If I knew which candidates would catch fire and which would fade into obscurity, I’d be retired with multiple vacation homes. That said, a candidate who hasn’t caught fire — by which I mean gotten the attention of politically engaged Democrats the way Kat Abughazaleh did — is doing a pretty good job in a district a couple of miles from where I’m sitting right now. I’ll use her campaign as a case study of how Democrats can use social media and events to organize without spending massive sums.

Melat Kiros is a 28 year-old former corporate attorney, PhD student and barista. Kiros is running in the CO-01 primary against Diana DeGette, who has been in Congress since 1997, longer than Kiros has been alive (a fact Kiros repeats regularly). Kiros is a member of the DSA and has been endorsed by Justice Democrats. Here’s her speech at the Denver County assembly to get a sense of the kind of candidate she is. It’s a great example of mentioning the fundamental values of the Democratic party:

Kiros is also good at social media. Her Instagram feed shows her appearing at a number of events at different venues in Denver during the last couple of months. It also shows her reacting to big events, etc. The usual stuff, but unlike less adept social media politicians, it comes off as authentic and unscripted. This month she’s doing coffee shop meetups. She also did happy hours, an event at a comic shop, and ICE whistle making. (All of her socials are linked on the bottom of her campaign website, but the events page only shows events starting in mid-March.)

Kiros has three main critiques of DeGette. One is that she takes corporate donations and generally a lot of money that sways her vote. That claim was bolstered by a report that one of DeGette’s big donors appeared in the Epstein files, trying to get De Gette in front of Epstein. (DeGette says she was unaware of her donor’s actions). The second charge is that DeGette takes money from AIPAC and has voted to arm Israel to commit the Gaza genocide. Kiros’ third critique is that DeGette had some good years but she’s phoning it in now. Note that DeGette’s predecessor was Pat Schroeder, who retired in her mid-fifties. DeGette is 68.

DeGette hasn’t done anything to dispel these accusations, in fact, she’s got a couple of self-owns on her record. First, Kiros used social media [Instagram post] to organize her supporters to become named delegates by their precinct so they could vote in the Denver assembly (which is like a caucus). Candidates must get at least 30% of the caucus vote to appear on the ballot, and ballot order is determined by the vote tally. In the Denver caucus that picked delegates go to the final caucus, Kiros received support of 63% of the delegates — DeGette got 35%. The final caucus will be held on March 27, and it’s possible that De Gette will be disqualified if enough of her delegates flip, or if some fail to show. There were almost 1,000 delegates at the initial caucus, so this is no mean feat on Kiros’ part.

If you need evidence that a candidate is phoning it in, there’s not a lot better than them barely being able to organize enough delegates to put them a distant second in the nominating caucus. No matter what happens, it’s pretty much a lock that Kiros’ name will appear first on the ballot.

DeGette’s second self-inflicted wound was an ugly incident at a meet-and-greet, where a young woman got in DeGette’s face about her vote to arm Israel. DeGette tried to play it off as a vote for “defensive” weapons (like Iron Dome) but come the fuck on. Guns are guns. The woman asked DeGette to support the Block the Bombs act. DeGette said it was a poorly written piece of legislation and that if this was the only issue the woman cared about, then she shouldn’t vote for DeGette. The woman walked away after saying that DeGette doesn’t think that Palestinians deserve to live, and DeGette ran after her and tried to grab her. After the woman gets away, DeGette asks if people got that on video, as if the constituent being rude was the story. Here’s the video on reddit, which anyone should be able to watch. Here’s Kiros’ response on Instagram, let me know if it doesn’t work for you.

I thought she did a good job by not dwelling on De Gette’s bad behavior and explaining why DeGette’s “defensive weapon” line was bullshit. She has a similar video responding to Epstein file thing — she said that she was sure that DeGette didn’t meet Epstein, but (paraphrasing here), if you lie down with dogs, you get fleas.

FEC reporting is quarterly until candidates get close to the election, and Kiros raised around $200k in Q4 last year, all from individual donors. As I wrote a while back, on paper CO-01 is an ideal district to test the notion that a hard-working candidate with a relatively small bank account can mount a meaningful challenge. It’s geographically very small, pretty liberal, and whoever wins the Democratic primary is a shoo-in for the general in this D+28 district. It’s also, according to Kiros, has one of the highest percentages of younger voters in the nation. There’s no reason — other than laziness, complacency or illiberalism — that DeGette should have to rely on corporate donors, and her Israel vote is a total unforced error for someone representing a dark blue district.

So we have a candidate running the same playbook that Kat Abughazaleh ran in IL-09 — heavy on social media, unabashedly anti-Gaza genocide, funded by small donors, and doing a lot of community events. There’s another candidate in the race, Wanda James. The news reports I’ve read is that she’s chosen to collect signatures to get on the ballot, but her campaign website is soliciting caucus reps. So she might split the vote in the primary, we’ll see. At a minimum, DeGette better step up her game, because there’s blood in the water, and if it isn’t Kiros in 2026, it might be someone else in 2028.