Colorado primary election
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This is pretty interesting:
Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist, defeated Representative Diana DeGette on Tuesday in the Denver area, according to The Associated Press, in a show of force for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
The triumph by Ms. Kiros unseats a 15-term incumbent and further propels the insurgent coalition that swept a series of congressional contests last week in New York.
Ms. Kiros, an immigrant and first-time candidate, was born the year after Ms. DeGette, 68, took office. Her victory in the solidly Democratic district all but ensures her election in November.
A lawyer and doctoral student in public affairs, Ms. Kiros cast herself as a political outsider capable of addressing the affordability crisis that she argued the Democratic establishment had failed to resolve. Her opposition to U.S. support for Israel was also a cornerstone of her campaign and central to her political identity.
Her grass-roots campaign overcame a fund-raising advantage held by Ms. DeGette, who was helped by a last-minute influx of spending from outside groups. Early Wednesday, Ms. Kiros was leading by more than five percentage points with nearly 80 percent of votes counted.
In her campaign biography, Ms. Kiros highlighted the fact that the Manhattan law firm where she once worked had fired her in 2023 after she refused to take down a letter that raised questions about Israel’s historical legitimacy, defended pro-Palestinian campus protesters and challenged the firm’s response to activist law students.
She has faced criticism for declining to call antisemitic a fatal firebombing attack in Boulder, Colo., on people who were marching in support of Israeli hostages.
Her victory “is part of a pattern of our democratic socialist politics resonating across the country,” said Ashik Siddique, a co-chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which Ms. Kiros is a member. “It just shows that Americans want politicians who are going to address the cost of living with universal policies that apply to everybody.”
DeGette is in the progressive wing of the Democratic party, and of course has a great deal of valuable seniority, and she’s not THAT old (68), so this is a striking result.
This primary is among other things another sign of how radically the Israel-Palestine issue has shifted in American politics in the last couple of years, as this seems to have been the decisive issue. As a junior associate Kiros was fired from white shoe firm Sidley Austin for voicing pro-Palestinian views in the wake of the October 7th attacks. She gave a complicated answer to a local reporter last week when asked, among other things relating to the Israel -Palestine conflict, if she considered the Boulder fire bombing of marchers who were supporting the release of the hostages taken by Hamas an act of anti-Semitism. This got her the wrong kind of national attention, but obviously didn’t hurt her very much in the primary.
In another surprising development, the former dean of the CU law school and current Colorado attorney general Phil Weiser easily defeated Sen. Michael Bennet for the Democratic nomination for governor. The conventional wisdom had been for months that this would be an easy win for Bennet, but Weiser has been campaigning furiously for two years straight. As dean Weiser was in my view way too cozy with Silicon Valley tech bros, as well as wth Donald Trump’s billionaire buddy Steve Schwarzman, but I suspect he doesn’t need a weatherman to know the way the wind is blowing these days. For example he did blast Jared Polis for Polis’s disgraceful decision to commute unrepentant voter rigging seditionist Tina Peters’s sentence. Weiser has always been enormously ambitious, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him running for president in six years or so, assuming we’re still having elections at that point.