Melat Kiros was born in 1997, the year her representative in the U.S. House, Democrat Diana DeGette, took office. On Tuesday, Kiros hopes to unseat her.
The next frontier of the fight for the Democratic Party is in Denver, where DeGette, a 15-term incumbent and longtime progressive, is facing her most serious primary challenge yet from Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist and first-time candidate.
Democrats’ widespread dissatisfaction and anger with their party leadership and a push for generational change in the wake of the party’s loss to President Donald Trump in 2024 have made incumbents in safe blue seats, like DeGette, unexpectedly vulnerable, with both Kiros and University of Colorado Regent Wanda James challenging her.
Last week’s elections in New York showed a wave of support for progressive left candidates, with one young democratic socialist challenger, Darializa Avila Chevalier, unseating top House Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th District. Both Chevalier and Kiros have made criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza and supporting Palestine central to their campaigns.
And while there’s been scant polling ahead of Tuesday’s vote in Colorado’s deep blue 1st Congressional District, an influx of pro-DeGette and anti-Kiros spending from outside groups in the final days before the election points to a highly competitive contest.
“I think this cycle, particularly Democratic voters are just so fed up with the establishment’s failures, not only in defeating Donald Trump, but defending our communities against Donald Trump, since he’s been elected,” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, a group backing progressive candidates that endorsed both Chevalier and Kiros.
Kiros, a lawyer, PhD student and barista whose family immigrated to the United States from Ethiopia when she was a baby, launched her campaign last year, casting DeGette, 68, as a representative of a failing Democratic establishment beholden to corporate interests.
The party as a whole, Kiros argued, has “lost step” with its roots as a party for the working class and shares responsibility for giving corporations and moneyed interests more influence over policy than regular Americans.
“That’s not a democracy, that’s an oligarchy,” Kiros said in an interview. “And Democrats have to reckon with the role that our party has played in maintaining this oligarchy.”
DeGette is a longtime progressive who leads an influential subcommittee overseeing healthcare and has said she would push to pass Medicare for All if Democrats retake the House. But her acceptance of corporate PAC funds, including from the healthcare industry, has become a central line of attack from Kiros and her supporters.
“It’s less about left versus right than whether you’re on the side of working people,” said Ravi Mangla, a spokesperson for the Working Families Party, which has also endorsed Kiros. “And when you’re an elected official — like Diana DeGette — taking money from Big Pharma and ICE contractors, it becomes incredibly hard to make the case that you’re on the side of people.”
DeGette and groups supporting her have highlighted her progressive positions, including support for abortion rights, and her role in managing Trump’s first impeachment in 2019. In a recent candidate forum, DeGette defended her record and her experience, saying, “Now is not the time to gamble and send someone with no experience” to Washington. She also denied that her contributions from corporate interests influence her votes.
“Nobody ever gave me a contribution and got anything in advance for that,” DeGette said, per Colorado Newsline. “If people think that they can buy my vote by making a contribution, they are sorely, sorely mistaken.”
In a brief interview at the Capitol on Thursday, DeGette said she was “optimistic” about winning renomination Tuesday.
“I feel like my message is getting out to the voters: fighting against Donald Trump, fighting for Medicare For All, and against ICE, and that’s what they care about,” she said.
When asked whether she thought the success of two democratic socialist candidates in New York City House races had any bearing on her race, DeGette said: “Denver, Colorado, is not New York City.”
But Kiros argued that Denver and New York do share a history of welcoming immigrants, embracing progressive politics and supporting an expansive social safety net — and also are both grappling with rising costs of living.
“This is one of the most progressive and one of the youngest districts in the country,” Kiros said. “The question of who’s out of touch with the voters is a question of whose platform actually aligns with the values that this district has, and it doesn’t surprise me that the congresswoman can’t see that these are the values that the voters of Denver care about.”
Tuesday’s primaries in Colorado come amid a streak of high-profile primary wins for candidates from the progressive left wing of the Democratic Party and those challenging more entrenched politicians in deep-blue cities like Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and, most recently, New York. The story of the primary, though, isn’t one of complete dominance by the party’s progressive wing: In other races, more moderate and establishment-aligned candidates have prevailed, and other Democrats have successfully beat back primary challenges.
Also in Colorado, Sen. Michael Bennet is in a closer-than-expected race in the Democratic primary for governor against Attorney General Phil Weiser, and Sen. John Hickenlooper is facing a primary challenge from state Sen. Julie Gonzales.
Andrabi argued that both Espaillat and DeGette were “caught flat-footed” by Justice Democrats-backed insurgents and didn’t take their challengers seriously.
“I think a lot of voters just see so often these incumbents only show up with a level of alarm and urgency when their own career is being threatened, but not when the livelihoods of working-class communities in their district are,” he said.
Most of the pro-Kiros spending in the race has come from Justice Democrats’ PAC, which has spent over $500,000, and from the pro-Palestine PAC American Priorities, both of which also backed Chevalier in New York.
Kiros, who was fired from her job at a top New York City law firm after publishing a letter in November 2023 criticizing top law firms’ response to Hamas’ attack on Israel, has made opposition to Israel central to her campaign, referring to Israel’s actions as “genocide” and calling for an arms embargo on Israel.
And in the final days of the race, outside groups have come in with a crush of last-minute ad spending boosting DeGette and attacking Kiros. Most of the pro-DeGette and anti-Kiros spending is coming from Pro-Choice Majority Action, a PAC linked to Elect Democratic Women, which spent over $1.5 million on ads in the final two weeks of the campaign. Another newly formed PAC with mysterious origins, the Mile High Accountability Project, has spent $350,000 supporting DeGette and attacking Kiros.
The race is also another test for pro-Israel groups that unsuccessfully spent to boost Espaillat in New York. Pro-Choice Majority Action received nearly all of its funding last month from Elect Democratic Women Action Fund, which, in turn, received $250,000 from the AIPAC-affiliated United Democracy Project in April, campaign finance filings show.
DeGette and the groups backing her are running digital ads arguing that Kiros, who grew up in Denver and moved back last year, has weak ties to the community and linking her to tenets of the Democratic Socialists of America’s platform, such as leaving NATO, which Kiros has said she does not support. One ad from Pro-Choice Majority Action attacks her for having worked at a big law firm while campaigning on reining in corporate power. And multiple ads highlight a response Kiros gave in a recent television interview in which she said the 9/11 terror attacks “were inevitable in the sense that we destabilized a lot of the Middle East.”
Andrabi said he believed the last-minute spending to boost DeGette showed the pro-Israel lobby was “panicking” after its losses in New York. “We keep winning against these lobbies and keep beating them, and so I think it might be a little too little, too little too late in some ways,” he added.
Kiros said while the outside spending is “daunting,” it reaffirms her reason for running.
“We always knew this would be the risk,” she said. “That’s why I’m challenging her in the first place, because there are corporations and special interests that want to keep her in power, and these are the same corporations and special interests that are keeping prices high and destroying our economy for working families.”
