AIPAC, Big Tech Back Diana DeGette Over Melat Kiros With $2M Spending Flood

Next week’s Colorado primary is attracting national attention in the wake of the major democratic socialist wins in New York City

Wanda James, Diana DeGette and Melat Kiros participate in a League of Women Voters candidate forum at Montview Presbyterian Church on May 28, 2026, in Denver, Colorado. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

Super PACs funded by AIPAC and major big tech donors have poured roughly $2 million behind Rep. Diana DeGette on the eve of her contentious primary in Colorado’s first congressional district against democratic socialist challenger Melat Kiros.

The June 30 primary in the Denver area has drawn national attention in the wake of Tuesday’s sweeping set of wins by democratic socialists in New York. Kiros has run as a critic of unchecked AI development, telling Drop Site News she supports a moratorium on data center construction. Her opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its ongoing efforts at occupation and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, meanwhile, has drawn the attention of pro-Israel donors hoping to rescue their longtime ally DeGette.

AIPAC, however, is now a political liability in the increasingly blue Colorado; the money being spent against Kiros has flowed instead through PACs associated with women’s rights, of which DeGette has long been a champion.

The key super PAC in question is called EDW Action Fund, which is affiliated with the member-led PAC Elect Democratic Women (EDW). EDW has been chaired since its 2018 launch by Democratic Rep. Lois Frankel, who quit the Congressional Progressive Caucus in November 2023 in protest of some of its members voicing criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza. The former mayor of West Palm Beach, Frankel was among just six members of the CPC who had recently voted to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib for using the phrase, “From the river to the sea.” Frankel’s EDW has frequently been used by AIPAC to funnel money into congressional races.

Now Frankel’s PAC is spending heavily against Kiros, largely relying on its sister organization Pro-Choice Majority Action, a hybrid PAC recently formed on May 1 as a legal affiliate of EDW Action. AIPAC has used EDW Action to shelter spending in several 2026 Democratic primary elections across the country already, and the same trend has followed in this race. DeGette also accepted a one-time $2,900 contribution directly from AIPAC in May 2022, but has since sworn off the lobby.

The AIPAC money has taken a circuitous route to television screens in Denver. AIPAC’s United Democracy Project donated $350,000 to EDW Action on May 1 and $400,000 on May 20, after which EDW Action transferred $876,000 to Pro-Choice Majority in three installments of $626,000, $100,000 and $150,000 on May 21, May 22 and May 29. Any funding EDW Action or Pro-Choice Majority secured after June 1 is not required to be disclosed until July 1, one day after Colorado’s Tuesday primary election.

The EDW PAC sent EDW Action Fund an additional $380,000 throughout the month of May.

PCM spent roughly $460,000 in ad buys supporting DeGette in two dumps on June 16 and June 18 respectively, despite reporting less than $38,000 total cash-on-hand as of May 31. Then, the PAC dropped more than $530,000 on a pro-DeGette ad buy on June 22, only to trump that figure with another $550,000 on June 24 and 25. Those final buys bring PCM’s year-to-date total spent either in support of DeGette or against Kiros over $1.5 million.

Lenny Young, a representative for both EDW Action and PCM explained that the two groups move cash between themselves and collaborate with other organizations when they support the same candidate. “Obviously there are groups out there who have their own priorities, who also happen to support the same women candidates we support. In those cases, it’s clearly much more effective to combine resources to carry a message,” he said in an email to Drop Site.

Project 218, another super PAC spending big behind DeGette, receives much of its funding from wealthy tech industry donors, as first reported in the Colorado Sun. Project 218 dumped $400,000 into attack ads against Kiros on June 17 after receiving two massive $3.5 million and $630,000 contributions from a 501(c)(4) organization called Democracy Matters on May 26 and May 20 respectively. Campaign finance laws do not require 501(c)(4)s, frequently referred to as “dark money” or “advocacy” groups, to disclose the sources of their funding.

Artificial intelligence, now the holy grail in Silicon Valley, is an especially hot button issue in Colorado amid a glut in data center construction along its portion of the I-25 corridor.

“When we’re talking about the threat of AI, I think a lot of folks think about it as like the apocalypse of the robots,” Kiros said in an interview with Drop Site News and the American Prospect. “It’s actually a lot worse, just in that it gets absorbed into our military industrial complex and it makes one or two wrong decisions and now we’re at a nuclear war with Russia.”

Kiros said that a federal data center moratorium is imperative and should be used as a negotiation tactic to implement significant regulation of AI. She also believes that the government is not thinking nearly big enough about all the implications of the rapid artificial intelligence advancement we have seen over the last few years.

“I think it’s also something that has motivated me into making sure that we sign on finally onto the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights and guaranteeing the rights to housing and health care and nutritional food as basic rights in our Constitution. Because if, you know, AI changes work as we know it, and the social contract that we have is that if you work, then that contract is broken and you need to replace it with something else that protects people’s dignity. And so this is going to change everything, and I don’t think we have enough folks that are talking about it in a meaningful way.”

DeGette could not be reached for comment. In discussing AI, DeGette has often focused on the energy demands and improving the grid. “After 20 years of stagnation, electricity demand is finally set to grow again, driven by everything from data centers to a resurgence in domestic manufacturing to vehicle electrification, America is demanding more electricity,” she said in a hearing in the House. “This increasing desire for electricity is a good thing... But as we celebrate these new industries being built in the United States, we must make sure our power grid is up to the task.”

Kiros has campaigned with Hasan Piker in recent weeks and picked up a key endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders. Piker had been slated to host a rally for Kiros and Senate candidate Julie Gonzales, who is challenging Democratic incumbent Sen. John Hickenlooper, in Denver on Sunday June 14, but was blocked after various venues, including the Ogden Theatre, Reelworks, and Stanley Marketplace, canceled the events. Stanley Marketplace told Deep Singh Badeesh, one of the event organizers, that they were told it was “a neo-Nazi rally.”

The speakers would make for an odd lineup at a Nazi rally: aside from the Turkish-American Muslim Piker, Reps. Justin Pearson and Donavan McKinney were also scheduled to speak and are both Black; Gonzales is Latina and Kiros emigrated from Tigray, Ethiopia. The rally was moved to the Capitol steps.