The state that will tell us who’s winning the Democratic civil war

In November 2023, Melat Kiros blew up her career.

Major US law firms had signed a letter denouncing antisemitism and “calls for the elimination of the Israeli state.” Kiros, a 26-year old attorney at one of those firms, publicly posted a rebuttal, in which she condemned bigotry but said the “geopolitical legitimacy of the Israeli state” should indeed be questioned. Her letter went viral — and Kiros was swiftly fired.

Now, less than three years later, Kiros is running for Congress — challenging Rep. Diana DeGette, a three-decade Democratic incumbent in Colorado, in a primary this month.

Part of Kiros’s platform is ending all aid to Israel — “I think it’s the moral question of our time,” she told me this week. And she has an infrastructure of enthusiastic backers, including the Democratic Socialists of America and the streamer Hasan Piker.

Kiros is one of a few candidates who are testing mainstays of Colorado’s longstanding Democratic establishment — figures who helped engineer the state’s gradual transformation from red to purple to blue.

Sen. John Hickenlooper, who has served almost continuously in major elected offices since 2003, is facing a challenge from state Sen. Julie Gonzales, a staunch progressive with a record of organizing for immigrant causes. Sen. Michael Bennet, in office since 2009, is now running to become governor — but state Attorney General Phil Weiser is trying to use his Washington years against him, hammering him for voting to confirm some of Trump’s Cabinet picks.

“The linkage of all three is they’re challenges to the longtime Democratic establishment in Colorado,” Eric Sondermann, a Colorado-based independent political commentator, told me. “And particularly in the case of Hickenlooper and DeGette, they are challenges to what’s seen as sort of a gerontocracy within the party.”

These Colorado contests haven’t made many national headlines. Given the dearth of public polling in the state, it’s difficult to know how close they’ll even end up being, and most insiders still expect Hickenlooper, DeGette, and Bennet to win. (The primary is technically June 30, but Colorado is a predominantly vote-by-mail state, so voting is already in full swing.)

But in a recent swing state where Democrats have long taken a pragmatic, middle-of-the-road approach to politics, the challengers are betting that these longstanding leaders have gotten out of touch with their increasingly restless — and increasingly progressive — base.

Rep. Diana DeGette has held her deep-blue Denver House of Representatives seat for 30 years. She has amassed a mostly progressive record overall — one recent ad of hers features Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York touting her bonafides. (The clip is from a rally last year; Ocasio-Cortez has not endorsed in the primary.)

But from the standpoint of most 2026 Democrats, there is one blemish — DeGette has long supported Israel, including supporting military aid to them in April 2024, when the conflict in Gaza was months old. (DeGette has since, like most other Democrats, shifted.)

Enter Melat Kiros. After her firing from the law firm Sidley Austin in November 2023, she pursued a public policy PhD and worked as a barista. But when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2024, she concluded that Democrats — including her own representative, DeGette — “were not going to learn the right lessons.” So she got in the race herself.

Kiros’s criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, she says, stems from her own family history. “I’m from the northern region of Ethiopia, the Tigray region, where a genocide took place just a few years ago,” she told me. “I lost family in genocide there. I protested what was happening there. No one was threatening to fire me or pull my job offers for it.” But on Israel, she went on, the “disregard the establishment has for voters and their concern about this issue” is “becoming blatant.”

When Kiros entered the race, she wasn’t officially a democratic socialist. But when she sought the DSA’s endorsement, she realized her policy ideas (such as Medicare-for-All) fit well with the group. “I’m really honored to have gotten to join the organization since starting the campaign — they have been critical to the success of our field program and helping us get the word out,” she said.

The race first garnered national attention in March, when DeGette, shockingly, nearly missed making the ballot. In Colorado, you can qualify for the ballot by either collecting signatures or getting enough support in a nominating caucus — DeGette tried to caucus route, but barely crossed the 30 percent minimum threshold when activist caucusgoers strongly backed Kiros.

Kiros has tried to capitalize on progressive energy, DSA organizing, and Piker’s backing (“Fired over Palestine, now running for Congress,” was the title of one Piker video with her).

However, a complication is that there is a third candidate in the race — Wanda James, a regent of the University of Colorado. While James doesn’t have the social media buzz of Kiros, she has won some significant endorsements, and argues she can win Black and Latino voters. It’s generally believed to be tougher to beat a longtime incumbent in a three-way race without a runoff, since DeGette could win with a plurality.

And though her district is quite blue, there’s some question about whether it’s ready for DSA-style politics.

“Denver is run by No Kings moms and grandmas,” Sondermann, the independent political commentator, told me. “They’re DeGette people.”

Hickenlooper, now 74, is running for just his second term in the Senate. But he’s loomed large in Colorado politics dating back to 2003. He was elected mayor of Denver as a folksy brewpub owner; followed up his two mayoral terms with two terms as governor; and then in 2019 switched from an ill-fated presidential bid to a successful effort to defeat Colorado’s last statewide elected Republican, Sen. Cory Gardner.

But according to his challenger — state Sen. Julie Gonzales — his “go-along-to-get-along, poll-tested incrementalist politics” have failed to meet the test of Trump’s second term.

Gonzales told me in an interview that, weeks after Trump won the 2024 election, Hickenlooper privately met her and two other state legislators who were deeply worried about the prospect of mass deportation. “We were asking Senator Hickenlooper, Hey, what’s the plan to protect our communities? And his response at the time had been, Oh, they’re just going to go after the criminals — basically, trying to quibble with us.”

Hickenlooper then voted to confirm 10 of Trump’s Cabinet nominees, and defended Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer when activists argued he hadn’t been doing enough to fight back against Trump. (“Hickenlooper has fought Trump’s extreme immigration agenda since Trump’s first day,” a spokesperson for his campaign said in an emailed statement.)

Gonzales is the daughter of a ranch manager who attended Yale University and, afterward, spent years working as an organizer for progressive causes, especially issues related to immigration. Now 43, she’s held a state senate seat in a Denver district since 2019.

Though she knew others were frustrated with Hickenlooper as well, she doubted her chances in a primary — until, she says, the surprising mayoral victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York City, as well as progressive candidates in Aurora, Colorado’s city council races, made her think she could win. She jumped in the race in December, and quickly made news when it emerged that a Hickenlooper ally had threatened to blacklist some operatives from party work if they signed on with her campaign.

Gonzales, who in 2106 supported Bernie Sanders, has endorsed sweeping policy promises such as Medicare-for-All, universal childcare and eldercare, abolishing ICE, and a wealth tax — as well as ending aid to Israel. She won the endorsement of the national progressive group Indivisible, which has frequently criticized Schumer’s leadership.

“Taking on Hick is, to me, the clearest opportunity that we have to send a message directly to Chuck Schumer and the upper echelons of the Democratic establishment,” Gonzales told me.

But she hasn’t raised very much money or funded a major TV ad campaign — instead, she’s pinning her hopes on organizing. “She’s pushing back against this notion that money matters — it does,” Jesse Paul, a reporter for the Colorado Sun, told me. “Especially in this race when voters don’t know who she is.”

Is this race actually close? There was some social media buzz around a recent poll showing Hickenlooper only up 38 to 30 among likely voters — but the poll was from a progressive group and had limited methodological detail. Colorado insiders I spoke to expect Hickenlooper will cruise to victory, and we’ll soon learn whether they have the finger on the pulse of where their voters are. (As for Republicans, their uncontested nominee, Mark Baisley, is a little-known state senator who has raised no money.)

Rather than a clear “progressive vs. establishment” race, the open seat governor’s contest — to succeed Gov. Jared Polis — pits two established politicians against each other.

But Bennet does have the longer tenure — he’s been a US senator for 17 years, and before that was then-Denver Mayor Hickenlooper’s chief of staff and superintendent of Denver Public Schools. His opponent, Weiser, has been state attorney general for eight years.

During his Senate career, Bennet has distinguished himself as a serious policy person — thrilling progressive wonks by championing the expanded child tax credit as an anti-poverty measure. But he surprised the Colorado establishment by deciding to try and make the leap to the governor’s mansion this year.

Weiser is trying to capitalize on anti-establishment sentiment by using Bennet’s Washington tenure against him. Like Hickenlooper, Bennet had voted to confirm several of Trump’s Cabinet nominees early last year, arguing at the time that a “blanket approach” of opposition wasn’t “the smart thing to do strategically.” That was not what the base wanted to hear, so, by December, Bennet’s team was releasing press releases with headlines like “Bennet blocks 88 Trump nominees.”

Weiser says that the many lawsuits he’s filed or joined against Trump show that he’s the true fighter. Bennet has fired back, arguing that Weiser was much less enthusiastic about suing the administration back during Trump’s first term.

Overall, the vibe here is two ambitious guys who both want to be governor each grasping for reasons why their rival shouldn’t. But the question is whether longtime service in Washington will be an asset for Bennet — or whether the anti-establishment feeling has gotten so intense that it’s more of a liability. With polling again scant, we’ll have to wait until the votes are counted to find out.