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Socialists Are Surging. In Colorado, a 29-Year Incumbent Is Sweating.

Rep. Diana DeGette didn’t take a socialist challenger seriously. Now she’s scrambling to convince voters she’s still the progressive pick.

Rep. Diana DeGette has had a tough few weeks. 

The Colorado Democrat is facing her first competitive primary in her 30-year House career on Tuesday. After a series of confrontations with voters — including a public meltdown in a coffee shop — an unfavorable poll kept out of public view, and speculation that she called on powerful allies to pressure venues to cancel planned participation in a rally for her opponent, a slew of new super PACs swooped in to keep DeGette’s campaign afloat in the final weeks of the race — including one funded by the pro-Israel lobby. 

While DeGette has spent the campaign’s home stretch defending her record as a progressive, her leading opponent, democratic socialist Melat Kiros, has never been more optimistic. 

After leftist candidates rode to victory in New York last week on a growing wave of anti-incumbent sentiment, Kiros said her campaign saw a major uptick in donors and volunteers. A coalition of leftist organizations backing her has run an aggressive field campaign and say they’ve out-organized DeGette, who didn’t take the challenge seriously at first and was almost kicked off the ballot in March. In a district full of the kinds of young voters who helped socialists win last week in New York, Kiros’s backers say a similar coalition could power another socialist challenger to topple the Colorado incumbent on Tuesday.

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“While the Democratic establishment reveals its contempt for its own voters by lashing out against the candidates their base elected, our candidates keep winning by taking on the corporate interests raising our prices to deliver a positive vision to make life more affordable for working class voters — from Medicare for All to ending taxpayer-funded genocide,” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, which is backing Kiros.

DeGette’s challenge is emblematic of a wake-up call for many Democratic incumbents this midterms cycle, Andrabi said: Even being relatively “progressive” is no longer enough to fend off a challenger from the left, let alone to keep your seat. 

“Voters are done watching Democrats take corporate PAC money and then wonder why nobody trusts them to fight,” Kiros said in a statement to The Intercept. “They are done with representatives who show up six weeks before a primary because a challenger finally scared them into it. The energy that showed up in New York is the same energy that’s showing up in Denver and we are ready for Tuesday night.”

Another progressive strategist who works with congressmembers and candidates and requested anonymity in order to speak freely said DeGette’s backers were worried. “Across multiple districts we’re seeing Dem primary voters unwilling to accept the usual platitudes from incumbents about their work ‘standing up to Trump’ as sufficient to earn their support,” they said.

“Voters across the spectrum are deeply frustrated with the Democratic Party’s ineffectiveness, and feel like many of these incumbents have been all talk and no action in this term,” they said. “There is broad anti-establishment sentiment that creates real opportunity for a next-generation challenger like in CO-01.”

The influx of super PAC spending for DeGette in the final days of the race came even as she had painted........

© The Intercept