There are political upsets and there are political upsets where the winner was born months after the loser first took office, and Tuesday night in Denver produced the second kind, and Justice Democrats described it as proof that “the ‘any Democrat will do’ era is over,” which is one way to describe a movement that just produced a congressional nominee who said the September 11 attacks were “inevitable.”
Melat Kiros, 29, a lawyer and Ph.D. student who lost her job at the New York office of Sidley Austin in 2023 for writing a Medium post criticizing law firms’ silence on Palestinian protests, beat Rep. Diana DeGette, 68, in Colorado’s 1st Congressional District primary Tuesday night. DeGette has held the seat since 1997. Kiros was born in the months before DeGette was first elected. DeGette’s campaign spent the final weeks warning voters that Kiros had no political experience, which turned out to be true and not determinative. Kiros took 49 percent of the vote. DeGette took her loss with the grace of a woman who had been in Congress for three decades and did not see this coming at the county assembly in March, where she received 32 percent of the vote and nearly missed the ballot entirely.
The victory extends the democratic socialist insurgency that swept New York last week, where Mamdani-backed candidates beat three incumbents in a single night, to Colorado, where the incumbents apparently received the same memo DeGette did, which was apparently no memo. According to The Intercept, Usamah Andrabi of Justice Democrats said: “In the last week, we have taken out 40 years of incumbency.” He said this with the satisfaction of a man who considers 40 years of incumbency the problem, which is correct if you believe that the 40 years produced nothing, and which requires explaining what Kiros has instead.
Kiros said in a 2023 interview, per Breitbart’s coverage, that the September 11 attacks were “inevitable” because the U.S. had “destabilized” the Middle East and created conditions in which people believed violence was their only option. This is a position that has a foreign policy literature behind it and that is indistinguishable from electoral poison in a general election in most districts, which Colorado’s 1st is not, which is why she won the primary and will win in November regardless of the position, which is the specific type of outcome that produces Stephen Miller Truth Social posts.
She will face Republican Christy Peterson in November in a district so solidly Democratic that the primary result is functionally the election. DeGette won it 36 times. Kiros will win it once, beginning this November, with 9/11 comments in the record.
When the candidate who said 9/11 was inevitable beats a 15-term incumbent in a primary, what exactly is the general election testing?
Sources
The Intercept: Socialist Momentum Grows as Melat Kiros Wins in Denver
HuffPost: Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros Unseats Rep. Diana DeGette In Colorado Primary
Raw Story: Diana DeGette loses primary race to upstart Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros
