Denver will see its first new congressional representative in nearly three decades — and it will likely be one who comes from the ascendant left wing of the Democratic Party.
Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist, defeated Rep. Diana DeGette in Tuesday’s Democratic primary election for the 1st Congressional District.
With the victory, Kiros will proceed to the general election and face the Republican nominee, Christy Peterson. Considering Denver’s heavy blue lean, Kiros is highly likely to win the November election.
She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has made notable gains in recent months. Voters elected democratic socialists as the mayors of Washington, D.C., New York City and Seattle, and leftists won remarkable victories in a trio of New York congressional primaries this month.
What is the DSA?
The DSA traces its roots to the early 1970s and was founded in 1982 with a goal of boosting worker power and pushing corporate influence out of Democratic politics.
The movement grew slowly over the decades — then multiplied its membership from just 5,000 to more than 100,000 on the strength of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020, transforming the organization and its priorities.
The DSA is a nonprofit that describes itself as the largest socialist organization in the country. It generally does not operate as a political party that nominates candidates — instead supporting candidates on Democratic tickets.
Its official platform calls for:
- Universal public systems for healthcare, college and housing
- The elimination of the Electoral College, instead deciding presidential elections by the popular vote
- Significant reforms to the Supreme Court and Congress
- Full voting rights for noncitizens
- An end to military and economic aid and weapons sales to Israel
- A 32-hour work week and expanded union rights
- Major public investment in renewable energy
- Higher taxes on “the richest earners”
- Statehood for Washington, D.C.
The Denver DSA wing was a key factor in the Kiros campaign. It has said it has 1,500 members, recently adding 50 in a week. “Capitalism is a dying idea; help DDSA build a socialist future today!” the local chapter declared on Instagram. It’s by far the largest of five chapters registered statewide.
What does Kiros stand for?
Kiros has not necessarily embraced all those idaes — the DSA has various factions with different priorities and calls itself a “multi-tendency” organization. While much of the movement openly aims to dismantle capitalism, the winning political candidates often focus on more immediate changes.
Indeed, she said earlier this month that she didn’t agree with DSA positions like pulling out of NATO, Colorado Politics reported. She has emphasized ideas like rejecting corporate influence and providing public services like Medicare for All and public housing.
“Those are basic needs that we should have in a modern world and especially in a country that is as wealthy and as powerful as this one. That's not a limitation of resources. It's a limitation of political will,” she told Ryan Warner, senior host of Colorado Matters, in an interview last month.
“The popular support is there,” Kiros continued in the interview. “People overwhelmingly support these policies, whether we're talking about Medicare for All or universal childcare and elder care, what we're missing is representation in our government specifically for working people, because over 80% of our representatives take donations from these corporate PACs, these corporations, these special interests who have a vested interest in keeping things exactly as they are because there's too much money to be made in the way that the healthcare industry exists today.”
She continued: “For me, socialism is about making it clear: We have basic needs. Every single human being — and that's housing, healthcare, nutritional food, public education, and I think in this modern world, transportation and access to the internet as well, and what kind of a society do we want to live in? It doesn't have to be this hard for people to be able to get by.”
She also has criticized mainstream Democrats for their focus on President Donald Trump, saying he is just one part of a broken system.
“The thing is, fighting Trump is just one piece of the problem. Trump is not the cause. He's a symptom of a system that is broken and has been broken for a really long time because our party has failed to understand the role that they need to take in getting money out of our politics,” Kiros said during a debate earlier this month.
Criticism of Israel has catalyzed the socialist movement
DSA's early leaders were “staunch allies of Israel,” as Tablet Magazine put it — but that’s turned sharply over the years. Israel’s deadly war in Gaza has become a catalyzing — and polarizing — issue in Democratic primaries.
In Denver, Kiros embraced the leftist mega-streamer Hasan Piker, who has attracted criticism from some Jewish groups for his statements about Israel, including that Hamas is the “lesser evil." Several local venues recently canceled plans to host a joint event with Kiros and Piker.
Kiros also has staunchly criticized Israel for its war in Gaza, which has killed more than 70,000 people in response to a Hamas attack that killed almost 1,200 people. Speaking on a stream with Piker, she described the Hamas attack as an “inevitable consequence” of Israeli policies.
“I believe it's incumbent upon us to actually identify why this violence is happening in the first place, to understand that certain conditions lead people to feeling like violence is their only answer, and our responsibility is to make sure that we're actually being responsive to the protest and to the resistance, the peaceful resistance that people have,” she said in a later interview with Kyle Clark of 9News. “That's not to justify what happened, that's not to take away from the horror of it. It's to recommit ourselves.”
In the same interview, she said that the 9/11 attacks were similarly “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.”
What is Melat Kiros' background?
Kiros is a former lawyer and a barista and is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado Denver’s School of Public Affairs. She was raised in Aurora, where her parents emigrated from Ethiopia when she was a baby.
In 2023, Kiros was fired from her job as a lawyer for writing an open letter about Israel in which she argued that “the Israeli government has weaponized anti-Semitism to defend its crimes against the Palestinian people and quell any resistance or critique against it.”
That set her on the path that led her to a shocking upset victory and a potential seat in Congress. Her opponent in the general election, Christy Peterson, lives in south Denver and works at a construction company doing office management and accounting.
