Progressive insurgency update: DeGette

Are incumbents in trouble?

Melat Kiros and Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorados 1st congressional district

I’ve talked a bit in the past about the extent to which there’s a “Tea Party of the Left” occurring in 2026, with lots of mainstream Democratic incumbents finding themselves under fire and facing tough progressive challengers. This week’s Illinois primaries were a mixed bag on this front. Yet Colorado’s own set of primary challenges suggests that, well, there’s something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear. Now we have some new evidence, with three-decade Democratic incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette facing a strong challenge from her left and losing a contest this past weekend.

Colorado has developed a quirky system of party nominations over the decades. Party contests, from the state legislature on up to the presidency, are settled by primaries, as they are in most other states. But candidates can take several paths to qualify for the primary ballot. One common path is the caucus/assembly process. There’s a caucus night (usually in early March) where registered party members meet in their precincts to do a straw vote for their favorite candidates and to pick from among themselves who should be the delegates at the county assembly a few weeks later. Then at the county assembly people pick delegates to congressional district-level assembly, and then to a state assembly for statewide candidates. The candidates that get at least 30% of the vote at the final assembly automatically qualify for the primary ballot, and the candidate with the highest number of votes appears first on the ballot. It’s a lot of time and effort for a relatively small (though not insignificant) prize.

The other path is for candidates to opt out of the caucus-assembly process and just get signatures on petitions to qualify for the primary ballot.

Now, from the description above, you can guess who participates in the caucus-assembly process. It’s the most hardcore partisans in the state. It’s people who care enough to show up at multiple successive meetings that eat up large chunks of time, sometimes traveling substantial distances to get there. It’s reasonable to think that these participants are much further toward the ideological poles than the average primary voter, no less the average state resident.

You can also probably guess the sorts of candidates who do well in these contests. It’s not necessarily the wealthiest or best known candidates, but rather the ones with an enthusiastic following that will show up at events. And turnout at these contests is typically not high; a candidate with a few hundred die-hard fans can sometimes swing a county assembly.

Your average primary voter, by contrast, will probably not spend more than a few minutes thinking about their vote choice, if that. They’ll be heavily influenced by name recognition, endorsements from major figures in their party, advertising, etc. So, given the differences between who shows up for this train of events and who will actually vote in the June primary, you can get wildly different results. Indeed, my own impression is that nothing ensures failure in the primary like success in the caucus.

Okay, all that exposition done, here’s what happened recently: Rep. Diana DeGette lost in this past weekend’s Denver County Democratic Assembly. Democratic Socialist attorney Melat Kiros (who wasn’t yet alive when DeGette first got elected) got 63% of the vote to DeGette’s 35%. So Kiros is sending about twice as many delegates to the 1st Congressional District assembly than DeGette is. The likely outcome is that both will qualify for the ballot but Kiros’ name will appear first.

This is, to my knowledge, the first time DeGette will have lost in the caucus-assembly process in the fifteen elections in which she has run for this House seat.

DeGette hasn’t done anything particularly egregious in office — she’s not associated with any major scandals and has generally been considered a reliable Democratic vote, slightly to the left of the median Democrat in the House. But Denver progressives still see a target. For one thing, a district that Kamala Harris won with 77 percent of the vote in 2024 could surely be sending someone further to the left to Congress. For another, there is a lot of anger toward the Democratic Party’s leadership across the country, especially from Democrats. Anyone seen as part of the party’s establishment is seen as vulnerable.

This is part of the same story with two high-profile Colorado incumbents — Sen. John Hickenlooper and Sen. Michael Bennet (now running for governor) — deciding to go the petition route to the primary ballot instead of casting their lots with the progressive activist community.

How much trouble is DeGette in? Well, fundraising at the beginning of the year showed DeGette with roughly half a million dollars on hand, with Kiros having just over a tenth of that. That doesn’t mean Kiros can’t do well — sometimes it doesn’t take all that much money to take down an incumbent who has lost favor in their party. Just ask Eric Cantor. And it’s possible Kiros will be able to leverage this moment of media attention to get more support, donations, endorsements, etc.

My guess is that DeGette will still win the June primary comfortably, as she always does. But even this current setback is a very bright signal flare for other incumbents this year.