Melat Kiros defeats Diana DeGette in Colorado primary

Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist, upset long-serving Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado’s first congressional district primary. With more than 90% of votes counted, Kiros led DeGette 51-42 and will aim for the seat after a campaign shaped by progres

By the time the votes started to pile up Tuesday night in Denver, the outcome was no longer just a possibility. Melat Kiros—29, a democratic socialist who describes herself as a “recovering lawyer”—pulled ahead of incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette, a member of Congress since 1997.

With more than 90 percent of votes counted, Kiros led DeGette by a comfortable 51-42 margin in the high-profile Democratic primary for Colorado’s first congressional district, a race DeGette had entered seeking a 16th term. DeGette leads Colorado’s congressional delegation.

For Kiros. the path to this moment has looked less like a conventional career and more like a series of risks taken in public. She participated in a League of Women Voters candidate forum at Montview Presbyterian Church in Denver on May 28. 2026—an early signal that this campaign would be run face-to-face. not behind closed doors.

Long before Election Day, Kiros’ politics put her at odds with power. Two years ago. when she was a new lawyer in New York. she wrote an open letter defending law students who organized for Palestine. She said she is from the northern region of Ethiopia. where a genocide had also taken place a few years earlier. and her parents immigrated to Colorado when she was a baby. Kiros’ employer asked her to take the letter down. She refused, was fired, and moved back to Colorado within a week. She later took a job as a barista—“the best job I’ve had,” she said—before returning to politics.

Her platform in the race matched that insistence on challenging mainstream boundaries. Kiros ran on Medicare for All, universal childcare, AI regulation, ICE abolition, and an arms embargo on Israel.

In the final stretch. the race also turned into a test of how much outside money—and institutional muscle—could hold back an insurgent candidacy. Millions of dollars flooded in to support DeGette in Kiros’ last weeks. The largest outside group spending for DeGette was Pro-Choice Majority Action. which has ties to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. or AIPAC. The biggest spender backing Kiros was the super PAC of the progressive group Justice Democrats, which endorsed her in December.

A single poll in the race, conducted by progressive firm Data For Progress, had shown Kiros leading by five points earlier in June.

Kiros told an interviewer on June 10 that the issues driving the race were bound together by power. “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. ” she said.

Her campaign also found prominent advocates. Kiros was backed by the Democratic Socialists of America. and high-profile supporters like Bernie Sanders and streamer Hasan Piker pushed turnout on the ground in the minutes before polls closed in Denver. Piker told audiences: “What do you guys think about the data center that just popped up over here?” he said. “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.”.

Once polls closed—before the race was officially called—Republicans were already treating Kiros as the presumptive winner. Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert said Democrats were “showing their true colors and saying we want socialism. inevitably we want communism.” She added: “You’re seeing this in New York—you have the Mamdani allies. who won their candidacy. ” referencing other left-wing primary upsets.

Those comparisons were not idle. The source of the narrative momentum for the insurgency includes Democratic establishment challengers across the country. Two politicians aligned with Mamdani—former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander and socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier—knocked out incumbents in their own primaries. A third, Claire Valdez, was set to replace retiring Democratic veteran Nydia Velázquez.

In Colorado, Kiros framed her own next step in the same language of leverage and collective discipline. She said she would work with other left-leaning insurgent winners 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.”.

The numbers from Tuesday’s primary settle one question in an argument that has been playing out for months: whether a candidate who challenges the party’s governing style head-on—on everything from Gaza policy to health care—can defeat a 30-year incumbent in a district that was supposed to be safely Democratic. By night’s end. Kiros had turned that challenge into a win that now reshapes what the next battle will look like.

Melat Kiros Diana DeGette Colorado 1st congressional district democratic socialist Medicare for All universal childcare AI regulation ICE abolition arms embargo on Israel Justice Democrats AIPAC Pro-Choice Majority Action Bernie Sanders Hasan Piker Lauren Boebert