A 29-year-old democratic socialist who once called 9/11 an "inevitable" consequence of American foreign policy just knocked off a Democrat who has held her Denver seat since 1997.
Diana DeGette survived fifteen terms in Congress. She did not survive Melat Kiros. The Colorado state representative and Democratic Socialists of America-backed challenger defeated DeGette in Tuesday's primary for Colorado's 1st Congressional District, according to the Associated Press, NBC News and Axios Denver, which called the race with Kiros holding roughly a five-point lead in the final ballot count from the Denver Elections Division. DeGette, first elected in 1996, is out. Kiros, who would be the first black woman to represent Colorado in Congress, is now the prohibitive favorite in a district Democrats have not lost in a general election in decades.
The result lands one week after Zohran Mamdani-aligned insurgents swept a trio of establishment Democrats in New York City primaries, and it confirms that the same current is now moving through the Mountain West. The National Republican Congressional Committee wasted no time framing the race as proof of a larger collapse, titling its reaction "Colorado confirms the socialist takeover of the Democrat Party."
Kiros is not a blank slate. Fox News reported that Kiros, appearing on far-left streamer Hasan Piker's show, described the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel as "an inevitable consequence of apartheid, of occupation, decades of occupation." Pressed on the September 11 attacks in a June 22 interview with 9News, Kiros did not walk it back. "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," she said, according to the network's own recording of the exchange. Mediaite reported separately that Kiros was pressed on whether a firebombing attack targeting Jewish demonstrators in Boulder amounted to antisemitism and declined to say so directly. The Post Millennial reported that Kiros has also called for the federal government to fund national "social housing" and argued that single-payer healthcare "pays for itself." None of that cost her the primary. If anything, it barely registered against DeGette, who was outspent in the closing weeks and, according to a report from MSNBC's news site, saw a wave of AIPAC-linked outside spending flow into the race trying to save her seat. It wasn't enough.
DeGette's campaign has not announced any concession statement disputing the results as of publication, and PRN reached out to her office for comment on the loss. The Colorado Democratic Party has likewise not issued a public response distancing itself from Kiros's past remarks.
DeGette was not the only casualty
Kiros's win was the headline, but it was not an isolated one. The Hill reported that the same Tuesday primary saw Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser defeat sitting U.S. Senator Michael Bennet in the governor's race, running explicitly to Bennet's left and branding the three-term senator as yesterday's Democrat. In the 8th Congressional District, a genuine swing seat that decides House control, 31-year-old former Earthjustice attorney Manny Rutinel beat longtime state lawmaker Shannon Bird, 57, in a district where Latino voters make up roughly 38.5 percent of the adult population. Three separate races, three establishment figures gone in a single night. The Hill's own writeup called it a continuation of the
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