Rep. Diana DeGette has had a tough few weeks.
The Colorado Democrat is facing her first competitive primary in her 30-year House career on Tuesday. After a series of confrontations with voters — including a public meltdown in a coffee shop — an unfavorable poll kept out of public view, and speculation that she called on powerful allies to pressure venues to cancel planned participation in a rally for her opponent, a slew of new super PACs swooped in to keep DeGette’s campaign afloat in the final weeks of the race — including one funded by the pro-Israel lobby.
While DeGette has spent the campaign’s home stretch defending her record as a progressive, her leading opponent, democratic socialist Melat Kiros, has never been more optimistic.
After leftist candidates rode to victory in New York last week on a growing wave of anti-incumbent sentiment, Kiros said her campaign saw a major uptick in donors and volunteers. A coalition of leftist organizations backing her has run an aggressive field campaign and say they’ve out-organized DeGette, who didn’t take the challenge seriously at first and was almost kicked off the ballot in March. In a district full of the kinds of young voters who helped socialists win last week in New York, Kiros’s backers say a similar coalition could power another socialist challenger to topple the Colorado incumbent on Tuesday.
