Melat Kiros participated in a League of Women Voters candidate forum at Montview Presbyterian Church in Denver, Colorado, May 28, 2026.RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post/Getty
Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist, has won the high-profile primary for Colorado’s first congressional district, the Associated Press and other outlets projected Tuesday. With more than 90 percent of votes counted, Kiros leads Diana DeGette, Colorado’s longest-serving Democratic member of Congress, by a comfortable 51-42 margin.
DeGette—who has held her position since before Kiros was born—was seeking a 16th term in the House. She leads Colorado’s congressional delegation.
I covered Kiros’ outsider challenge to DeGette as part of a wave of young congressional candidates running in part to challenge the Democratic establishment on Gaza:
And in a primary taking place Tuesday in Denver, Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist who calls herself a “recovering lawyer,” is running against incumbent Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette, who has held her seat since 1997.
Two years ago, as a new lawyer in New York, Kiros wrote an open letter defending law students who organized for Palestine. “I myself am from the northern region of Ethiopia, where a genocide had also taken place a few years ago,” Kiros, whose parents immigrated to Colorado when she was a baby, said.
Her employer asked her to take the letter down. Kiros refused, was fired, and moved back to Colorado within a week. She took a gig as a barista (“the best job I’ve had”) to make ends meet, and is now running on a familiar progressive platform: Medicare for All, universal childcare, AI regulation, ICE abolition and an arms embargo on Israel.
The only poll in the race, by progressive firm Data For Progress, showed Kiros up by five points earlier in June.
“Every single thing that you care about, from social justice to economic justice to environmental justice, all of these things are intertwined with who has the money and the influence to wield power over our government,” Kiros said to me in an interview June 10.
In the final weeks of Kiros’ race, millions of dollars flooded in to support DeGette. The largest outside group spending on DeGette’s behalf, Pro-Choice Majority Action, has ties to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. The biggest spender backing Kiros has been the super PAC of the progressive group Justice Democrats, which endorsed her in December.
Kiros is also backed by the Democratic Socialists of America and high-profile supporters like Bernie Sanders and streamer Hasan Piker, who was urging voters to get to the polls in Denver minutes before they closed. (“What do you guys think about the data center that just popped up over here?” Piker told audiences. “Diana DeGette, who’s represented this district for 30 years in Congress, is saying nothing about the data centers, because she’s in the pocket of big corporations.”)
Kiros will join a group of left-wing insurgent candidates who have upset the Democratic establishment by winning decisive primary victories on unapologetically progressive platforms. Only half an hour after polls closed, with the race not yet called, Republicans were already treating Kiros as the presumptive winner. Democrats are “showing their true colors and saying we want socialism, inevitably we want communism,” said Republican Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert on Colorado’s News9. “You’re seeing this in New York—you have the Mamdani allies, who won their candidacy.”
Two politicians aligned with Mamdani—former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander and socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier—knocked out incumbents; a third, Claire Valdez, will replace retiring Democratic veteran Nydia Velázquez.
Kiros says she will work with them to push the Democratic Party leftward. “If enough of us share that commitment to Medicare for All, to ending corporate capture, to an arms embargo [on Israel], we should absolutely say: here are our conditions,” she told Axios. “If you want our votes on leadership, on appropriations, this is what it costs.”
