Welcome to a Friday evening edition of Progress Report.
Last night, I hosted one of the fastest rising stars in Democratic politics. She’s running for Congress in Denver, primarying a 30-year incumbent and riding a wave of momentum and a surge of interest all around the country. You can watch my entire conversation with Melat Kiros above or read on for my write-up and several clips.
Here are the previous entries in this year’s interview series with primary challengers: Mai Vang, Patrick Roath, Michael Blake
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The way Melat Kiros sees it, Democrats have a six-year window to revive democracy and transform the economy to serve working and middle class Americans. And because her member of Congress, Rep. Diana DeGette, hasn’t been able to deliver on any of those fundamental goals in her 30 years in DC, and nobody else was willing to challenge the incumbent in a cycle of mass Democratic primary challenges, Kiros stepped up to run herself.
“My plan was I want to sign up to volunteer for whoever’s going to do this because this is the most anti-incumbent cycle, so obviously, someone’s going to run against her. And that just wasn’t the case,” Kiros told Progress Report during a live interview on Thursday evening. “And so for me, there has to be a challenge. And if no one else is going to do it, I think I can speak to the issues that matter the most to Denverites, which is that it’s too damn unaffordable right now.”
At 28, Kiros would be one of the youngest members of Congress, and wasn’t even born yet when DeGette was elected back in 1996. In the past, that experience gap — Kiros is an attorney and former campaign manager, but hasn’t served in government — might be used against her. But in this environment, with Democratic voters so pissed off at an inert leadership that has failed to stand up to Donald Trump or protect the rights they purport to hold so dear, a fresh perspective and a far more urgent approach has been winning over supporters — a lot of them.
Last month, Kiros and her campaign shocked the Colorado political establishment when she not only won the Democratic Denver County assembly caucus vote last month, but demolished DeGette, more than doubling her vote total. She took home around 67% of the vote in the complicated process, which engages the party’s most tuned-in and passionate members. So thorough was the walloping that DeGette nearly didn’t make the primary ballot, qualifying by just a few points.
Kiros almost didn’t contest the assembly caucus, as she’d focused for months on qualifying for the ballot by collecting signatures from residents of the district. All of that groundwork helped her earn the endorsements of progressive groups like Justice Democrats and DSA, which brought the kind of grassroots support that helped another 28-year-old barista to a shock primary upset against an entrenched Democrat in a deep blue district back in 2018.
The parallels to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are natural and fitting, both in their biographies and the kind of contrast they offer to a long-time incumbent. The Democrat that AOC defeated is now a corporate lobbyist; DeGette’s campaign has been inundated with cash from corporate PACs, including from the likes of Lockheed Martin, Walmart, and every major pharmaceutical company. And like the Bronx congresswoman, Kiros is a passionate advocate for Medicare for All, universal childcare, a moratorium on AI data centers, and ending military aid to Israel.
The last one is pivotal to her story: Kiros moved to the US from Ethiopia as a little kid, and in recent years watched a civil war and genocide rip the country apart, with death toll of upwards of 600,000. It was a horror that led her to speak out early on against the burgeoning mass slaughter in Gaza.
In the fall of 2023, while working as a lawyer in New York, she wrote an article decrying both antisemitism and the way that it was used as a cudgel to silence anyone critical of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Her law firm asked her to take down the article.
“Having lost family members in that war [in Ethiopia], I said, ‘No, I can’t. I can’t take this down. This is the truth, and I refuse to shy away from it,’” Kiros recalls. “And then the next day I was let go.”
So much has changed in the two and a half years since that incident, and it’s likely that she wouldn’t be fired if the article went up today; the genocide and now the Iran War have compelled even the most hawkish Democrats to condemn Israel’s conduct. Because she took an early stand, though, the decision served as an inflection point: Kiros moved back to Denver, began a PhD program, worked for political campaigns, took on part-time jobs to pay the rent, and now she’s a few months from potentially pulling off one of Congress’s biggest upsets.
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