The Denver chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, fresh off its most significant electoral win, is already gearing up for its next fight.
This November, the organization is preparing to defend an at-large seat on the Denver City Council that will soon be vacated early by a DSA member. The election will be unlike any other municipal contest, both because of its timing and how it will be conducted.
Councilwoman Sarah Parady announced in June that she would resign her position as a council member representing the entire city in August because of health problems. That means voters will get a chance to choose her replacement through a special election on the November ballot.
Five months later, when the remainder of Parady’s term expires, the seat will again be up in the normal municipal election.
Complicating things further: The winners of those two elections for the exact same position will be decided in different ways. In November, whoever wins the most votes — even if it’s just a slim plurality — will be elected. But to win in April, a candidate must notch more than 50% of the vote; otherwise, a runoff election will take place.
Because the November election will potentially be easier to win than the one in April, the unusual contest likely will draw many candidates. The officially nonpartisan contest could also show how much of an appetite Denver voters have for farther-left candidates in municipal elections against more establishment figures
The Denver DSA chapter is hoping that last month’s upset victory by proud democratic socialist Melat Kiros over longtime U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette — in the Democratic primary to represent Colorado’s 1st Congressional District — will translate to another win in November, and again next April.
The congressional district, where Kiros is now favored to win in November, is made up almost entirely of Denver. Soon, the local chapter of the group will conduct an extensive internal process to decide whom it will endorse for the council at-large special election.
“The left in general, including democratic socialists, believe that the seat should go to somebody who is ideologically similar to Sarah so (that) the ideological makeup of council stays the same,” said Deep Singh Badhesha, a Denver DSA member and a Democratic strategist. “The wind is at our backs after this huge win in June, and this is going to be in November — when the electorate is younger and includes more people of color.”
The Denver council has 13 members, including the two at-large members elected citywide. The other 11 represent geographic districts.
‘Six months to prove that you’re worthy’
The campaign for the November special election won’t actually kick off until Parady formally resigns, which she said she intends to do on Aug. 5. Then candidates will have a short period to file for the seat, according to the city’s election website.
Possible candidates include the seven people who , most of them since Parady announced her resignation. Two of those contenders, Jeff Walker and Kristina Maldonado Bad Hand, said they intended to file for the November election as well.
“Itap an interesting race. Itap going to be a sprint,” said Monica Martinez, executive director of the Fax Partnership nonprofit on East Colfax Avenue, who plans to run in November. “Once you get in there (as the winner), you have basically six months to prove that you’re worthy.”
Martinez said she thought the race was likely to be highly competitive, but she also hoped that her platform — which will focus on housing affordability, anti-displacement measures and transportation — would appeal to voters who supported Kiros. In the June 30 primary, the first-time candidate , beating DeGette by more than 13 percentage points in the three-way race.
The back-to-back timelines for the council campaign are likely to prove tricky, other candidates said.
“Whoever is elected in November, they have to turn around and do it again,” said Walker, an infrastructure and housing advocate who previously served on the Regional Transportation District’s elected board. “They get to run two campaigns in six months.”
Maldonado Bad Hand hopes to become the council’s first tribally enrolled Native American.
“Itap an interesting race this year, for sure,” she said. “There’s a lot of different political candidates that don’t usually end up in these spaces. Itap really exciting to see.”
The special election is all but certain to be another test of the push and pull of the city’s more moderate Democrats running against more progressive contenders.
In the most recent round of council elections in 2023, groups backing moderates spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to challenge some of the most progressive candidates. Besides Parady, Councilwoman Shontel Lewis also won with Denver DSA backing, but .
A changing election system
Next spring’s regular election will use a new system of electing at-large council members after Denver voters approved a change in 2025. In past races, candidates for the two at-large seats all appeared under one question on the ballot and the top two vote-getters won the positions. Voters could support up to two of them.
Under the new setup, the two seats will be split into “At-large Seat A” and “At-large Seat B” positions — Parady’s seat has been designated “B” — and will require a majority of votes to win. If no candidate wins a majority in the first-round election, there will be a runoff in early June between the top two finishers for each position.
The change will make the at-large council elections function more like the races for mayor, auditor, and clerk and recorder, which are citywide and require a majority vote to win.
But before that race plays out, the campaign for this fall’s special election will unfold in a sped-up timeline.
Prospective candidates will need to gather 300 valid signatures to be approved for the ballot. That process will open when the council declares a vacancy (likely the same day as Parady’s formal resignation on Aug. 5). Candidates will have about two weeks to turn in their petitions by Aug. 20, .
DSA may choose a single candidate
If it backs a candidate, the special election will be an indicator of how far the Denver DSA’s influence can reach beyond Kiros’ win.
Susie Ramsey, a co-chair of the Denver DSA, said the chapter will go through multiple steps to decide whom to endorse. It’s possible that the membership could reject all the candidates who come forward. But so far, she said, members seem interested in finding someone to run.
“There is a lot of interest in the chapter in intervening in this race, whatever that looks like,” Ramsey said. “I think the success of the Melat campaign showed that there is a lot of appetite in the city in general for taking on power and taking on races we think we can win and putting socialists in government.”
The Denver DSA will begin its process, which is essentially an internal primary election system, by asking interested candidates to fill out a questionnaire. Then it will invite some of those candidates to participate in a forum. Finally, members will weigh in by voting. If enough agree on one candidate, the organization will formally endorse that person.
Assuming a DSA candidate does run, the race will provide clues for how Denver voters think about federal versus municipal elections — and how significant it was that the congressional primary had a 15-term incumbent, DeGette, for DSA supporters to rally against.
The two current at-large council members are largely DSA-aligned, but they landed in the seats under the previous election system. In the combined at-large race in 2023, Parady and Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez of the total votes in a large field.
Federal and local politics have changed significantly since 2023, with some indicators pointing to a more progressive voting base in Denver. The local DSA chapter added hundreds of members this year and is now up to 2,000 people, Ramsey said.
“What we saw is that if our membership is able to really cohere behind a candidate that we feel strongly about and that makes us feel really excited, we can take on a citywide race and we can win — and we can win by a big margin,” she said. “That also means that Denver DSA has a lot of responsibility to vet its candidates.”
