If Democrats regain control of the House this fall, DeGette could lead . She says she would have the chance to bring a “Medicare For All” bill — one of the Democrats’ white whale policies — to a vote. She also vows to use that position to make strides toward banning government restrictions on abortion access.

But her opponents in the June 30 primary, lawyer Melat Kiros and University of Colorado Regent Wanda James, say it����ap too little, too late.

“She’s not really done anything effectively in the last 10 years,” said Kiros, also a barista who’s pursuing a doctorate in public policy.

“We don’t have leadership in Congressional District 1,” said James, who is also a marijuana entrepreneur. “Seniority, when you have done nothing and not been effective, is not good.”

But DeGette is fiercely defending her record, saying her opponents don’t understand what the job actually takes and that she’s accomplished plenty in her three decades in Congress.

“I’ve never seen anybody pass a piece of legislation to lower costs through ‘disruption,’ ” she said in an interview with The Denver Post, referring to her opponents’ strategies.

The Democratic primary in dark-blue Denver for Colorado’s 1st Congressional District. The three-way race heated up earlier this year when Kiros soundly defeated DeGette in the Democrats’ Denver County assembly. Though the party assembly process isn’t typically representative of the people voting in the full primary election — in which Democrats as well as unaffiliated voters can participate — the event raised eyebrows among political observers.

It was the first time DeGette, 68, had lost a county assembly vote since she was initially elected in 1996.

“I think she has lost some contact with her constituents based on what you saw at the county assembly,” said former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, who has endorsed James. “It����ap just time for a change.”

DeGette went on to narrowly earn her place on the ballot in late March at the 1st Congressional District party assembly, just clearing the eligibility threshold while Kiros, 29, won top billing. James, 62, landed on the ballot through a petition process.

Whoever wins the nomination will become the favorite in the November midterm against other general election candidates, including presumptive Republican nominee Christy Peterson.

If DeGette loses, the new representative would enter Congress as a freshman lawmaker. Karen Middleton, the president of the Cobalt Abortion Fund, an abortion-rights advocacy group based in Colorado, said that could be a problem during a critical moment in healthcare policy.

“Every time you turn over a member of Congress, you lose seniority, you lose committee assignments, you lose leadership,” she said. Cobalt hasn’t endorsed any of the three primary candidates.

A look at DeGette’s accomplishments

One of the main criticisms lobbed at DeGette in the primary campaign so far has focused on the .

During her time in Congress, DeGette has been the primary sponsor of 205 bills. Seven of them either became law or were incorporated into other bills that later became law, according to .

But focusing on that figure alone shows a fundamental misunderstanding of civics, said James Owens, a spokesman for DeGette’s campaign. Members of Congress do far more work than just introducing bills, he pointed out. They secure funding for projects in their districts, serve on committees, provide services to constituents, bring amendments, and work behind the scenes to build coalitions and shape policies.

Lawmakers can also find ways to weave their policies into other bills that may not bear their names.

“The effectiveness of a legislator is in their ability to get policy passed. And she’s been able to do that through all these different mechanisms, and those various avenues aren’t captured by a simple Google search,” Owens said. “Folks in Denver don’t care if your name is on the bill or if you were pushing to get it included in another bill, they just want the legislation to pass.”

Owens said by his count, DeGette has had a major role in passing more than 40 pieces of legislation for things like , tightening , allowing the Food and Drug Administration to , and funding for projects in the district. Her team says she also played a role in shaping parts of the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare.

DeGette was an architect of the 21st Century Cures Act, . That’s another bill that doesn’t include her name because a Senate version of the legislation, which was designed to accelerate biomedical research, is what eventually passed, Owens said.

DeGette says she’s also been instrumental in educating fellow members of Congress and building coalitions on complex issues like abortion access. She’s been one of two chairs of the Reproductive Freedom Caucus since 2005.

“The next day after Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court, I called (then-Speaker) Nancy Pelosi on her cell phone … and I said, ‘Nancy, we need to put the Women’s Health Protection Act on the floor next week — and I will guarantee you I have the votes.’ ”

The House later passed that bill, but ultimately it failed in the Senate. DeGette said she has begun working on a plan to bring that legislation back if Democrats regain the House majority.

“I’m sure both of my primary opponents are pro-choice,” she said. “… But if you have a brand new person coming in saying, ‘Put my bill on a very important topic on the floor next week,’ they’re not going to have any ability to do that.”

DeGette is one of 45 members of the Democratic caucus on the litigation task force, which files legal motions and amicus briefs to support and challenge certain efforts in the courts. Earlier this month, to the U.S. Supreme Court that encouraged the justices to protect access to the abortion medication mifepristone.

DeGette has been the prime sponsor on eight unsuccessful bills related to stem cell research but was able to work with Obama on his executive order to .

Despite those actions, the a joint project from Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia that analyzes items moving through Congress, ranked DeGette as below average in effectiveness in eight of 14 terms analyzed.

The center rated five of her terms as average. Only one term, her first, was rated as above average.

The group considers how skilled members of Congress are at moving their agenda items forward. It has ranked U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, who represents Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District, as one of the most effective lawmakers in the House. Neguse, a Lafayette resident, is the House’s assistant Democratic leader.

But DeGette’s team says rankings like that lack context and don’t take into account all legislative accomplishments.

For instance, DeGette  in 2019. to be one of the nine impeachment managers for Trump’s 2021 impeachment trial in the Senate.

Promises for her next two years

If her fellow Democrats regain the majority, DeGette believes that, as the current ranking Democratic member of the Energy and Commerce Committee’s , she would become chair of that subcommittee.

Then, she would be able to decide which bills come before it. She would set the agenda, which would allow her to bring legislation implementing Medicare for All to the committee. For it to be successful from there, she said, she would lean on her connections to build a support group.

“It����ap having the vision and the ability to write the legislation, and then to push the legislation through and having the contacts to make that happen,” she said. “Legislative politics is a team sport, so you have to be able to be the captain of the team.”

Both James and Kiros are also supporters of Medicare For All, a proposal that can vary in details but typically means single-payer health insurance coverage for all Americans in a program run by the government.

DeGette said her hope is for Democrats to use the next two years to regain power on the national stage.

If the party wins a majority in the House or Senate in the midterms, she said that will allow Democrats to begin developing major policies that they can enact if they then win the presidency in 2028.

“I actually see the next two years as a huge opportunity,” she said.

DeGette has defeated primary challengers before, but this time her opponents have lined up long endorsement rosters. Kiros and local elected officials, including Reps. Javier Mabrey and Denver City Councilwoman Sarah Parady. James counts Webb and his wife, Wilma, as well as Ken Salazar, a former U.S. senator and Interior secretary, along with .

Both challengers also have fundraising in the six figures, with Kiros reporting about $375,000 in contributions through March 31 and James reporting about $234,000.

But DeGette has more than held her own, reporting contributions approaching $1 million, including heavy support from political action committees. And she from a litany of labor unions, abortion-rights groups and other organizations on her website.

Kiros and James offer something new

If Kiros is able to continue her momentum from the assembly process and win the primary, she would join a wave of young Democrats nationwide who are seeking to oust longstanding political figures.

Kiros, a Democratic socialist, sees herself aligning with members of Congress like U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Summer Lee of Pennsylvania.

She said that after Democrats lost the 2024 presidential and many congressional elections, she believes the party needs more competitive primaries.

“We need to make sure that we’re sending the best of the best to the general. And particularly looking at Democrats that have been there for decades — and so I looked at the congresswoman,” she said, referring to DeGette. “There’s nothing in her record to point to that shows that she’s fighting for working people right now in a way that����ap meaningful and tangible.”

DeGette responded to criticism that she has been in office for too long during her interview with The Post.

“I think there are people in Congress who’ve been there too long. But I think the voters of the 1st Congressional District know me, and they know that I’m a fighter for their values, and you need both,” she said. “You need people who have the experience and the leadership roles to know when the time is right to get these things done, and that����ap where I’m at.”

While Kiros is aligned with some of DeGette’s values, she has distinguished herself with her views on the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip. While DeGette has focused her comments on the need for humanitarian aid, Kiros has more directly criticized Israel and questioned its legitimacy as a state.

She said in a recent interview that she wouldn’t support providing offensive or defensive weapons to the country.

James, a Navy veteran and the owner of the cannabis company Simply Pure, said that if she was elected, she would do a better job of using the bully pulpit than DeGette does.

“I’ve lived here now for 20 years, and I don’t think that I have ever seen my congresswoman being interviewed on any television show,” she said. “I don’t believe I have ever seen my congresswoman stepping out and holding Congress or the other party to task anywhere.”

DeGette has taken a somewhat lower-profile approach to her position than some of her colleagues. She is less active on social media and appears at public events less often than some of her colleagues in Colorado’s congressional delegation.

She was absent, for instance, during a recent news conference in Denver with Mayor Mike Johnston and Democratic National Committee leaders as the group considers hosting its 2028 presidential nominating convention in her district. U.S. Rep. Jason Crow was present, but DeGette said she had a conflict. She said she did meet with the DNC delegation during its visit.

“Diana DeGette is nonexistent and has been nonexistent as long as I’ve been a resident of CD1,” James said. “That����ap why I’m running. … In Colorado’s capital city, CD1 should be leading the conversation.”

Mail ballots for the Democratic primary are set to go out starting June 8. The 1st District generally follows Denver city boundaries and includes Glendale and Holly Hills.

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“I promise you, in a few years, he’s going to be something huge in football,” Noor Al-Khaouli told me Monday when I called about new Broncos linebacker Red Murdock, the last pick of the 2026 NFL Draft. “Because I’ve seen how smart the guy is. And how quickly he picks up things.

“If I explained a concept to him in (his) bio psych course, what would take me a week to explain to other people, he picked up right away. And I’m sure he’s like that on the field. He’s a very observant guy.”

He’s a researcher. A scholar.

“Red was never irrelevant, my friend,” Noor told me by phone from upstate New York. “Never, ever, ever, ever.”

Al-Khaouli first met Red in 2023, when the former was an athletic department tutor assigned to help Murdock, then a University of Buffalo linebacker, with his psychology studies. She saw a kid with a good head, a big heart and too many irons in the fire.

“At the time (I met him), Red was really struggling with his time management,” Noor recalled. “He was working a part-time job, he was playing football, he was studying until 2 or 3 a.m. to catch up on all his homework,” while having to go lift with his teammates at the crack of dawn.

“He was really passionate about psychology, really passionate about helping people,” Noor said. “Honestly, if he weren’t a football player, he would make a fantastic psychologist and community worker.”

Except he’s really good at the football part, too. As an undergrad, the 22-year-old Murdock is an empathic, curious, introspective sort who reads Angela Duckworth. With pads on, he’s a freight train with bad intentions.

Red didn’t miss a game as a collegian, breaking the FBS career forced fumble record (17) in just 34 appearances, a record that had once been held by another Buffalo Bulls player with NFL bona fides — Khalil Mack. He posted 143 tackles, 13.5 tackles for losses, five sacks and six fumbles forced last fall, despite playing with a fractured heel and torn ligaments in his right ankle.

“(The Broncos) are lucky to have him,” Noor said. “He’s a sweetheart.”

The two became friends, academic colleagues and even presented at a conference together. Murdock eventually became a research assistant for two years with the University of Buffalo’s “Narrative Lab” under psychology professor Hollen Reischer.

“In one of our studies, the older ladies loved him,” Noor chuckled. “They would actually ask about him, to see if he was coming in to participate in interviews (that day).”

Mr. Irrelevant remains a voracious self-help reader and a disciple of — in which acolytes must undergo at least two 45-minute workouts, drink a gallon of water, read at least 10 pages of non-fiction and take a photograph of their progress daily.

“If I would bring chocolate or something into the lab, he would be completely repulsed by it,” Noor laughed. “That guy is dedicated.”

To his craft. To his studies. To his friends and his community. Red and Noor are both Virginia natives and shared an interest in community outreach. When she was tutoring Murdock, they’d sometimes go off on shared tangents about how some nonprofits weren’t really committed to the communities they serve, and how “a lot of people do this to look good.”

Julia Dietz, however, was not one of those people. at the University of Buffalo a few years back. It was initially launched as a branch of AOC Homework Helpers — — but has since changed its affiliation.

Its mission is to provide tutoring for K-12 students in underserved communities through free, virtual one-on-one sessions. The organization currently has roughly 300 volunteers who work with students across multiple regions out east.

More than a year ago, Dietz got a note from Noor, another UB grad, to say that a Bulls football player wanted to talk about how he could help. When Red made his pitch, he didn’t miss.

“There’s a real need for these services in my hometown,” Murdock told her. “There are a lot of kids that need access to education.”

“He was unbelievably passionate in the meeting,” Julia told me. “I said, ‘Absolutely, I’ll help you with this.'”

Which is why UB Homework Helpers now has branches in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Petersburg, Va., 25 minutes due south of Richmond.

Virginia’s cadre of Homework Helpers is Murdock’s baby. He spent more than three hours pre-launch reaching out to teachers and educational staff in his old hometown, crossing names off a spreadsheet, just to scout for help and to get the word out.

“Why do you want to give back so badly?” Noor asked him once.

“I wish I’d had something like this in my hometown growing up,” he replied.

Red’s in charge of roughly 50 volunteers, all while supervising them as a volunteer himself. So as his draft preparations cranked up, Dietz offered to take some of the Petersburg branch off his plate.

“I need to do as much as I can,” Murdock replied. “I want to use my platform to bring as much awareness as I can to it.”

The tough cookie’s got a gooey heart. You’d trust Red with your special teams or your 3-year-old. At a research gathering a few years back, the Broncos’ seventh-round draft pick found himself talking to the Reischers ‘ young daughter at her home. Before long, the child had Red reading her snippets from the classic children’s book “Where The Wild Things Are,” acting out every part.

“She was rapt,” Reischer texted me Monday.

Khalil Murdock was nicknamed “Big Red” as a youth for being born with freckles and crimson locks. He moved from Petersburg, Va., to Hopewell, Va., when he was 10. He graduated from Hopewell High, where he played with future Ohio State and Patriots tailback TreVeyon Henderson, in 2021. He graduated from Buffalo in the spring of 2024 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology — magna cum laude with a 3.5 GPA.

“He wants to be ‘Dr. Murdock’ someday,” Noor said. “He’s a psychology guy. He’s very nerdy.”

He’s also loving. Loving and loyal. After a massive junior season that saw him rack up 156 tackles with 16.5 TFLs and seven forced fumbles for the Bulls, reps from Power 4 schools came knocking with cash in hand, trying to entice him to jump ship. He stuck it out in Buffalo.

“I’ve had opportunities,” Red recalled to reporters over the weekend. “But I mentioned earlier being a team-first guy — that����ap all that matters to me.”

“He didn’t want to leave his teammates in Buffalo,” Noor added. “Red does not care about money. You could offer him thousands of dollars. He’s not giving up his loyalty. Or his values.”

Irrelevant? Not to her. Never, ever, ever, ever.

Melat Kiros — who’s also a lawyer and a Ph.D student when she isn’t behind the counter at the Whittier Cafe — is picking up momentum in her first-ever political campaign. She’s running against longtime U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette in the Democratic primary for Colorado’s 1st Congressional District in Denver.

DeGette, who was sworn into office the year Kiros was born, has .

But Kiros, a Democratic socialist, rose to prominence after she demolished DeGette in the Democrats’ Denver County assembly last month. And while political observers, including Kiros herself, say the assembly process isn’t actually representative of who will vote in the June primary, the win still marked a surprising development in a race that many considered to be predetermined.

“This has nothing to do with me and everything to do with the fact that Denver Democrats want a fighter — somebody who is actually committed to transformative change,” Kiros said in an interview this week with The Denver Post.

Kiros didn’t keep DeGette off the ballot, but she gave her a scare. Kiros won 646 votes, or the support of 63% of those present at the county assembly. DeGette won 336, or 32% of the votes.

It was the first time DeGette had lost a county assembly vote since she initially won her seat in Congress in the 1996 election.

Two weeks after the county assembly, DeGette, 68, narrowly won her place on the primary ballot at the 1st Congressional District party assembly, receiving 33% support — just above the 30% threshold to make the ballot. A third primary candidate, University of Colorado Regent Wanda James, , but her voter signatures are still under review by the state.

Denver-based state Rep. Javier Mabrey, who endorsed Kiros, said he saw her as part of a larger movement within the Democratic Party: voters who don’t want to see the same types of candidates elected.

Like New York City’s new Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Kiros is a more progressive Democrat than those who currently make up the majority of the party’s members in Congress, he said.

“I think there’s an energy for politics that says, ‘Our problems are more complicated than Donald Trump alone. We’ve got to confront the conditions that led to Donald Trump,” Mabrey said of the Republican president. “I think Melat has tapped into that.”

Kiros will still have a long way to go if she hopes to pull off a win of the June 30 primary, however. The assembly gathered only a tiny sliver of the 416,000 people eligible to vote in the June Democratic primary — 230,000 unaffiliated voters and 186,000 registered Democrats, as of March 1, according to the secretary of state’s office.

A spokesperson for DeGette’s campaign said the congresswoman was proud to have made the ballot through the assembly process.

“This is ultimately only a small first step with a small group of people,” Jennie Peek-Dunstone wrote in an email. “Now, we are talking with hundreds of thousands of Democrats and unaffiliated voters across the District. Diana has deep support across Denver because she’s always fought for us. She’ll keep championing our progressive values by standing up to Trump, fighting for universal health care, and defending our democracy — just as she always has.”

Denver is a Democratic stronghold, meaning that whoever wins the primary is all but guaranteed to win the general election. In 2024, DeGette defeated her Republican challenger with 77% of the vote.

Kiros’ background

A child of immigrants, Kiros was born in Ethiopia but moved to Denver with her family as a baby. She left the city to attend Washington College in Maryland and went on to attend law school at the University of Notre Dame. After passing the bar exam, she began work as a securities regulation attorney at , one of the biggest law firms in the country.

Kiros said that two years in, firm leaders fired her for a by Hamas in Israel, which responded by launching a war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. In the post, she questioned Israel’s legitimacy as a state and disavowed about the rise in antisemitism.

“This letter rightfully rebukes the anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and bigotry of all kinds that has spiked in recent weeks, but then goes on (to my confusion) to cite ‘calls for the elimination of the Israeli state’ as anti-Semitism,” she wrote. “… To conflate such bigotry with the geo-political question of Israel’s legitimacy is one of the greatest travesties in this conflict.”

More recently, Kiros has been criticized for sharing last month with a video that said Democrats “fellate Israel” and “suck (expletive).” The video was promoting an online rally for progressive candidates and speakers.

Kiros said she didn’t write that phrasing and doesn’t endorse that language.

After her firing from the law firm, Kiros says she decided to get more involved in politics. Now, she’s pursuing a doctorate in public policy with a focus on “democracy reform” at .

In 2024, she volunteered as the communications director for Democrat John Padora’s campaign in Colorado’s 4th Congressional District — one of the most conservative seats in the state and now represented by U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert.

‘Our party isn’t fighting back’

Kiros’ online ads , calling out not only DeGette but also former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. One shows large Xs over photos of former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and former President Joe Biden while Kiros says: “We hear politicians say over and over that we need bold leadership, progress and change. We’ve heard this for years. Decades. But they never deliver.”

“Our party isn’t fighting back like they should,” she goes on to say.

Kiros is endorsed by the Denver chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and the Justice Democrats. She says that if elected, she sees herself aligning with members of Congress like U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Summer Lee of Pennsylvania and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

She would use her position, she said, to “call out the Democrats who are not actually fighting for our values” and pressure them to change the votes she disagrees with. That could include civil protests and threatening quorum.

Her top three policy priorities would be passing “Medicare for All” and universal child care and creating a publicly financed election system similar to the one that Denver uses in city elections, which includes public matching for smaller-dollar donations.

DeGette supporters emphasize that the congresswoman is also a co-sponsor of Medicare for All legislation. Angie Anderson, a Platt Park resident and mother of 2 young children, said she’s heard DeGette talk about it.

“I consider myself pretty progressive, and I think that she represents me very well,” said Anderson, who said she has voted for DeGette in every election since she’s lived in Denver.

Ocasio-Cortez even gave DeGette a shout-out for her support of the policy .

“She is one of the most powerful people in Congress on health care,” Ocasio-Cortez said to the crowd of 30,000 people. “And Diana DeGette is a co-sponsor of Medicare for All. She believes in the guaranteed right to health care for every American. Thank you for electing her.”

Anderson said she thinks Kiros and DeGette are actually pretty similar politically.

“I just think the real difference is that Rep. DeGette has many years of experience and is actually a very skilled policymaker and legislator,” she said. “I take issue with the idea that youth and inexperience is fundamentally required to effect change.”

What did assembly win mean?

After Kiros’ assembly win, a wide swath of political observers jumped in to say that while the event’s outcome was surprising, it wasn’t particularly meaningful for the upcoming primary.

Doug Friednash, a former Denver city attorney and chief of staff to then-Gov. John Hickenlooper, wrote in a Post opinion piece recently that assemblies exclude the vast majority of voters, resulting in a “tiny, highly motivated slice of activists” to determine results.

“More and more extreme candidates in both parties have effectively used these caucuses to fly under the radar and effectively organized a small cadre of activists, like the Democratic Socialists, to show up at the caucus, leading to stunning results that make most voters shake their heads in extreme disbelief,” wrote Friednash, now a partner with Denver-based law firm Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber and Schreck.

At the very least, the win showed that Kiros’ team found a way to out-organize DeGette’s team. But it remains to be seen if that will continue through the primary election.

Kiros and her supporters agree that her assembly win doesn’t mean she’s a shoo-in to win the primary.

“I don’t think that folks who talk about the assembly not being reflective of the general electorate are wrong,” Kiros said. But she noted it was unusual for an incumbent to lose an assembly vote.

“DeGette has been challenged before,” Kiros said. “This is a different kind of campaign.”

Mabrey said finding ways to raise money for her campaign will be one of the keys for Kiros in the remaining months before the primary.

“Melat����ap going to need an injection of grassroots campaign cash to keep up,” he said.

Through the end of 2025, she had raised about $204,000 and spent nearly $138,000. DeGette had raised about $729,000 and spent $507,000 through then, while James had raised about $179,000 and spent $86,600.

Despite having lower cash reserves than DeGette, Kiros is getting recognized more often when in public, she said. During a recent hourlong interview with The Post at a Capitol Hill coffee shop, two people stopped by the table to introduce themselves and voice their support for her.

“I’m totally voting for you, dude,” one said. “Your campaign is (expletive) awesome.”

Between now and June, Kiros plans to knock on doors, call voters, work with businesses and use digital advertising to get her message out. Nearly 200 people volunteered at a recent weekend canvassing event, she said.

“The thing that we need to do to win,” she said, “is to give people enough faith that getting involved will make a difference.”

Staff writer Seth Klamann contributed to this story.

The shock drubbing, delivered ahead of a formal assembly vote next week, was among signs that Democrats participating in the party’s caucuses and assemblies are dissatisfied with incumbent officials. Some other incumbents, including U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper in his reelection race and Sen. Michael Bennet in the governor’s race, have been leaning on the petition route to the ballot rather than facing primary opponents at the March 28 state assembly.

At the Denver Democrats’ county assembly on Saturday, Kiros — a 28-year-old doctoral student and former lawyer — won 646 votes, or 63%, compared to DeGette’s 336 votes, or 32%. The result was the first time DeGette, 68, has lost a county assembly vote since she entered Congress in 1997, Kiros’ campaign said.

If that level of support holds at the party’s 1st Congressional District assembly on March 27, Kiros will cruise to a place on the June 30 primary ballot. DeGette, meanwhile, cannot afford to lose any more ground: If fewer than 30% of delegates support her at that virtual assembly, she won’t make the ballot at all. Time is rapidly running out to switch tactics and get on the ballot by submitting voter signatures, with petitions due to the state on Wednesday.

“I think it����ap a testament to the organizing we were doing and the lack of organizing (DeGette) was doing on her part — and her thinking she would coast through,” Kiros said in an interview. ” … It was just an incredible, incredible day, and I’m really proud of what our campaign was able to accomplish.”

DeGette campaign spokeswoman Jennie Peek-Dunstone said the congresswoman “received more than the required threshold and we are confident she will be on the primary ballot.”

The polling win does not, by itself, mean that Kiros is a front-runner to prevail in the June 30 primary election, and her campaign will still need to flip DeGette delegates if it wants to keep the congresswoman off the ballot. That’s far from a sure thing, especially for a candidate with the experience and name recognition of DeGette.

But it does speak to the Kiros’ campaign’s organizing capabilities, and the results also represent something of a wakeup call, said Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver.

“DeGette and others know their party and the people associated with it are not terribly popular right now,” he said. “Democrats in general elections have the wind at their back right now, but incumbents in primaries — not so much. It����ap a harder environment.”

DeGette faces progressive challenge

A first-time candidate and daughter of Ethiopian immigrants, Kiros previously worked as a lawyer in New York. She was fired after writing in late 2023 criticizing law firms — including her own — that had signed onto a letter opposing anti-Israel protests. She then moved back to Colorado and entered a Ph.D program at the University of Colorado Denver.

She’s run a progressive challenge to DeGette, backing “Medicare for All,” universal child care and an embargo on arms sales to Israel, a nation that she has accused of committing a genocide against Palestinians.

Kiros has also been endorsed by the Justice Democrats, a left-wing Democratic group that’s backed candidates like now-U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna and Ilhan Omar.

In her Denver assembly speech Saturday, DeGette accused Kiros of lying about her — a comment that drew boos from the audience.

Already a longtime supporter of Medicare for All, DeGette has backed more progressive causes in the past year. She for a halt to providing offensive arms to Israel, and she told assembly-goers Saturday that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be abolished and that she wouldn’t support any funding for the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran. Those pledges drew cheers.

Kiros’ preference poll win was fueled by pre-assembly organizing, her campaign and supporters said, particularly on the part of the Denver chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. Deep Singh Badhesha, a DSA member who supported Kiros’ campaign, said organizers had group chats, stickers, food — they’d even set up a system to find babysitters for those who needed it. Such organization also helped the campaign sidestep technology problems that delayed the assembly, he said.

Those tech problems have contributed to lingering concerns among the DeGette campaign about assignment of delegates for the assembly next week, though her campaign said she was not disputing Kiros’ polling victory.

The assembly results come amid a broader surge of challenges to incumbent Democrats nationwide by often-younger and more progressive candidates. More than a dozen Democratic U.S. House members will face primary challenges this spring and summer, .

Some of the contests pit older incumbents against newcomers. Some feature moderates competing against liberals. Some of the matchups have resulted from the nationwide redistricting wars that redrew incumbents’ seats. Most of the races share a common ingredient: challengers seeking to move past the party’s losses in 2024 — and to bring more energy to the fight against President Donald Trump.

“Within the Democratic Party, it����ap this notion of how you best respond to a country that Trump is dominating when you’re all, as Democrats, unhappy with that,” Paul Teske, a professor at CU Denver and former longtime dean of its School of Public Affairs, told The Denver Post on Tuesday. (Kiros was a student of Teske’s last year.)

In addition to Kiros, University of Colorado Regent Wanda James is also running against DeGette in the primary. She did not participate in the assembly process Saturday and planned to file a petition to make the ballot.

‘Scared of the base’

Elsewhere, in the Democratic race for governor, Bennet’s campaign as he filed his primary ballot petition that he wouldn’t also seek a spot on the ballot through the caucus and assembly process. His rival, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, is relying on next week’s state assembly in Pueblo to make the primary ballot.

State Sen. Julie Gonzales has launched a progressive Senate primary campaign against Hickenlooper, who dropped out of the assembly process last week after initially participating. Hickenlooper’s campaign noted that he didn’t complete the assembly process during his first Senate campaign in 2020 and that he’s already submitted petitions for his place on the primary ballot.

In an interview, Gonzales countered that the senator was “scared of the base.”

Some left-wing-versus-moderate fights are set for state legislative races, too. In the Colorado attorney general’s race, two newcomer candidates, David Seligman and Hetal Doshi, are challenging Secretary of State Jena Griswold and Boulder District Attorney Michael Dougherty for the Democratic nomination.

In a news release Tuesday morning, Seligman’s campaign said he led Griswold by 2 percentage points in a straw poll of Democratic assembly delegates statewide.

Teske and Masket underscored that success in the Democrats’ assembly process, which often draws more progressive or active party members, does not necessarily translate to a high likelihood of victory in the June primaries.

Kiros’ campaign and organizing helped turn out motivated and informed delegates and supporters Saturday, and they seemed to catch DeGette flat-footed. But the June contest will feature tens of thousands of voters, including many who are unaffiliated, and will require campaign organizing on a vastly different scale.

It will also require money. DeGette had more than $535,000 on hand as of Dec. 31, compared to Kiros’ $64,000. After 30 years in office, which has included DeGette sweeping aside the occasional primary challenge, she can also boast strong name recognition.

“I was surprised,” Teske said of Saturday’s results. “I think Melat’s campaign organized well, got a lot of people out, got young people excited. … Whether it builds any momentum or changes anything is hard to say, because it����ap still hard to beat an incumbent.”

The New York Times contributed to this story.

“We will not allow America to become an oligarchy,” Sanders said to cheers. “This nation was built by working people, and we are not going to let a handful of billionaires run the government.”

Sanders, speaking alongside U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, visited the city as part of a tour the pair are taking across the country  to garner early support for Democrats before the midterm elections in 2026.

“An extreme concentration of power and corruption is taking over this country like never before,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “A better world is possible.”

Ocasio-Cortez, who said the crowd was estimated to be 30,000 people, praised each of Colorado’s Democratic members of Congress while addressing the park.

“We need a Democratic Party that fights harder for us, too. That means communities choosing and voting for Democrats and elected officials who know how to stand for the working class,” she said. “Colorado, I want to thank you for working hard to make that happen.”

She also took the opportunity to call out Republican Rep. Gabe Evans, who narrowly defeated Democrat Yadira Caraveo in the November election to represent Colorado’s 8th Congressional District.

Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders have focused their visits on areas represented by Republicans but that have close enough margins to possibly swing toward Democrats in the future. Earlier in the day, the pair visited Evans’ district, for a rally in Greeley.

The district is likely to be a major fight as Democrats seek to regain footing in Congress. About 11,000 people attended the event, according to

In a news release Friday, Evans criticized Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez for their policies, including their lack of support for the oil and gas industry.

“Congressman Evans is fighting for lower costs, safer communities and making the American Dream possible for all Coloradans. His common-sense approach stands in stark contrast to AOC and Bernie Sanders’ extreme anti-oil-and-gas rhetoric,” according to the statement.

Bernie, who visited the same Denver park in 2019 when he was competing for the Democratic nomination for president, won that contest in Colorado in 2020 and 2016.

During Friday’s rally, he repeated themes he has long elevated around health care reform, support for Social Security and the power held by the wealthiest Americans.

“What I think is the worst addiction in this country, the most dangerous, is the greed of the oligarchs,” he said. “How much money do you need?”

Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have visited several cities including Las Vegas and Omaha and will next go to Tucson.

Other speakers in Denver included union leaders and the former commissioner for the Federal Trade Commission, Alvaro Bedoya. President Donald Trump recently fired Bedoya from that position.

People watched from the rooftops of nearby buildings, the stairs of the Denver City and County building and outside of the gated perimeter of the official event. The rally remained peaceful, with crowd members occasionally chanting and shouting in agreement with the speakers. At various times, the crowd chanted Sanders’ and Ocasio-Cortez’s names and phrases such as “tax the rich.”

The speakers and crowd expressed frustrations not only with GOP members of Congress but also with Democrats. The crowd erupted in cheers when Jimmy Williams, general president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, said he had a message for the Democratic Party: “Get off your ass.”

The democratic socialist senator, who has been in Congress for nearly 35 years, as one of a few planned “town meetings.” He said people in the country are “profoundly disgusted with what is going on here in Washington, D.C.”

Sanders, 83, targeted Elon Musk — the tech mogul who is working hand in hand with President Donald Trump to reduce the size of the federal government, to the alarm of many Democrats — as one of a number of billionaires now “running the government” under Trump and threatening to turn it into an oligarchy.

Sanders, who has run for president twice, has been attracting relatively large crowds on the tour, . Nine thousand people showed up for one of his stops in suburban Detroit earlier this month, while 4,000 came to see him in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

The doors will open for the Civic Center Park event at 101 W. 14th Ave. at 4 p.m. Friday, and the speaking program will begin at 5 p.m. Those wishing to attend are asked to .

He repeatedly came under pressure as the committee’s Republican members grilled him on Denver’s immigrant-friendly policies and, at several points, threatened to pursue criminal charges against him. The , during which Johnston was under oath, focused on problems that have arisen because of the city’s policies and delved into whether the local rules violate federal law.

Sitting alongside the mayors of Boston, Chicago and New York City, Johnston and the others fielded dozens of questions, all while the committee members interrupted their responses over and over. They received occasional help from Democratic committee members, who posed friendlier questions.

Johnston consistently conveyed his message that the city’s policies are generally welcoming to “newcomers” — while emphasizing that the local police force will work with federal immigration agents to prosecute violent criminals.

“If we want to tell the story of what impact immigrants have in America, we must tell the full story,” he told the committee in an opening statement. “The truth is that people who are new to this country do good and bad, just like all of us.”

While new President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have threatened to cut federal funding for cities that won’t cooperate fully with , that possibility wasn’t a major focus during the hearing.

When asked by a Democratic member what the cuts could mean, Johnston said: “It would be catastrophic.”

He added that losing federal funding would dramatically weaken public safety in the city, with potential impact on things like repairing bridges, putting children in preschool and giving veterans medical care.

A spokesman for the city previously told The Denver Post that the city’s 2025 budget includes about $150 million in federal dollars.

Tangling with Boebert

Early in the hearing, Johnston garnered the majority of the questions as committee members put a microscope on the city’s policies.

In a back-and-forth with Colorado U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Windsor Republican who’s on the committee, the two argued over the specifics of Denver’s and Colorado’s laws and when exactly Denver police will work with ICE. Johnston said they coordinate with the agents when there is a violent criminal with a warrant.

many problems arise before a warrant is issued.

“Local law enforcement officers are unable to coordinate because there is no warrant,” Boebert said. She continued pressing the mayor on why he hadn’t called for city or state policies related to immigrants — which were approved before he was in office — to be repealed.

Boebert went on to ask Johnston whether the state should rescind its policy of restricting how much local law enforcement can work with ICE. The agency’s leaders have expressed frustration that Denver only gives them notice of inmates’ impending releases from jail and won’t honor requests to hold them longer.

“I do not believe the detainer law needs to be changed,” Johnston said in response.

Boebert also pointed to the city recently hiring a D.C.-based lawyer for a yearlong contract worth up to $2 million to help with any investigation the committee pursues. She suggested he did that to “help cover your ass for Denver’s sanctuary city policies.”

There could be additional investigations of the cities, as the U.S. Department of Justice is now looking into the policies of both Chicago and New York City.

Multiple times, committee members said they wanted to see criminal charges filed by the department against the mayors, arguing the city leaders are enforcing their own local policies over the rules laid out by the U.S. Constitution. Ultimately, members of Congress can only refer matters to the DOJ.

Boebert said in an interview after the hearing that she thinks there needs to be action taken against anyone “aiding and abetting illegal aliens,” including the possibility of prosecution. She added that she doesn’t think the hearing will be the last step the committee takes on the topic.

Denver has drawn attention for the nearly 43,000 migrants who have come to the city since late 2022, with tens of thousands staying in city shelters at some point, as well as for controversies involving the city and Aurora during the presidential campaign.

Rep. Clay Higgins, a Republican from Louisiana, referred directly to Johnston’s comments last year that he to stand in the way of deportations he considers illegal.

“We might give you that opportunity,” he said.

Focus on jail incident

One of Johnston’s most contentious moments came when Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, about an  involving immigration authorities’ arrest of a man in the parking lot of a Denver jail.

Abraham Gonzalez, a suspected member of the transnational Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, was arrested in Denver on suspicion of aggravated assault, among other charges, in 2024 and the city released him on Friday afternoon. The city notified ICE of the planned release but the agency said they weren’t given much notice; city officials provided information indicating the notice occurred nearly 90 minutes before his release.

Because of the city’s policies, agents had to wait until Gonzalez left the facility to arrest him, leading to a conflict with agents.

“An officer got assaulted because of your policy,” Jordan said.

The incident drew multiple questions from committee members later in the hearing. They used it to dispute Johnston’s claim that the city works with ICE when it comes to violent criminals.

Johnston responded that ICE had six agents there to help apprehend Gonzales and that this was the only instance he knew about where an incident like this had happened following an immigration detainer request.

He also said officials may consider adjusting the way the city releases people in the future.

Colorado Rep. Jeff Crank, who was waived onto the committee for the day along with the two other Republicans from the state, zeroed in on the incident.

“You’re putting police officers — who you’ve sworn to help protect as their mayor — at risk to score political points,” Crank said. “I think it����ap outrageous and it����ap unbecoming to your office, and it����ap a danger to the people of Colorado and the citizens of Denver.”

During their time toward the end of the hearing, Colorado U.S. Reps. Gabe Evans and Jeff Hurd focused on public safety concerns in Denver and the rest of Colorado.

Johnston jumps in

Multiple times throughout the hearing, Johnston volunteered to answer questions that weren’t directly asked to him.

In one exchange with Rep. Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican, Johnston spoke first when the panel was asked a general question about how they define a “sanctuary city.” It led to an argument between the two.

“We call ourselves a welcoming city,” Johnston said, adding that the city is welcoming to everyone.

“So you’re welcoming criminals that you don’t have any idea what their crime background is?” Perry asked. “How do you vet the people that you welcome into your city?”

Johnston responded that the city doesn’t vet people from anywhere, including Illinois, California or other countries.

Request for Congress’ help

During their testimonies, Johnston and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu both made a point of asking the members of Congress to reform the country’s legal immigration system to help make their jobs easier.

In a written statement, Johnston said he would welcome any ideas about immigration reform that will secure the border, create a “better process” for immigrants to enter the country and make the “immigration situation easier for cities to manage.”

“If Denver can find a way to put aside our fear and our ideological differences long enough to manage a crisis we didn’t choose or create,” Johnston said, “it seems only fair to ask that the body that is actually charged with solving this national problem, this Congress, can finally commit to do the same.”

While Johnston attracted much of the committee’s attention, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and New York City Mayor Eric Adams were also subject to frequent attacks.

Several Democratic members, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, focused on Adams during the hearing, asking whether he had a to drop charges against him in exchange for cooperation on his deportation efforts.

“There was never any agreement, never any quid pro quo and I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said repeatedly.

At the end of the hearing, committee chairman Rep. James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky, said that in the coming days, it was likely to send the mayors additional written questions.

Staff writer Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton contributed to this story.

NEW YORK — New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been indicted by a grand jury on federal criminal charges, according to two people familiar with the matter, an extraordinary culmination to weeks of of top officials that have thrust the city’s government into crisis.

The indictment detailing the charges against Adams, a Democrat, was expected to be unsealed Thursday, according to the people, who spoke with The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment.

In a speech recorded at his official residence, Adams said he would remain in office, describing any charges he may face as “entirely false, based on lies.”

“I always knew that if I stood my ground for all of you, that I would be a target — and a target I became,” Adams said. “I will fight these injustices with every ounce of my strength and my spirit.”

It was not immediately clear what laws Adams is accused of breaking or when he might have to appear in court.

Federal investigators had seized Adams’ electronic devices nearly a year ago as part of an investigation focused, at least partly, on campaign contributions and Adams’ interactions with the Turkish government. Because the charges were sealed, it was unknown whether they dealt with those same matters.

The indictment was first reported by The New York Times.

It marks a stunning turn for Adams, a former police captain who won election nearly three years ago to become the city’s second Black mayor on a campaign that stressed his working class roots and commitment to public safety. But as Adams has made reducing crime a cornerstone of his administration, he has faced growing legal peril, with multiple honing in on his top aides and his own campaign.

In the last two weeks alone, the leaders he appointed to oversee the country’s largest police force and largest schools system have announced their resignations.

Adams is the first mayor in New York City history to be indicted while in office. If he were to resign, he would be replaced by the city’s public advocate, Jumaane Williams, who would then schedule a special election.

Gov. Kathy Hochul has the power to remove Adams from office. Hochul spokesperson, Avi Small, issued a statement late Wednesday that said “Governor Hochul is aware of these concerning news reports and is monitoring the situation. It would be premature to comment further until the matter is confirmed by law enforcement.”

The indictment comes against the backdrop of the United Nations General Assembly, which has brought dozens of world leaders to New York, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The federal investigations into Adams administration first emerged publicly on Nov. 2, 2023, when FBI agents on the Brooklyn home of his chief fundraiser, Brianna Suggs.

At the time, Adams insisted he followed the law and said he would be if anyone on his campaign had acted illegally. Days later, FBI agents as he was leaving an event in Manhattan.

Then on Sept. 4, federal investigators seized electronic devices from the city’s police commissioner, schools chancellor, deputy mayor of public safety, first deputy mayor and other trusted confidantes of Adams both in and out of City Hall.

Federal prosecutors declined to discuss the investigations, but people familiar with elements of the cases described multiple, separate inquiries involving senior Adams aides, relatives of those aides, campaign fundraising and possible influence peddling of the police and fire departments.

A week after the searches, the city’s police commissioner, Edward Caban, announced his resignation. About two weeks later, Schools Chancellor David Banks announced he would retire at the end of the year.

Adams himself insisted he would keep doing the city’s business and allow the investigations to run their course.

Over the summer, federal prosecutors Adams, his campaign arm and City Hall, requesting information about the mayor’s schedule, his overseas travel and potential connections to the Turkish government.

Adams spent 22 years in New York City’s police department before going into politics, first as a state senator and then as Brooklyn borough president. He was elected as mayor in November 2021 — a victory he has repeatedly said was ordained by God.

But after more than two years in office, Adams’ popularity has declined. While the city has seen an increase in jobs and a drop in certain categories of crime, the administration has struggled with an influx of tens of thousands of international migrants who overwhelmed the city’s homeless shelters.

There has also been a steady drip of accusations and a swirl of suspicion around people close to the mayor.

In addition to the sprawling inquiries launched by Manhattan prosecutors, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn are investigating another one of Adams’ close aides, Winnie Greco, who had raised thousands of dollars in campaign donations from the city’s Chinese American communities and later became his director of Asian affairs. Greco hasn’t commented publicly on the FBI searches of her properties and continues to work for the city.

When agents seized electronic devices from Caban, the former police commissioner, in early September, they also visited his twin brother, James Caban, a former police officer who runs a nightlife consulting business.

Agents also took devices from the schools chancellor; his brother Philip Banks, formerly a top NYPD chief who is now deputy mayor for public safety; their brother Terence Banks, who ran a consulting firm that promised to connect businesses to government stakeholders; and from First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, who is David Banks’ domestic partner.

All denied any wrongdoing.

While those investigations churned, federal authorities also searched the homes of newly named interim police commissioner, Thomas Donlan, and . Donlon confirmed the search and said it involved materials that had been in his possession for 20 years.

In his speech Wednesday night, Adams appeared to cite that search as proof of overreach by federal investigators.

Hours before the charges were announced, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called on Adams to resign, the first nationally prominent Democrat to do so. Adams reacted with scorn, dismissing Ocasio-Cortez as self-righteous.

Adams, who is expecting a tough primary election next year, faced additional calls to resign once the indictment became public Wednesday night, including from many of his declared or expected Democratic challengers in the mayoral race.

Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller, said the indictment marked “a sad day for New Yorkers.” State Sen. Zellnor Myrie added that it was “especially painful for so many Black New Yorkers who put our hope and faith in this Mayor.”

Scott Stringer, a former city comptroller who is expected to run against Adams, said the indictment had left New York City “with a broken down trainwreck of a municipal government.”

Joe Borelli, the top Republican in the City Council, who is believed to be eyeing a run for mayor, said he would reserve judgment until viewing the charges.

NEW YORK — Student have created a new and unpredictable challenge for President as he resists calls to cut off U.S. support for Israel while trying to hold together the coalition of voters he’ll need for reelection.

The protests at Columbia University in New York and other campuses have captured global media attention and resurfaced questions about . His handling of the Middle East conflict is also being closely watched by both and voters in key swing states.

At best for Biden, the protests are a passing distraction while the White House presses forward with negotiations over a while pushing Israel to limit casualties with . At worst, they build momentum toward the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, potentially triggering scenes of violence that could recall the during the party’s convention there in 1968.

“If it ends with Columbia, that����ap one thing,” said Angus Johnston, a historian focused on campus activism. “If this sends the national student movement to a new place, that����ap a very different situation.”

Already, Biden’s aides have had to work to minimize disruptions from antiwar protesters, holding smaller campaign events and tightly controlling access. Demonstrators forced his motorcade to change routes to the Capitol on his way to deliver the State of the Union, and they’ve thrown a red substance intended to symbolize blood near his home in Delaware.

The president could face more confrontations with students this spring. Morehouse College said Tuesday that Biden would in May to deliver a commencement address that could draw protests.

FRUSTRATION AT COLUMBIA

More than 100 pro-Palestinian demonstrators were arrested Thursday, with dozens more people arrested at other campuses. Many now face charges of trespassing or disorderly conduct. The protesters have demanded that their universities condemn Israel’s assault on Gaza after and divest from companies that do business with Israel.

Some people have reported antisemitic chants and messages at and around the Columbia campus, and similar concerns have been reported at other universities. Some Jewish students say they’ve felt unsafe on campus. The White House, in a message Sunday to mark the Passover holiday, denounced what it called an “alarming surge” of antisemitism, saying it “has absolutely no place on college campuses, or anywhere in our country.”

Four Jewish Democratic members of Congress toured Columbia’s locked-down campus on Monday with members of the school’s Jewish Law Students Association. They condemned that things had escalated to where Jewish students felt unsafe and the university canceled in-person classes Monday. Columbia said it would use through the end of the spring term.

Rep. Kathy Manning of North Carolina called on the Education Department and Justice Department to work with the White House “to ensure that all universities take steps necessary to keep Jewish students and faculty safe.”

“This discrimination is simply unacceptable and cannot be allowed to continue,” she said.

Biden on Monday sought the same middle ground that he’s staked out for months as he backs Israel’s military operations with weapons shipments while also pushing Israel to limit civilian casualties and get more humanitarian aid into Gaza, where the United Nations has said .

“I condemn the antisemitic protests,” the president said at an Earth Day event. He then added, “I also condemn those who don’t understand what����ap going on with the Palestinians.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a high-profile progressive who represents parts of the Bronx and Queens, spoke before Biden at the same event. She said it was “important that we remember the power of young people shaping this country” and praised “the leadership of those peaceful student-led protests.”

HOW MUCH IS BIDEN TO BLAME?

Former President Donald Trump, Biden’s presumptive Republican opponent in November, pointed to the headlines and images coming out of Columbia to redirect focus from in New York, telling reporters in the courthouse Tuesday that Biden bears the blame for the unrest.

“If this were me, you’d be after me. You’d be after me so much,” he said. “But they’re trying to give him a pass. But what����ap going on is a disgrace to our country, and it����ap all Biden’s fault and everybody knows it.”

In a sign of the political potency of the situation at Columbia, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana planned to visit the school Wednesday and meet with Jewish students.

Joel Rubin, a former State Department official and Democratic strategist who has worked in Jewish politics for years, rejected critics blaming Biden “for everything that����ap gone wrong” but said the president would have to “make the argument for why the policy is the right one and let the chips fall where they may.”

“If it were purely politics and polling, it would be a very hard one,” Rubin said. “But I think Biden is making these decisions based on national security.”

Biden graduated from Syracuse’s law school in 1968, bypassing the campus convulsions over the Vietnam War. He distanced himself from that protest movement two decades later during his first run for president.

“I was married, I was in law school, I wore sports coats,” Biden said in 1987. “You’re looking at a middle-class guy. I am who I am. I’m not big on flak jackets and tie-dyed shirts. You know, that����ap not me.″

Biden has been endorsed this year by and built his campaign around key social issues — such as , and canceling — that they believe can energize voters under 30 who are more likely to be concerned about his approach to Gaza.

on Tuesday to capitalize on the momentum against nationwide abortion restrictions and criticize a state law soon to go into effect that will ban abortions after six weeks, before many women know they’re pregnant. A day earlier, Vice President Kamala Harris held an event promoting abortion rights in swing state Wisconsin.

Safia Southey, a 25-year-old law student at Columbia who is Jewish, has been participating in the protest and sleeping at the encampment on the university’s quad since Thursday. She believes outrage over the war will deflate Biden’s chances against Trump because staunch supporters of Israel are more likely to support the presumptive Republican nominee.

“I think Biden has tried to be very strategic and it����ap backfired in a lot of ways,” she said.

However, Southey said she’ll vote for Biden “pretty much no matter what” in a matchup with Trump.

“The students who are upset, especially at these kind of universities, are smart enough to not stay home,” she said. “I think that they’re going to go out and vote, and they’re going to go for the most strategic option, even if they’re not happy for Biden. I think that they would do anything to make sure that Trump’s not in office.”

Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher was skeptical that campus demonstrations over Gaza would prove to be politically influential.

“What percentage of Americans are really in those narrow spaces, and how representative are they of a broader American audience, or even a broader youth audience?” he asked.

Johnston, the historian on student activism, said the current protests don’t approach the size or intensity of demonstrations in the 1960s, when school officials were held hostage and campuses were vandalized.

But over the years, he said, “there’s a lot of times where student protests have shaped the national debate.”

___

Weissert and Megerian reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Jill Colvin in New York contributed to this report.

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“She’s in it to make these outrageous comments,” suggested Fetchenhier, a Democrat who owns Fetch’s Mining & Mercantile on Greene Street in Silverton and also serves on the San Juan County commission. “Even Republicans are getting tired of the shenanigans.”

Meet Thomas Moore Jr., who voted for Boebert in 2020 and last year.

“She’s vitriolic, she’s sensationalistic, she draws attention to herself,” said Moore, a Pueblo native and loyal Republican who’d just left that county’s courthouse on a warm September afternoon after picking up collector plates for his 1986 Mercedes-Benz 420SEL. He speculated about her high-profile congressional perch: “I think it’s gotten to her head.”

Whether it’s incendiary comments Boebert has made to colleagues in Congress, her shouting at the president during a State of the Union address or her recent ejection from a musical in Denver for inappropriate behavior, plenty of residents in her district — including some who liked her in the past — have had enough.

More than three years have passed since Boebert, a handgun-toting former restaurant owner from the Rifle area, rocketed to prominence by ousting a seasoned Republican congressman in a party primary, on her way to winning the seat. The headlines and attention that initially won her fans have taken a toll.

Now Boebert, 36, has exactly one year to refurbish her image and reassure voters across her massive congressional district that she deserves their support in the Nov. 5, 2024, election. That is, if she makes it through a GOP primary next June that already has some big names lining up behind one of her opponents.

“She’s a polarizer rather than a back-bencher. She’s going to raise a lot of money and she’s going to raise a lot of money for her opponent,” said David Wasserman, a senior editor and elections analyst for the Cook Political Report, which . “Her fate rests with the voters who didn’t show up for the (2022) midterm but will show up in 2024.”

Boebert, in moments of reflection during a recent interview with The Denver Post, acknowledged the challenges she faces in her re-election bid, especially after the theater incident. But she said she doesn’t plan any drastic changes in her approach to the job.

“I didn’t come here to go along to get along, and just do things the way they’ve always been done — because they aren’t working,” she said.

The Post found no shortage of opinions about the second-term congresswoman during a recent swing through Colorado’s sprawling 3rd Congressional District, which swoops from the northwest corner of the state down through many of its southern counties. It takes in Western Slope ranching communities and ritzy ski towns before reaching Pueblo and the plains.

While some voters sounded caution about another Boebert term in Congress, others feel she is the perfect answer for a state that has turned decidedly blue, at a time when there’s a feeling that the chasm between rural and urban Colorado has only deepened.

Dan James, a staunch Republican and gun shop owner in Pagosa Springs, said Boebert has “more balls than many of the people in Congress do.”

“Sometimes her toughness shows,” James said, as he offered up a free copy of the U.S. Constitution from a stack of booklets on his front counter at PS Guns & Ammo on an early fall afternoon. “We have a government that doesn’t want the citizens to be armed. And Lauren, a little itty person, she acts like she’s 10-foot tall.”

But the same thing can rub Christina McCleary the wrong way. The La Veta Democrat doesn’t like Boebert’s sometimes undiplomatic approach to those who don’t agree with her.

“I don’t have a problem with her speaking her mind, I have a problem with the way she does it,” said McCleary, who was stopping at a liquor store after work in this Huerfano County town of fewer than a thousand people. “It does not flatter our district at all.”

The varying assessments reflect the wildly divergent effect Boebert has had on the nearly 565,000 registered voters in her district since her 2020 election.

“Lauren is polarizing, like (Donald) Trump,” said Greg Brophy, a farmer, consultant and former Republican state lawmaker from Wray who first met Boebert at her Rifle restaurant a decade ago, during his run for governor. “Either they love her or hate her.”

Testing district’s strong Republican lean

Though her largely rural district leans firmly Republican, with a in GOP affiliations over Democrats, voters nearly spurned Boebert last November for her challenger, former Aspen City Councilman Adam Frisch.

The 546-vote difference separating the two — out of more than 327,000 ballots cast — triggered an automatic recount under state law.

In pursuit of a rematch, Frisch has developed a formidable fundraising advantage over the incumbent and all other declared candidates. A poll commissioned by his campaign over the summer showed a statistical dead heat in the 3rd District, with Frisch leading by 2 percentage points.

As Boebert, a bomb-throwing member of the far-right Freedom Caucus in Congress, has made headlines for her antics and actions both on and off the House floor, Democrats have found themselves with potentially their best hope to reclaim a seat they haven’t won in 15 years.

“CD3 leans solidly Republican, so the incredibly close 2022 results showed substantial fatigue among many in the district with the drama — and a willingness to consider a moderate Democrat in the name of pragmatic legislating,” said Paul DeBell, an associate professor of political science at Fort Lewis College in Durango.

Boebert, he said, does better “when she focuses on pragmatic issues of legislation and less on churning out firebrand soundbites.”

The congresswoman publicly apologized for being thrown out of a performance of “Beetlejuice” at Denver’s Buell Theatre on Sept. 10. She’d found herself at the center of a national media firestorm as surveillance video showed her vaping, recording the performance and groping her male companion. It’s an incident that has prompted in her district.

But she told The Post she doesn’t intend to be a “wallflower” in Washington, D.C. Boebert doesn’t see her feisty and combative approach as chaotic, but rather as a necessary, if sometimes “uncomfortable,” way of forcing change in the national’s capital.

“Not one of my colleagues campaigned on continuing with the status quo. We all campaigned (by) telling our voters that Washington is broken, that we need a new way to legislate,” she said.

This year, Boebert sponsored and passed several bills out of the Republican-controlled House. She worked with Colorado’s two U.S. senators on a bill that aims to preserve hundreds of jobs in Pueblo following the closure of the U.S. Army’s Pueblo Chemical Depot. She regularly works on water, energy and inflation challenges that impact her constituents directly, she said.

“Look at my odometer in my car and see how much boots-on-the-ground time that I have in the district,” Boebert said. “I don’t see it as drama. I don’t see it as chaos. I don’t see it as dysfunctional. I’m a mother of four boys, I’m a previous restaurant owner — I know chaos and dysfunction very well.”

Primary challenge looms as “an escalating problem”

But looking ahead to 2024, several high-profile state Republicans have recently thrown their support to Grand Junction attorney Jeff Hurd, who announced in August he would challenge the incumbent in the GOP primary.

They include former Gov. Bill Owens, former U.S. Sen. Hank Brown, and John Suthers, a former Colorado attorney general and recent Colorado Springs mayor. Several county commissioners in Boebert’s district also have backed Hurd.

Former U.S. Attorney Jason Dunn, a Trump appointee who supports Hurd, that the Buell Theatre contretemps was “the straw that I think broke the camel’s back” for some party faithful. Dunn declined to elaborate when contacted by The Post.

The intraparty challenge is Boebert’s “immediate problem, and it is an escalating problem,” said Justin Gollob, a political science professor at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction.

“Recent endorsements of Jeff Hurd from local Republicans are not good news for her campaign and signal trouble ahead,” he said. “While this is a storm that can be weathered by her campaign, it is hard to ignore the gathering storm clouds.”

Wasserman, from the Cook Political Report, predicted a tough road ahead for Boebert in the next year, saying she has “done very little to rehabilitate her image since her close call” against Frisch. Nonetheless, he isn’t sure she will be so easily dislodged by fellow Republicans in June.

“I’m very skeptical Boebert can be beaten in a primary, given her viral following among Republicans and her primary victory in 2022,” he said, referring to her nearly 2-to-1 crushing of former state Sen. Don Coram.

And if Trump is the Republican presidential nominee next November, Brophy said, that should help her by rallying his supporters.

With next year’s race resting largely in the hands of the district’s roughly 250,000 unaffiliated voters, Boebert will have to figure out how to appeal once again to those who aren’t part of her base. And with Frisch more than capable of attracting national money in what will be one of the most closely watched races in the country, Wasserman said the congresswoman will need to be at the top of her game.

Boebert says she has beaten expectations before — no more so than during her successful quest in 2020 to defeat then-Rep. Scott Tipton in the Republican primary. Her chances were roundly dismissed outside conservative media, including by Tipton himself.

“I was elected to Congress as a fighter. I had to fight like heck to get here,” she said. “I wasn’t supposed to win my primary against a five-term incumbent. I was outspent in my general election. I had $6 million in negative ads running against me — they were raining down on me — and I still won that election.”

Hope Scheppelman, the vice chair of the state Republican Party and a resident of Bayfield, near Durango, said Boebert’s record of “standing up for her conservative principles is unmatched.” Her background, which also includes work in Garfield County’s natural gas industry as a pipeline mapper, also helps her connect with people.

“For rural Colorado, she’s one of us at the end of the day,” Scheppelman said. “She’s proud of her roots and voters can relate to her story, they feel a connection with her when she speaks and they know she’s not one of the typical politicians that we see too much of in D.C.”

Legislative record in focus

Scheppelman also suggested Boebert’s effectiveness has benefited from Republicans’ retaking of the House majority at the start of the year, giving her bills a better chance of moving forward — though Democrats still control the Senate.

“She’s been able to push bills through the process that truly benefit 3rd District voters, and that will help immensely in this upcoming cycle,” Scheppelman said. “That wasn’t something voters were aware of in 2022, which I think hurt. But we’ve seen the difference this year and that’s just one reason she will win in 2024.”

Boebert points to bread-and-butter issues that she has worked on in Congress, including gas extraction and veterans benefits, as proof she is not constantly playing for the cameras. This year, she has sponsored and passed seven bills out of committee and three bills out of the House, while attaching more than 50 amendments to legislation.

One of Boebert’s bills, which passed the House Natural Resources Committee, aims to protect four species of threatened and endangered fish. Another bill she helped craft would extend the length of oil and gas drilling permits from two to four years; it was passed by the House.

She also points to a bill, which has made it through committee, that would yield local benefits by allowing Mesa County to buy 31 acres of federal land in Clifton for economic development purposes. The deal has the backing of the Bureau of Land Management, her campaign said.

“There is a real rural and urban divide that takes place, especially in Colorado, and our rural voters are often ignored,” she said. “The policies from these urban areas are forced on Colorado’s 3rd District and the area’s surrounding rural areas. So I want to give them the voice they never had.”

But Paul Henricksen, who lives in Pueblo County and served as a U.S. Army infantry staff sergeant in both Iraq and Afghanistan, said Boebert failed veterans when she voted against the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act last year. The $325 million bill, which passed through Congress, to burn pits, Agent Orange and other toxins.

Hendricksen, who is president of the Pueblo Veterans Council, said Boebert is so partisan in how she governs that she’d rather spend her time “trolling the liberals” than helping vets.

“It’s about denying the other party any success,” he said.

Rocky Mountain Values, a progressive dark-money group, in an ad campaign against her this summer.

Scheppelman, who served as a hospital corpsman in the Navy for four years, said Boebert voted against the PACT Act because it was a poorly written bill that had “no funding mechanism” and threatened to create a backlog in getting veterans their benefits.

She pointed to four other major veterans bills Boebert voted for that “directly impacted and improved the lives of veterans in the 3rd District.” Among them were money for veterans’ benefits and of about 6% for veterans’ disability compensation that Congress passed last year.

Brophy said Boebert has been plenty busy in her district, but the public wouldn’t know it because much of the media “cannot help but blow up the more flamboyant things that she does that constitute a tiny fraction of her actual work.”

“They are as fascinated with her as Fox News is with AOC (New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez),” he said, “and for exactly the same reasons: She’s attractive, controversial and drives clicks.”

“This isn’t about one night,” Boebert says

At the top of the Boebert media-feeding frenzy is the ignominious boot she got from “Beetlejuice.” Bolstered by the security video of Boebert in a revealing dress, the story went ferociously viral. The congresswoman quickly became a point of national ridicule for everyone from comedian John Oliver to radio host Howard Stern to Saturday Night Live.

In a , Western Slope GOP state Rep. Matt Soper said he heard from Boebert shortly after the incident.

“She talked about the stresses of her divorce that was almost finalized at that time and the excitement of going on a first date for the first time in years,” he told the magazine.

Boebert told The Post: “I did mess up, plain and simple, and I’ve taken accountability for my actions and I’ve apologized directly to my voters.” And her constituents, she said, are “abundantly merciful and graceful.”

“I believe wholeheartedly that my voters know this isn’t about one night,” Boebert added. “This is about the future of our country.”

DeBell, the Fort Lewis College professor, said the news media, which “deserve some culpability for our outrageous politics,” has developed an almost co-dependent relationship with Boebert.

“Sensational coverage gets more attention, and that provides incentives for outrageous statements and behavior in order to gain political prominence and get ahead in electoral contests,” he said.

While that may work in the fast-paced national media climate, DeBell suggested that “it plays much less well here in the 3rd District — where many voters, including many in the Republican Party, do not want to be known as the home of such outrageous political drama.”

The drama began as Boebert took office. On Jan. 6, 2021, in Arizona and Pennsylvania, calling the results in Arizona a “travesty.” A few days later, she refused to turn over her bag to Capitol police after she set off metal detectors. She had vowed to carry her Glock throughout Washington, D.C. in previous days and was rebuked by the city’s police chief for saying so, given the city’s restrictive gun-carrying laws.

In late 2021, Boebert apologized after being captured on video implying that Ilhan Omar, a fellow member of Congress and a Muslim, could be a suicide bomber. The following summer, Boebert was lambasted for critiquing a cornerstone principle of the American republic.

“I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk,” she told a gathering in Basalt.

Jim Harper, whose family owns the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad and the Grand Imperial Hotel in Silverton, said in an interview that it was time to lower the temperature of the political discourse. As he threw sheets and towels into a washing machine in the basement of the 140-year-old hotel in September, the registered Republican chose his words carefully when asked about Boebert.

“National politics are national politics — we need to focus on home,” Harper said. “Maybe it’s time to focus on home and mending those fences. I’m Silverton-first, I’m Colorado-first.”

GOP challenger: “Our district is lacking the leadership it needs”

That’s precisely what prompted Hurd, one of four announced Republican challengers, to enter the district’s GOP primary in August. The 44-year-old attorney, who specializes in working with electric co-ops across the 3rd Congressional District, said voters want a “reasonable Republican.”

“I think people in the district want someone who is focused on local headlines, not national ones,” Hurd said. “I feel our district is lacking the leadership it needs.”

The “Beetlejuice” incident, he said, amounts to a character question for voters.

Dissatisfaction with Boebert goes beyond just big-name Republicans. Mesa County Commissioner Cody Davis recently switched his allegiance to Hurd. His colleague, Commissioner Bobbie Daniel, did the same.

“I have supported the congresswoman over the years, but it����ap become less about her constituents and more about her,” Davis said. “We need to elect leaders focused more on fixing the problems that ail our country, and that starts with electing a new generation of representatives.”

In neighboring Delta County, Republican commissioner Don Suppes said last month that . And on Thursday, Rio Blanco Commissioner Ty Gates became local Republican Western Slope officeholder to endorse Hurd and not Boebert.

But Wendell Koontz, who sits on the dais with Suppes in Delta County, says he’s sticking with the incumbent.

“To put it in perspective, she made a dumb move — but we’ve all made dumb moves,” he said of the “Beetlejuice” incident. “I like candidates who have suffered some of life’s hard knocks and picked themselves up and learned from them.”

But will the seemingly endless controversy swirling around Boebert impede the flow of money necessary to mount a successful campaign?

Frisch, the Democratic frontrunner among several candidates seeking that party’s nomination, has so far in the 2024 cycle. Hurd, meanwhile, raised about half of Boebert’s $800,000 third-quarter haul, despite having been in the race for only six weeks. Another notable Democratic entrant is Grand Junction Mayor Anna Stout, who’s raised just over $100,000.

“It is certainly a poor sign for Boebert, though it is difficult to determine how much this is predictive of fundraising over the next year,” Fort Lewis College’s DeBell said. “One thing is for sure, she has serious challengers in both major parties who are well-organized, working hard and focused on winning her seat.”

That will keep a bright spotlight on the race. Case in point: A small group of protesters — complete with someone dressed in a striped Beetlejuice costume — gathered at the edge of Buckley Park in downtown Durango in late September to protest Boebert, a full 13 months before the election. Rocky Mountain Values had a hand in organizing the rally.

“It feels embarrassing to live in this district,” said a sign-wielding Nikki Bauer, a 25-year-old Minnesota transplant who works at the local Unitarian Universalist Church. “She doesn’t govern — she’s just making a scene for the media.”

Nearly four hours away via winding roads and over towering mountain passes, Elizabeth Brim likes Boebert’s forward style. She flies an anti-Joe Biden flag outside her house in Gunnison, and she particularly embraces the congresswoman’s “gun stance and her opposition to the Democrats.”

“I love people with no filters,” said Brim, as she juggled kids and groceries in the doorway of her home. “I like hearing the truth, even if the truth is something I don’t want to hear.”

But if that kind of outspokenness has had a strong appeal in the political turmoil of recent years, it’s wearing thin for other voters. Joe Martinez, the owner of the stalwart business Martinez Shoe Repair in Alamosa in the San Luis Valley, said he started off open to Boebert, despite being affiliated as a Democrat.

But the headlines she has created have become too much for him.

“She started off really good, and then it fell apart,” he said.

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