to live my life authentically as a Jewish man who is proud to be Jewish and has a deep connection to Israel, even though I’m critical of the Netanyahu government.
Considering what happened in Boulder on June 1, 2025, how do you thread that difficult place between free speech and criminal speech?
Hate crimes are hate crimes. The perpetrator of the Boulder anti-Semitic firebombing engaged in hate crimes and is being prosecuted for that, should be prosecuted for that.
I am also deeply worried about the ways in which, especially the Trump administration, has sometimes weaponized the law in order to try to squelch speech, whether it’s taking away people’s visas or expelling people from schools for protected speech.
The first amendment is sacrosanct. That doesn’t mean that all speech is legitimate or useful and that some of it isn’t stupid and bad and hurtful. It doesn’t mean that some speech isn’t anti-Semitic.
It also doesn’t mean that all speech framed in anti-Israel terms is anti-Semitic. The example that I always give is: Do I think the phrase “free Palestine” is inherently anti-Semitic? No, but when it was carved into my synagogue, it was anti-Semitic. So we have to protect the right to speak. We also have to make sure that everyone feels safe.
That involves creating open discourse where we can identify anti-Semitism and the ways in which certain things, even sentiments that are voiced for legitimate reasons, how they can land on us, how they can feel hurtful. It’s really important that all of us have an opportunity to speak not just to the intent of what people are saying, but to the impact of people’s words.
That kind of discourse where we recognize the humanity in one another is the solution.
The solution is not to shut down speech. The solution is more speech. The solution is seeing one another.
© IJN 2026
