In 2019 He Was Booed for “Socialism Is Not the Answer.” Now Hickenlooper Sells Socialists as the Path to Farm Country.
On June 1, 2019, at the California Democratic Party convention, then–presidential candidate John Hickenlooper was booed for more than thirty seconds over a single sentence: “Socialism is not the answer.” Days later he doubled down in his home-state paper: Democrats, he wrote, “must say loudly and clearly that we are not socialists.”
On July 1, 2026, the same man — now Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO), a self-described “extreme moderate” fresh off his own primary win — went on CNN’s “The Lead” and welcomed the party’s newest democratic-socialist star, Melat Kiros (D, DSA-backed), into a “big tent” he says can win back “farmers and ranchers.” Kiros calls the 9/11 attacks “inevitable” and has refused to call last year’s Boulder firebombing — which killed an elderly Jewish woman — antisemitic.
The claim is testable. The USDA’s 444 farming-dependent counties voted 77.7 percent for Donald Trump in 2024 — he carried all but eleven of them. Nationally, 57 percent of Americans view socialism negatively. This is the story of a party’s six-year drift, told through the man who once tried to stop it.
- 77.7%farm voteTrump's average share across the USDA's 444 farming-dependent counties in 2024 — he won all but 11 (Investigate Midwest)
- 57%negativeAmericans who view socialism negatively; the Democratic base now prefers socialism to capitalism, 66–42 (Gallup, Aug. 2025)
- 3in 8 daysDSA-backed Democratic primary wins — Avila Chevalier and Valdez in New York, then Kiros in Colorado (Fox News)
- 57–43his marginHickenlooper's own primary win over former DSA member state Sen. Julie Gonzales (D) (CPR News / AP)
The quote that set off the reaction came in response to a direct question. Jake Tapper asked Hickenlooper about Kiros — specifically her claim that 9/11 was “inevitable” and her refusal to label the Boulder firebombing antisemitic. Hickenlooper did not defend either position. He prefaced his answer with disagreement, then pivoted to the tent.
“I don't agree with everything that Ms. Kiros is claiming and fighting for. But I believe in a big tent, that, if the Democratic Party is going to really represent farmers and ranchers and middle-class workers and be able to compete in states like Indiana, Kansas, and Nebraska, we've got to have a big tent.”
Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) · CNN's ‘The Lead’ · July 1, 2026
He carried the same message across the dial that day. On NBC’s Meet the Press NOW, Hickenlooper said Democrats “have to embrace” a bigger tent as democratic socialists notch more wins — the video below. The logic is a specific electoral bet: that the energy behind candidates like Kiros can be broadened outward, into the rural and agricultural states where Democrats have been getting crushed. It is worth taking that bet on its own terms, because it is checkable against how those places actually vote.
To measure the drift, you need a baseline — and Hickenlooper conveniently provides his own. In 2019, running for president as the moderate lane’s standard-bearer, he made anti-socialism the center of his pitch. At the California Democratic Party convention that June, he told the room that socialism would hand Donald Trump reelection. The crowd booed him for more than thirty seconds. He did not back down.
Days after the booing, he pressed the point in the Colorado Sun, warning that if Democrats failed to distance themselves from socialism they would “end up helping to re-elect the worst president in the country’s history.” That is the control group. The 2026 Hickenlooper is not answering a hostile crowd; he is welcoming into the tent the very wing he once warned would sink the party.
“If we want to beat Donald Trump and achieve big progressive goals, socialism is not the answer.”
John Hickenlooper · California Democratic convention · June 1, 2019 (booed 30+ seconds)
The shift is not just rhetorical. It played out in his own June 30 primary, which he won 57–43 over state Sen. Julie Gonzales (D), a former DSA member. A 43-percent floor for a challenger to his left is itself a measure of where the Colorado Democratic electorate has moved — and, perhaps, of why the incumbent moderate is now speaking the language of the tent rather than the language of the line.
The nominee at the center of the big-tent question is not a hypothetical. Melat Kiros (D, DSA-backed), 29, born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and a 2022 graduate of Notre Dame Law, defeated fifteen-term Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO-1) by a double-digit margin in Colorado’s deep-blue First District. She ran with the backing of the Denver DSA, Justice Democrats, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), on a platform that includes taking no corporate PAC money, ending U.S. military aid to Israel, abolishing ICE, and a Green New Deal.
The positions that drew Tapper’s question are on the record. In a June 22 interview with 9NEWS’s Kyle Clark, Kiros described the September 11 attacks as “inevitable in the sense that we destabilized a lot of the Middle East.” In the same sitting, pressed on the June 2025 Boulder firebombing of a march for Israeli hostages — an attack in which an elderly Jewish woman died — she declined to call it antisemitic. The full exchange is below; it is the interview Hickenlooper was asked about.
“Inevitable in the sense that we destabilized a lot of the Middle East, which led people to believe that another act of violence was the only response.”
Melat Kiros, on the 9/11 attacks · 9NEWS · June 22, 2026
Those remarks are why Republicans reacted to Hickenlooper’s embrace as a gift. GOP communications veteran Steve Guest argued the Kiros win eclipses the moment that launched the party’s current left wing — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 upset of ten-term Rep. Joe Crowley.
This is light-years worse than AOC beating 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley.
Here is where the big-tent theory meets the returns. Hickenlooper named the target himself: farmers, ranchers, and states like Indiana, Kansas, and Nebraska. Those are among the most one-sidedly Republican places in the country. In 2024, according to an Investigate Midwest analysis of USDA data, Trump carried 433 of the 444 counties the department classifies as farming-dependent — all but eleven — and averaged 77.7 percent of the vote across them, up about two points from 2020.
The pattern is not confined to farm counties. Across America’s predominantly rural counties, Trump won roughly 93 percent in 2024, and AP VoteCast put rural voters at 62–36 for Trump. Nationally, Gallup found in August 2025 that Americans split 39 percent positive to 57 percent negative on socialism. The one place the socialist label is an asset is inside the Democratic base itself, where Gallup found 66 percent view socialism positively against just 42 percent for capitalism. That is the tension at the heart of the pivot: the message that wins a Denver primary is the message the target audience of farmers and ranchers has been rejecting by three-to-one margins.
Farm counties: Trump 77.7% average, 433 of 444 won (2024) — Investigate Midwest.
Rural counties: ~93% carried by Trump; rural voters 62–36 Trump — AP VoteCast.
National view of socialism: 39% positive / 57% negative — Gallup, Aug. 2025.
Democratic base: 66% positive on socialism vs. 42% on capitalism — Gallup.
Kiros is not an isolated result, which is exactly why the intra-party debate is real. In roughly eight days, DSA-backed candidates won three major Democratic primaries: Darializa Avila Chevalier ousted Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D, NY-13), chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus; Claire Valdez (DSA) took the nomination in NY-7; and then Kiros won in Colorado. By Fox News’s count, Kiros was the 28th far-left candidate to win a Democratic primary in the 2026 cycle. Above them all sits Zohran Mamdani (D/DSA), now governing New York City after his own primary upset.
The wing is confident about what it is selling. In a viral July 3 clip, Kiros framed her agenda as a matter of settled answers: “Every single issue that I looked at…we already figured out the solution a long time ago. You solve homelessness by giving people housing.” It is precisely that certainty — and its distance from how most of the country talks about cost and trade-offs — that critics seized on.
Kiros on MS NOW: 'Every single issue that I looked at… we already figured out the solution a long time ago. You solve homelessness by giving people housing...'
Conservative media treated the trend as a story in itself. On Fox News, Greg Gutfeld cast Mamdani’s rise as the “hangover of wokeism” — a movement, in his framing, that Democratic leaders in Washington have chosen to court rather than confront.
Republicans are not treating the socialist wave as a threat to argue against so much as a label to attach to every Democrat. In Colorado, the GOP’s stated plan, per the Colorado Sun, is simple: tie every Democrat to Melat Kiros. RNC Chair Joe Gruters (R) put it in national terms — “From New York to Colorado, socialists and anti-American anarchists have fully taken over the Democrat Party” — and Rep. Gabe Evans (R-CO-8) echoed that “the socialists have taken over the Democrat party.” The strategy is to make Hickenlooper’s tent the whole party’s address.
One radical lunatic after the next is coming to Washington.
At the top of the ticket, President Donald Trump (R) has already folded the wins into his midterm message. At the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference he called the new nominees “not social ‘Dumocrats’” but “hardcore, godless communists,” and at the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library he described communism as “like a cancer that spreads, and you better stop it fast.” Both lines were spoken remarks, not social-media posts — but they track a longer Trump pattern of branding socialist Democrats as communists, most visibly against Mamdani.
Zohran Mamdani, a 100% Communist Lunatic, has just won the Dem Primary, and is on his way to becoming Mayor. He looks TERRIBLE, his voice is grating, he's not very smart.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Truth Social · paraphrasing Trump's post as reported by Time and CNBC
He is going to have problems with Washington like no Mayor in the history of our once great City. Remember, he needs the money from me, as President, in order to fulfill all of his FAKE Communist promises. He won't be getting any of it...
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Truth Social · paraphrasing Trump's post on Mamdani as reported by Newsweek
Democrats are not uniform in response. On “The Five,” Fox News hosts mocked Washington Democrats for schmoozing with Mamdani rather than keeping their distance — the same embrace-the-socialists instinct Hickenlooper acted on when he welcomed Kiros. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) dismissed the communist framing as “bunk.” And inside Colorado, AG Phil Weiser (D), the party’s gubernatorial nominee, has said he will confront Kiros over her past remarks rather than paper them over — a reminder that the tent is contested from the inside, too.
Six years ago, John Hickenlooper staked a presidential campaign on the claim that socialism would sink the Democratic Party and re-elect Donald Trump. He absorbed thirty seconds of boos and kept saying it.
Now, as a senator up for reelection this November, he welcomes a DSA nominee who calls 9/11 “inevitable” into a “big tent” he says can win farmers and ranchers — a demographic that voted 77.7 percent for Trump.
Whether that is a coalition-building bet or a strategic gift to the other side is the argument the 2026 midterms will settle. The receipts — the farm-county math, the base’s 66–42 preference for socialism, the GOP’s “tie every Democrat to Kiros” plan — are already on the table.
