After DSA candidates roiled traditional Democrats with wins in New York City last week, Tuesday’s primary in a Denver-centered district tested whether the left wing’s appeal could prevail elsewhere. 

It turns out the democratic socialists’ reach extends well beyond New York — and it may well grow before the year is out. 

Melat Kiros, backed by the national Democratic Socialists of America and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, upset Rep. Diana DeGette, who has held her reliably blue seat for almost 30 years. 

“What we’re seeing right now is the response to voters feeling like the party has not actually been fighting for working people,” Kiros told MS NOW last week. 

The result is that Kiros, a critic of the Israeli government and high-ranking Democratic leaders, will likely be a member of Congress come next year. That happened even as DeGette cast the race as a warning, with President Donald Trump’s second term continuing to upend governance from the nation’s capital.

“Now is not the time to gamble and send somebody with no experience to Washington,” DeGette said during a recent candidate forum. “We need a strong, bold, hardened leader who will hold Trump accountable.” 

The result was one of several Colorado results Tuesday to test incumbents or prominent statewide officials navigating a turbulent moment in Democratic politics — one in which voters have shown an appetite for untested fighters over familiar faces who’ve served in Washington’s halls of power. 

The night’s theme wasn’t clear-cut; the three marquee races diverged on everything from ideology to questions of approach and clout. But each pitted an incumbent whose Congressional ties became fodder for a challenger.

In 2020, Democrats’ ability to woo former Gov. John Hickenlooper into the Senate race was seen as a boon for a party trying to unseat incumbent GOP Sen. Cory Gardner, one of the last Republicans left representing a blue state in the Senate. That move came after Hickenlooper’s 2020 presidential primary campaign fizzled. Even so, he faced a somewhat-competitive primary that year, taking 58.7% to his challenger’s 41.3%. Hickenlooper went on to win the seat that November by a little over nine points. 

This year, even with the traditional advantages of incumbency, whether he’d earn a second term was tested. State Sen. Julie Gonzales mounted a primary challenge from his left, and while she is not a democratic socialist at this point, she had a chance to try and capitalize off the energy coming out of New York City and Hickenlooper’s own less-than-commanding 2020 primary showing. 

Hickenlooper, who is projected to have defeated Gonzales, wasn’t the only Colorado senator with something to lose on Tuesday. 

For a senator, running for governor has meant a path to a state’s top job. Not for Sen. Michael Bennet, who drew a Democratic primary challenge from Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser.

Bennet, who mounted a longshot presidential bid in 2020, is among several senators angling to trade Washington for a governor’s mansion — alongside Tommy Tuberville in Alabama, Marsha Blackburn in Tennessee and Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota.

On Tuesday, voters denied him that chance. Weiser defeated Bennet for the Democratic nomination. The state’s attorney general was not a DSA candidate- but he was an option for voters who wanted something other than an elected official whose credentials over the last few years came from time in Congress. 

This summer’s DSA inflection point isn’t necessarily over. In the weeks ahead, DSA-aligned candidates will challenge congressional incumbents in Michigan and Missouri’s primaries, while in Wisconsin, a democratic socialist is vying to become the left’s standard bearer in the presidential battleground’s open race for governor. 

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