The national media and the political analysts inside the Beltway seem to have reached that conclusion after our Democratic primary election last month, when Rep. Diana DeGette was trounced by a democratic socialist, Melat Kiros, and . These results are said to show that Coloradans, and particularly those in Denver, have swung wildly toward the far left.
wrote the New York-based headline writers at The Wall Street Journal on July 2 days after Kiros won the primary. The reason for Colorado’s primary results, the Journal concluded, is that “socialist insurgents” have taken over here. President Donald Trump, predictably, went further, saying that the recent elections in New York and Colorado prove that the “menace of Communism” is rampant.
But do those distant observers have a clear view of Colorado? The truth is that the primary election results had more to do with DeGette and Bennet than with their challengers. The people of Colorado — a state that harbors extremely few socialists — were voicing their disappointment with two incumbents who seem to have lost interest in their constituents.
After 30 years in Congress, Rep. DeGette has been acting as if she is entitled to her seat for life, and she can’t be bothered to waste any of her important time dealing with the people she is supposed to represent. During the primary campaign, she refused media interview requests 鈥� too busy, was the explanation 鈥� while her challenger, Kiros, showed up on every news show and answered every question.
I ran into this attitude when I asked DeGette’s office if I could meet with her to get some information for a book I was writing. I requested 20 minutes with her, either in Denver or Washington. But this could not be arranged. I was informed that the way I could meet with my representative in Congress was to call in to a “telephone town hall,” and hope that I was one of the handful of constituents chosen to ask a question.
If anything, Bennet was even less engaged. He was so sick and tired of representing us in the U.S. Senate that he came home in the middle of his term to run for governor. 聽His primary opponent, Phil Weiser, kept asking why Bennet wasn’t back in Washington, using his Senate seniority in the fight against Donald Trump. The voters were asking the same question.
Both DeGette and Bennet have said that they support universal health care. But in 2016, when 154,000 Coloradans signed the petitions required to put a universal coverage proposal on the state ballot (it was Amendment 69), those two sided with their big corporate contributors and opposed the citizens’ initiative (it lost).
So Colorado voters were showing themselves to be not communists, but constituents. People here actually expected their elected representatives in Washington to pay attention to the folks back home. The real lesson of the Colorado primary election is not a “socialist wave,” but rather that members of Congress should never forget who sent them there.
T. R. Reid, of Denver, is the author of The Healing of America 鈥揂 Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care.
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