Colorado primary tests reach, staying power of Democrats’ socialist surge

Campaign Colorado primary tests reach, staying power of Democrats’ socialist surge Comments: by Chris Stirewalt - 06/30/26 6:00 AM ET Comments: Link copied by Chris Stirewalt - 06/30/26 6:00 AM ET Comments: Link copied

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There have been four Democratic House incumbents defeated in primaries so far in 2026. We’re barely past the halfway point in the primary calendar, so it’s a notable number — already twice as many as in 2018, when “the squad” was born.

Whether or not there’s a fifth member who joins the ranks of the vanquished after today’s Colorado primaries will tell us something important about the nature of the populist revolt currently convulsing the Democratic Party.

First, some level setting.

We don’t know how many of the 22 House Democrats not seeking reelection this year might have lost — veterans like Reps. Jan Schakowsky (Ill.), Danny Davis (Ill.) and Jerry Nadler (N.Y.) — had they stayed for another round. So, those four primary defeats so far may actually understate how intense the pressure really is on the Democratic establishment.

Of course, 22 incumbent departures isn’t high by historical standards (the modern midterm for each party is 23). It certainly isn’t high compared with the withering of the GOP’s old guard this year. Thirty-six House Republicans aren’t seeking reelection, including many who were part of the revolutionary politics of the 2010s GOP.

And that brings us to the pertinent question: Is this a year like 2014 was for Republicans when the Tea Party insurgency scaled the establishment’s battlements in a foreshadowing of the 2016 takeover to come? Will we look back on last week’s results in New York and the ousting of Democratic Reps. Adriano Espaillat and Dan Goldman the same way we now understand the defeat of former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.)? And that may depend on what happens to Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) in her Denver district today.

The journey to the presidency of Donald Trump and the current vassalage of the Republican House to him took shape in the summer of 2014. So maybe we are seeing a similar story take shape with Democrats in the summer of 2026 in which a populist revolt in one party is about to burn our politics down again. Or, maybe this is just another chapter in the long story of Bernie Sanders-ism, in which the very online, younger radicals in the Democratic Party wilt in real-world politics.

Some context is helpful here. Of the four Democratic incumbents defeated so far this year, two were in Texas, where an aggressive GOP gerrymander that pitted incumbents against each other in Houston and in Dallas opened the door for a former member to regain his old seat. Neither race was particularly ideological and didn’t fit the insurgent v. establishment template.

The other two losses — Goldman and Espaillat — were both in New York City, which bears little political resemblance to most of the rest of the country. Just as Nelson Rockefeller and Michael Bloomberg were outliers in the Republican Party of their eras, maybe Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his democratic socialist compatriots are only viable with a New York state of mind.

Certainly, there’s evidence that moderate and establishment-backed Democrats are doing pretty well this cycle, particularly the successes of mainstream Democrats in New York and its environs. Micah Lasher won a tough race in Manhattan to succeed Nadler, Cait Conley prevailed in the Hudson Valley district that’s home to vulnerable GOP Rep. Mike Lawler and Rebecca Bennett cruised in her race in the New Jersey suburbs despite a rough-and-tumble campaign. There are similar stories to tell in Maryland, Utah and California

So if you’re an optimistic Democrat, you might be inclined to say that the “big tent” is simply expanding to include some folks who may have some radical ideas but who bring much-needed energy into a party that has been famously sclerotic in recent years: democratic socialists for the big cities, capitalists for the suburbs; “globalize the intifada” for the campuses, conditional Zionism for the swing states.

That optimistic perspective will be put to the test today in Colorado, where politics were profoundly remade in the most recent grassroots revolt in Democratic politics. DeGette won her seat in 2008, the same year Barack Obama flipped the state from red to blue on the presidential level. And she is, most assuredly, a Democrat of the Obamian progressive mold — a seemingly good fit for a state that has shifted almost 20 points to the left since the start of this century.

But unlike some other longtime big-city Democratic incumbents, DeGette has a district that is mostly white, highly educated and pretty affluent, which is to say: the kind of place that has shown an increasing fondness for democratic socialism and the Justice Democrats, the broader group that functions like the Freedom Caucus did for the GOP in the Tea Party era.

That’s why Melat Kiros, 29, may win in Colorado’s 1st District today. Her bio — lawyer, Ph.D. student, barista, Ethiopian immigrant — reads like she was AI-generated to scratch every itch of younger, disaffected Democrats. Like Darializa Avila Chevalier, who defeated Espaillat in New York, Kiros has generated intense national support for a platform that combines pitchfork economic populism with a pro-Palestine/anti-Israel message that generates lots of heat online.

And it’s not just happening in DeGette’s district. You may have seen the meltdown of term-limited Democratic Gov. Jared Polis after he was censured by the state party. Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, another star of the Obama era, was expected to be a shoo-in to succeed Polis, but state Attorney General Phil Weiser — who gained national attention for his legal actions against businesses that wouldn’t provide services for same-sex weddings — has been in hot pursuit.

Weiser isn’t a democratic socialist, but the gubernatorial race and Polis’s own struggles speak to the same difficulties of Democrats in a state that 20 years ago was at the forefront of a new national party who now find themselves struggling to keep up with the next revolution.

How well Bennet does, but particularly how DeGette fares, may tell us a great deal about the future of Democrats nationally and whether the recent upheaval has been a spring fling and a New York thing or if the Blue Team’s Tea Party moment really has arrived.

Chris Stirewalt is the politics editor for The Hill and the host of “The Hill Sunday.”