The democratic socialist Melat Kiros unseated the long-serving US representative Diana DeGette in Colorado’s primary elections held on Tuesday, the latest in a string of high-profile victories for the party’s insurgent left.
The Associated Press reported that Kiros had defeated DeGette for the Democratic nomination in the deep-blue first congressional district centered on Denver. Kiros’s triumph came a week after New York voters unseated two Democratic congressional incumbents and replaced a third who was retiring with candidates who had campaigned on standing up to Israel amid accusations that it was carrying out a genocide in Gaza.
Her success in the solidly Democratic first district all but ensures her election in November.
Kiros, 29, was born in Ethiopia in 1997 – the year DeGette arrived in Congress – and graduated from law school at the University of Notre Dame in 2022. The following year, she wrote a blogpost rejecting accusations that law students who protested against Israel’s counterattack after 7 October were antisemitic. The New York law firm where Kiros was working fired her after she refused to take the post down, and she then went into politics.
After announcing her run for Congress, Kiros picked up endorsements from the progressive senator Bernie Sanders, as well as the Democratic Socialists of America and Justice Democrats, progressive groups that had also been involved in New York’s primaries.
In a statement, Justice Democrats praised Kiros for having “built a movement that inspired Denverites to remember they themselves have the power to transform what kind of Democratic Party they want to be represented by”.
“Melat and our candidates continue winning this cycle because Democratic voters are finally getting leaders acting on their demands to bring the fight to the corporations raising our prices, the war lobbies profiting off endless war & genocide, and the immigration gestapo terrorizing our communities,” said Alexandra Rojas, the group’s executive director .
Kiros sought to mount a generational challenge to the 68-year-old DeGette, a member of the Congressional Progressive caucus, who supported key progressive policies like Medicare for all and abolishing ICE. But since Donald Trump returned to the White House, Democratic voters have increasingly turned to younger, more aggressive candidates willing to take on their party’s ageing establishment.
Kiros made concerns about US support for Israel prominent in her campaign. In an interview with Colorado Public Radio (CPR), Kiros accused the country of carrying out a genocide in Gaza and called for the United States to impose an arms embargo. DeGette opposes providing offensive arms to Israel, but told CPR that she believes the country has a right to exist and defend itself.
The representative’s campaign criticized comments Kiros made in a recent interview, including a refusal to say whether she considered a 2025 firebombing attack on pro-Israel demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado, to be motivated by antisemitism.
“I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator,” Kiros told 9News. “All I know is that he went and attacked innocent people because of what they might have believed. I don’t even know what the people that were at that protest believed, too.”
Kiros also said in the interview that she viewed the 9/11 attacks as “inevitable” for the United States “in that we destabilized a lot of the Middle East, that forced people to believe that an act of violence was the only response”.
Anti-Washington sentiment coursed through Colorado’s elections on Tuesday. In the race to replace term-limited Democratic governor, Jared Polis, Colorado’s attorney general, Phil Weiser, edged out the US senator Michael Bennet, according to the Associated Press. Though Bennet, who has represented Colorado in the Senate since 2009, had entered the race an early favorite, Weiser scuppered his campaign by accusing him of not taking a hard enough line against Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees.
In the state’s most competitive House district, the progressive state representative Manny Rutinel defeated a more moderate Democrat, according to the Associated Press, to face Republican Congressman Gabe Evans in November. Evans is considered vulnerable and the seat is among a handful of congressional districts across the country that could determine control of the House.
Meanwhile, the incumbent senator John Hickenlooper fended off a progressive challenge from state senator Julie Gonzalesto win renomination. He will face the Republican nominee, Mark Baisley, a state senator who ran unopposed.
