Last week, the Democratic Party took a giant leap to the left in New York City, where voters embraced three far-left candidates backed by Democratic Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani in primaries for U.S. House seats. As it turns out, it is not just a big-city East Coast thing.
Colorado House Race
On Tuesday, socialist Melat Kiros defeated 15-term incumbent Congresswoman Diana DeGette in the Democratic primary for a House seat that represents the Denver area in Colorado. The 29-year-old lawyer, PhD student, and self-described Democratic Socialist ran on abolishing ICE, “Medicare for All,” and her fervent opposition to U.S. support for Israel. Her campaign website also features a “Trans Bill of Rights.”
Based on her victory speech Tuesday night, it doesn’t appear Kiros will be moderating her platform any time soon:
“We will not wait to take the fight to Donald Trump and the oligarchy. We will not wait. We will not wait to abolish ICE and pass Medicare for all. We will not wait to put an end to the politics of the past, to get big money out of our politics, and to reject corporate PACs and AIPAC… If we organize and show no fear in standing up for what’s right, that is the message that Denver has sent to both parties, to Donald Trump, and to the entire country.”
According to a bio on her campaign website, Kiros was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, just before her father won the United States’ Diversity Visa Lottery and moved their family to Colorado.
She announced her campaign to unseat the woman who has been Congress as long as she has been alive last year, running “to fight for the working people of Denver, to deliver a more affordable city, and to root out the corruption in government once and for all.”
Kiros’ campaign site says she worked at a “top firm” in New York City before being fired for writing an op-ed defending students who were protesting in support of Palestine and criticizing Israel. She moved back to Colorado where she is pursuing a doctorate in public policy while working as a barista “to pay all of her bills and student loans.”
The Socialist Surge
On Wednesday’s Megyn Kelly Show, Megyn said Kiros’ positions are nothing new. “It’s all going to be free… and we’re also going to get rid of ICE, so no more policing of illegals. It’s basically open borders. They’re all for that. They don’t like cops; they do like illegals. They want somehow to pay for Medicare for everybody in the country, socialized medicine,” she listed.
And then there is the one issue that she believes is actually driving the success of these far-left candidates. “They’re very, very opposed to Israel, and I would submit to you that last point is the determining factor,” Megyn posited. “It is not the only factor, but, if you had to rank the things that are driving these elections, I would put it number one because the Democrat Party is just so solidly against Israel right now.”
Independent journalist Matt Taibbi agreed. “I think you’re right about the last point. American politics in recent years has been a series of litmus tests, and the most recent one on the Democratic side is clearly the Israel issue,” he explained. “If you haven’t taken a stance on it, if you’re a supporter of Israel, you’re really not electable anymore in the Democratic Party.”
He believes this has a two-fold effect. “This is a major factor in the DSA success at the primary level, and it spells trouble for the leadership of the party,” Taibbi noted. “We saw what happened in New York after the victories of the three Mamdani-backed candidates. When [House Minority Leader] Hakeem Jeffries flashed on a television screen, everybody was chanting, ‘You are next, you are next.’ So they’re very intent on ousting the traditionalist wing of the Democratic Party.”
What Comes Next
The primaries these Democratic Socialist and far-left candidates have been in ultra-progressive districts where GOP challengers don’t stand a chance in the general election. But what will happen, Megyn wondered, when the fight becomes more mainstream.
“So far, this is happening only in like very, very deep blue cities and states for congressional representation, in which Republicans are a joke. But at some point, they’re going to face them, I guess, in a general election contest… And if they get elected into Congress as the new Democrats, they’re going to have to fight the Republicans once they go to Capitol Hill,” Megyn noted. “It seems to me that, right now, Republicans are relishing the thought of that, but it could be one of those ‘be careful what you wish for’ situations given the way the country’s going right now.”
In Taibbi’s view, the concern surrounding these candidates should be the fact that they are unlike anything U.S. politics has ever seen. Because while they would be “technically under the same tent as [Vermont Sen.] Bernie Sanders,” he said “they are a very different group of people.”
“I know this [because] I studied at the Soviet college. I’m old enough to have gone to university in the Soviet Union. I’m very familiar with this personality type,” he explained. “I took scientific communism in college, and so I know the difference between the real thing and what Bernie was in 2016.”
When Sanders challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, Taibbi said he was “running as a traditional sort of FDR Democrat.” As he noted, Sanders, “grew up in a poor neighborhood with great reverence for the Democratic Party” and “clearly loves his home state of Vermont.”
The same cannot be said, in his opinion, of Kiros and her comrades. “That is not the vibe with this crew that uses terms like ‘seize the means and means of production’ very freely,” Taibbi noted. “But we’ll see what happens when they get exposed to the general electorate. I think there’s going to be rebuke there, but it will be interesting to see how the party reacts to that.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Taibbi by tuning in to episode 1,351 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.