Diana DeGette survived fifteen terms in Congress, two impeachment trials, and three decades of Denver politics. She did not survive a 29-year-old democratic socialist who thinks America had 9/11 coming.
Melat Kiros defeated the incumbent Democrat in Colorado’s 1st Congressional District primary on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press, capping a stunning collapse for a lawmaker who first took office the same year Kiros was born. With the vast majority of the vote counted, Kiros led DeGette by roughly five points, with CU Regent Wanda James trailing well behind in third.
The result was not close enough to blame on turnout quirks. It was a repudiation.
The 9/11 Question She Didn’t Dodge
Kiros, a Democratic Socialists of America member and former corporate attorney, had already drawn scrutiny for describing Hamas’s October 7 massacre as “an inevitable consequence of apartheid, of occupation, decades of occupation.”
That framing is common enough on the activist left that it barely raises eyebrows in certain circles anymore.
What should have ended her campaign came next. Denver’s 9News anchor Kyle Clark asked Kiros directly whether she believed the September 11 attacks were likewise “the inevitable consequence of American foreign policy.” She did not hedge.
“Inevitable in the sense that we destabilized a lot of the Middle East, which led people to believe that another act of violence was the only response,” Kiros said. “Our responsibility is to get rid of those conditions that lead to violence in the first place.”
Nearly three thousand Americans died on September 11, 2001, at the hands of men who chose mass murder. Kiros describes that choice as a predictable byproduct of American policy rather than an act of evil committed by people responsible for their own decisions.
It is worth sitting with what that logic actually does: it relocates moral responsibility from the terrorist to the target. Applied consistently, there is no atrocity that couldn’t be explained away as the inevitable consequence of something the victim did first.
Clark also asked Kiros whether the 2025 firebombing attack on a Boulder gathering supporting Israeli hostages was an act of antisemitism. She declined to say. “I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator,” she said, adding that she didn’t know what the victims believed either — despite their reason for gathering being publicly stated at the time.
How She Won Anyway
None of it stopped her. Kiros trounced DeGette at the Denver Democratic assembly in April, taking 67 percent of delegate votes to the incumbent’s 33 percent — a margin that nearly kept a fifteen-term congresswoman off her own party’s primary ballot.
She built her campaign on Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, a $21-an-hour federal minimum wage, federally funded “social housing,” and the claim that single-payer healthcare “pays for itself,” a line Democratic socialists have been repeating for a decade without ever producing a functioning national model that proves it.
She had institutional muscle behind her, too. Bernie Sanders endorsed her. So did Justice Democrats, the Sunrise Movement, and the local DSA chapter, which helped run a door-knocking operation that outworked an incumbent who assumed her progressive voting record would be enough. It wasn’t.
DeGette had voted against additional military aid to Israel and campaigned on abolishing ICE herself, and it still didn’t matter, because the base she needed wasn’t looking for a progressive record. It was looking for someone who’d never had to build one by governing.
Kiros was fired from the law firm Sidley Austin in 2023 after publishing an open letter accusing the firm of “weaponizing” antisemitism concerns to shield Israel from criticism. Her career since has been a straight line from that letter to Tuesday’s win, and it tells you something about where the energy in the Democratic Party currently sits.
Part of a Pattern, Not an Anomaly
Colorado is the third state in a week to watch democratic socialists topple sitting Democrats. In New York, three Mamdani-backed candidates won their primaries, including Darializa Avila Chevalier’s defeat of Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair Adriano Espaillat and Brad Lander’s ouster of Rep. Dan Goldman. In Utah, socialist Liban Mohamed came close to beating establishment favorite Ben McAdams at the state convention.
Kiros will now be favored heavily in November in a district that hasn’t elected a Republican in more than fifty years, and Axios reports she’s positioned to become the first Black woman to represent Colorado in Congress — a genuine milestone attached to a genuinely troubling worldview.
DeGette was, by any honest measure, a reliable progressive vote for three decades. It didn’t matter. The Democratic Party’s primary electorate isn’t rewarding progressive records anymore. It’s rewarding people willing to say the quiet part about America out loud, then walk it back just enough to survive the news cycle.
Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
That’s not a hard verse to apply here. A candidate who treats the murder of three thousand Americans as an inevitable consequence of policy, rather than an evil act freely chosen, has confused the categories in exactly the way Isaiah warned about.
Denver Democrats didn’t just nominate a socialist on Tuesday. They nominated someone who can’t tell the difference between an explanation and an excuse — and rewarded her for it.
DeGette thanked her supporters and conceded gracefully. Whether Colorado voters in November extend Kiros the same grace her fellow Democrats just did remains to be seen.
