The Democratic Socialist Machine Now Turns Its Attention to Colorado

D emocratic socialists are riding high this month after a trio of upset victories in New York City congressional primaries and their capture of the mayor’s office in Washington, D.C. Another socialist won a place in the November runoff for mayor of Los Angeles. The Democratic Socialists of America are boasting that they will score even more successes in this year’s remaining primaries.

“New York City, we think, is really reflecting where the whole country is going at this point, so we’re very excited, and we want to keep building from it,” DSA Co-Chairman Ashik Siddique told The Hill.

The next test for the DSA will come on Tuesday in Colorado. Representative Diana DeGette, a 15-term incumbent House Democrat, is being challenged by Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old DSA member. A recent poll shows Kiros leading DeGette by 41 percent to 36 percent, and the enthusiasm carrying over from last week’s New York victories is expected to boost the grassroots enthusiasm for her. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders also just endorsed her.

DeGette barely made it onto the primary ballot because in March she was challenged by Kiros at the local Democratic convention, where delegates gave her only 33 percent of the vote — just three points above the level needed for access. Since then she has been bolstered by a flood of establishment money trying to save her seat.

Democrats who worry that the Democratic Party is in danger of being taken over by socialists are particularly worried that Kiros would become another political superstar the way that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did after she knocked off a member of the House Democratic leadership in a 2018 primary. Indeed, Kiros shares some superficial traits with AOC. She is 29 years old, the same age AOC was when she was elected to Congress. She is now studying for a doctorate in public policy, but Kiros’s last job was as a barista at a coffee bar. That background mirrors that of AOC, who worked as a bartender for seven years before launching her campaign for Congress. Both women are attractive, have exotic-sounding names, and are skilled at reading from a socialist script without any deviations from the party line.

Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic political consultant in New York, said both women have a not-so-obvious advantage: “Many progressives in cities now favor candidates of color, especially women, over anyone else,” he told me. “It’s a form of virtue-signaling and helps with both fundraising and enthusiasm.” In Kiros’s case, her Denver district is at ground zero for progressive gentrified votes — Kamala Harris carried it by 56 points in 2024, and it has the sixth-highest share in the country of whites with at least a four-year college degree.

If anything, Kiros is more radical than AOC. On economics, she supports a litany of new big-budget entitlements with a topical call for a moratorium on data center construction. “When we’re talking about the threat of AI, I think a lot of folks think about it as like the apocalypse of the robots,” she told Drop Site News and the American Prospect. “It’s actually a lot worse, just in that it gets absorbed into our military industrial complex and it makes one or two wrong decisions and now we’re at a nuclear war with Russia.”

But the wedge issue in the primary is clearly Israel. Kiros, who was born in Ethiopia but came to the U.S. as a child, is clearly steeped in anti-imperialist philosophy. She questions the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state and recently had Hasan Piker, a leftist Twitch streamer with almost 3 million followers, campaign for her.

Congressman Ritchie Torres, whose Bronx district borders AOC’s, is appalled by Piker, who has said, “America deserved 9/11.” Torres calls him an “antisemitic poster child.”

For her part, not only has Kiros associated with Piker, but she recently declined to admit that last year’s deadly firebombing of Jewish protesters in nearby Boulder qualified as an antisemitic act, telling 9News in Denver, “I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator.”

She went further in the interview and said that both the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas and the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks were an “inevitable consequence.” She explained: “Inevitable in the sense that we destabilized a lot of the Middle East that forced people to believe that another act of violence was the only response.” DeGette has responded by saying she was “shocked and disgusted” by those comments.

DeGette supports a two-state solution to deal with Palestinian grievances and still wants to sell defensive weaponry to Israel. In today’s Democratic Party, that may be seen as an extremist position.

A flood of last-minute money from pro-data-center and pro-Israel groups could drag DeGette over the finish line one last time. But Kiros’s ads play to the progressive vanities of district voters by urging them “to make history.”

My bet is that the socialist juggernaut that Zohran Mamdani started in New York City last November will roll triumphantly through Denver. The question going forward is: Are centrist Democrats actually willing to fight the socialists’ blitzkrieg, or will they eventually acquiesce in having them as full partners in the party?