Impossible. Unwinnable. Career-killing. That’s what most of Colorado’s Democratic political establishment thought of the task the MAC Group had set for itself. After all, their candidate would not be the first to challenge Congresswoman Diana DeGette for Denver’s deep blue congressional seat: in the previous 30 years, DeGette had survived six contested primary races, what would make the seventh any different?
Quite a lot, it turned out. In January of next year, DeGette will pack the contents of the D.C. office she has held for three decades into bankers boxes and leave Congress for good. The seventh challenger, 29-year-old Melat Kiros, defeated DeGette in the Democratic primary on June 30 by a decisive 13 points. The race was a three-way contest which also included University of Colorado Regent Wanda James.
Kiros is a remarkable talent, something I had the fortune to see up close during the campaign. In an era of political discontent, she is refreshingly unlike D.C.’s stilted status quo: honest and passionate, articulating a clear vision. But it was not just Kiros’s own striking political talent which ushered the newcomer to her unprecedented victory last month, it was also the talented team around her; the volunteers, the organizers, and – to my own interest as a long-time creature of the campaign trail – the team from Denver’s MAC Group Consulting.
Running a campaign is hard. Running a campaign that most of the political world has decided you don’t have any chance of winning is exponentially harder. In the end, what Kiros and MAC Group pulled off was more than a win: it was the biggest political upset Colorado Democrats have seen in decades. I was eager to pick the team’s brains on how they did it.
Arranged around a conference room table in an east Denver office space on Monday afternoon, I asked the firm’s three partners — Michael Whitehorn, Annie Orloff, and Claire Simonson, whose first initials make the acronym MAC — as well as their digital strategist, Casey Main, about the race: from their decision to take on the challenge in the first place, through the shocking spate of negative ads DeGette’s team hurled at Kiros in the race’s closing month, and the lessons they learned about what made it all possible.
“I Just Kind of Got Fed Up”
When Michael Whitehorn left his job as chief of staff at the Colorado Department of State to open a new political consulting firm in 2024, it was not the first time he had left a secure position for something riskier. As both disclosure and anecdote, I should note that Whitehorn and I are friends; when I first met him ten years ago, he was Diana DeGette’s campaign manager. On Monday, when I sat down with Whitehorn and his business partners, the journey between that point and this one was among the topics I was most eager to ask about.
“Watching, day to day, politicians around the state, who get elected and maybe run on something good, who use good words during their campaign, who are uplifting and inspiring, and then refuse to fight for us in the face of difficulties, in the face of lobbying, in face of relationships,” Whitehorn told me, enumerating frustrations with some of the more establishment-aligned work he has done in the past. “Frankly, I just kind of got fed up.”
“I think, in general, we didn’t start MAC to do more of the same,” Claire Simonson added. Simonson, whose first name provides the C in MAC, is the fundraising and campaign finance expert among the three partners, and previously worked for Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s political fundraising operation. “We could have just stayed in our jobs if that’s what we wanted, but we wanted to build something else.”
When it came to choosing which candidates to work with heading into this year, the partners fully embraced the idea of doing something different; of taking on long-shot clients whose visions they believed in.
“The folks that we chose to work for are folks who we are confident are going to actually fight for Denver, and who are actually going to put themselves on the line,” Whitehorn said. Kiros was not the only candidate who fit that bill: the MAC Group team also worked on state Sen. Julie Gonzales’s challenge to U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper. In the end, Gonzales finished within 5 points of the incumbent senator, a result so unexpected that it prompted 9News anchor Kyle Clark to apologize to his viewers for not taking the race more seriously.
“We were told, ‘Don’t do it, you can’t do it,’” the third MAC partner, Annie Orloff, told me of the firm’s choice to take on two entrenched incumbents. Orloff, like Whitehorn and Simonson, is a veteran of Secretary Griswold’s orbit, having served first as director of communications for the Department of State and later as deputy chief of staff under Whitehorn. “But we believe in primaries, and we believe in not repeating the mistakes the Democratic Party has made in the past, so we took on a couple challenges,” she said.
“Melat and Julie are in this long-term,” Whitehorn said. “Their goals weren’t just to win these elections. Their goals are to have meaningful change for the people around them, and that is a very stark difference between them and other politicians.”
“A Clear Point of View”
MAC Group’s involvement with the stunning June 30 upset started with a missed call. It was the back half of 2025, and Simonson was on vacation when she saw she had a voicemail from Kiros. The team had been told about Kiros by a mutual friend, and knew that she was considering running; after checking her voicemail, Simonson asked Whitehorn and Orloff if they would be interested in taking the meeting while she was out of town. They agreed.
“Right after they met with her, they said, ‘Oh my god, we love her, let’s do this,’” Simonson recounted. With the decision made, all that remained was the small matter of figuring out how to do what no one had ever done before.
Their first challenge was convincing people to take the race seriously, and convincing national progressives that it could be an important proving ground for a refreshed view of what the Democratic Party can be. “We had to get folks to realize that this was going to be one of the test cases on whether there was enough anti-establishment energy” in the electorate, Orloff told me. “It really wasn’t until after assembly that people started to say, ‘Oh, she almost knocked her out right there.’ Before that, it was hard to make the case that Denver was going to be an interesting place for this race.”
“What made my job easy,” Orloff continued, “is that Melat is someone with a clear point of view that was consistent even before we joined the team. She’s an incredible messenger, and I knew her message really resonated with Democratic voters.”
For a message to resonate with voters, it has to get to them. But getting a message out costs money, and raising money for a race you’re unlikely to win is no small task. DeGette, as a long-term incumbent, has raised well over one million dollars per cycle for decades. At the beginning of Kiros’s race, Whitehorn built the campaign plan around a budget of $600,000. “And that felt very ambitious,” he told me.
And yet, against long odds, Kiros’s fundraising total passed the million-dollar mark just days before the primary.
“I think a couple things stand out,” Simonson told me when I asked how they accomplished the fundraising feat. “One is that she is just really disciplined about call time, the fundamentals of how you raise money on a campaign.” Kiros’s Ethiopian-American community also came through, Simonson said. “Both in Denver and around the country, her community really rallied behind her in a way that was really special to watch.”
“We did not have many max-out donors,” Simonson said. “Almost every contribution was under $100.” Even after raising just over $1.07 million, the campaign’s average contribution amount was about $50.
When Zohran Mamdani won the 2025 New York City mayoral race in an upset similar to what Kiros accomplished in Denver, the commentariat was quick to chalk his success up to his campaign’s smooth social media operation – an analysis that overlooked the content of Mamdani’s message in order to focus on the mode of its conveyance. While the pundits who insisted that progressive victories are simply a fluke of the social media age have grown suspiciously quiet recently, it’s true that cash-strapped, outsider campaigns often rely heavily on digital media. Kiros’s campaign excelled on that front as well.
“I think it started with reach,” MAC digital strategist Casey Main told me. “We wanted to make sure she had enough name recognition in Denver to be a challenger. To show people that there were other options on the table, and that you can vote for those options.”
Main, who was living in Kansas City when she saw Kiros’s launch video before applying for the digital role with MAC Group, also emphasized the district’s largely untapped demographic reality. “Not a lot of young people vote in primaries, but CD-1 is one of the youngest, if not the youngest congressional district in the country. So we were thinking, how do we reach young people, and where do young people live? How do they build community with one another? A lot of that starts on social media.”
“The mistake people make is thinking that posting is where it ends,” Orloff added. “Casey was very focused on bringing people into the real-life campaign, and that doesn’t just stop at posting. We were really using social media for name ID and organizing.”
The MAC team took on a task which was supposed to be impossible, and yet, by mid-spring, they could see all of the pieces coming together. “It was all very symbiotic,” Simonson said, noting how the field work and fundraising and social media all seemed to be driving each other.
Then the attacks started.
“They Looked Like Republican Ads”
Going into the race, the team knew that being attacked would be a sign that they were doing well, a confirmation that they posed a threat to the incumbent. So, as the campaign picked up steam through May, heading into the closing month of the race, they thought they were braced for what was coming.
They were wrong.
For months, Kiros’s detractors had worked to build a steady drumbeat of online accusations that she was antisemitic, based on the fact that she had previously lost her job at a law firm for a blog post which sympathized with the Palestinian people amidst the genocide in Gaza. Originally, that narrative struggled to break through (possibly because the second paragraph of the blog post in question is a full-throated condemnation of antisemitism). It never occurred to the campaign team that their opponent might attempt to weaponize the bad-faith accusation in any serious manner.
“I was surprised, yeah,” Orloff told me, describing the ads as racist, xenophobic, and nativist. “I expected the ‘she’s inexperienced’ attack, but the xenophobia was … They looked like Republican ads.”
For many Denverites, the attacks hurled at Kiros by DeGette’s campaign and the PACs supporting her will likely remain the most memorable aspect of the race for years to come. In the final month of the race, DeGette’s campaign ran ads accusing Kiros of “rationaliz[ing] the killing of Jews” and “blaming America for 9/11.”
The MAC Group team was stunned. “Melat is such a caring, kind, genuine person who has had family members go through genocide,” Orloff said, referencing the Tigray genocide, which claimed as many as 600,000 lives in Ethiopia between 2020 and 2022. “This is something she believes in across the board, that people should be able to live in peace and dignity.”
“Melat is flat-out not an antisemite,” Whitehorn said. He thinks he would have noticed by now. “Of the five people who made campaign decisions on a day-to-day basis, four of us were Jewish,” he said. “Claire is the only one who isn’t,” Whitehorn added, laughing with Simonson.
Despite their own certainty about Kiros’s character, the attacks landed heavily with the team, particularly Orloff and Whitehorn. “It’s really tough when you have people who are intelligent and in the grasstops in this community calling Michael and myself kapos,” Orloff said, referring to a slur meant to evoke Jewish concentration camp inmates who collaborated with their Nazi jailers. “It feels very personal. But this conversation is happening, and they’re not going to shut it down.”
“As a Jew, I was raised with a communal kind of ethos which aligns very closely with Melat’s policy perspectives,” Whitehorn said.
“I think what kept me grounded was, one, it reflects my moral values, and two, it reflects the values of the majority of Americans,” Orloff said. “If you’re not going to listen to people, then look at the polling. This is where people are. People can see with their own eyes what is happening, and they are done with politicians who keep telling them not to believe their lying eyes.”
Outside of the personal impact of the attacks, the MAC team was surprised to see DeGette’s team make what they felt was an overt strategic mistake. “The ads were misplaced given the electorate, given the type of things that people want to hear from their electeds,” Whitehorn told me, saying that the mismatch was emblematic of DeGette having lost touch with her constituents. He referenced another ad against Kiros, which tried to demean her for having worked as a barista. “They weren’t connected enough to the people of Denver to know that telling folks that Melat worked as a barista was not actually something that would hurt Melat.”
On the campaign’s social media channels, Main could tell that the attack ads were backfiring in real time. “We had volunteers joining the campaign just based on seeing the negative ads and saying that they don’t want to live in a political environment where those kinds of ads can exist.” True to their candidate, the Kiros campaign’s messaging remained positive, upbeat, and aspirational. “I think that’s a much more resounding message to amplify than one that is racist and xenophobic,” Main told me.
Orloff thinks the attack ads were a mistake on another level as well. “The fact that that’s all they had to say said a lot.”
“This is About Long-Term Relationship Building”
June 30 came and went. Colorado history was made. From the first ballot drop at 7 p.m., Kiros never lost the lead in the vote tally. In November, she is likely to win the General Election by at least 30%, even with the last-minute addition of an independent candidate. Now, both Kiros and the MAC Group team behind her are getting to work on the new task before them: transitioning from being an insurgent, against-all-odds primary campaign to staffing a congressional office and positioning Kiros to be a representative for all of Denver.
“Long-term, Melat’s vision for Denver is different from the prior representative’s vision, so her engagement in Denver is going to be really different,” Whitehorn told me.
“We really think Melat can do a lot,” Orloff said, “so we want to make sure she’s really set up for success long-term, not just pop up all of this infrastructure and then lose it.” Right now, the MAC Group team is helping Kiros build towards November, and towards January, including heading up the search for a chief of staff for Kiros’s congressional office, and a district director to manage her office’s operations in Denver.
Setting up for the future also means working to bury hatchets from the campaign trail, and assuaging any concerns that still exist. In the closing days of the campaign, during an interview with Kyle Clark, Kiros declined to assert that the Boulder firebomb attack last year, perpetrated against a group protesting for the release of Jewish hostages held by Hamas, was an antisemitic act, even though she condemned the attack and political violence more broadly. For those already concerned that Kiros might harbor a hatred for Jewish people, the interview seemed to be another confirmation.
“It was frustrating,” Orloff said of the response to the interview, “And with this issue, which is complicated – like, centuries-long complicated – it’s very easy for people to clip things, or hear what they want to hear.”
Still, Kiros and the campaign team understood why the exchange had landed askew with some people. In the days following the campaign, in interviews with outlets like Denverite and Colorado Public Radio, Kiros expounded on her response to Clark, saying she wished she could have better conveyed her understanding of the horror and tragedy the Jewish community experienced because of the Boulder attack. She said that she spoke with members of the Jewish community to better understand their perspectives after the interview. Whitehorn told me the same thing.
“What we have done since the election is go have real, meaningful conversations with Jewish leaders across the city, and we will continue to do that, just like we are having real, meaningful conversations with labor leaders and reproductive rights leaders,” Whitehorn told me. “We’re just not posting about it online, because this is about long-term relationship building, so that we – Melat, the MAC Group, the Jewish community – all of us can work together moving forward.”
“Our goal is to work across every imaginable constituency to build a Denver that works for everyone, where everyone feels protected and safe.”
With an impossible victory etched into the books behind them, and what they hope are years of meaningful work in the community stretching out before them, I asked the MAC Group team if they had distilled any lessons from their wild, improbable ride through primary season.
Main was quick with an answer – one which she acknowledged might not be original, but currently seems truer than ever. “It’s what Melat says at every event and to every new person she meets, but organized people really do beat organized money every single time.”
“Running for office is so hard, it is so personal,” Orloff said. “A candidate has to know why they’re running, and that’s not something a consultant can decide for them. We saw Chuck Schumer push Janet Mills to run and it just doesn’t work.”
Whitehorn emphasized one of the benefits of being the underdog: flexibility. “When we made bad decisions, we were able to pivot quickly to good ones; to go from, ‘Hey, I’m not sure that worked,’ to, ‘Let’s try something new,” instantly. We adjusted in real time.”
“Contrast that to how long it took Diana’s campaign to realize those ads weren’t working,” he said. “It took them a month. If it had taken them a day or two, we might be having a different conversation.”
Simonson stressed the fundamentals. “Melat didn’t raise a million dollars because we invented some brand new tactic that no other campaign has ever thought of. It was 20 hours a week of call time, a bunch of small house parties, and a really disciplined digital program.”
Ultimately, a campaign lives or dies by the strength of the candidate at its center, and MAC Group knows they could not have gotten much luckier in that regard. “Above most things, voters are looking for authenticity,” Whitehorn told me. “Not just in the way people speak, but in when they show up, where they show up, and who they show up with. Melat had an opportunity to show people her authenticity, and they believed it.”
“It really reflects who Melat is as a person, not just as a candidate. She’s so full of empathy, joy, and kindness,” Main said of the campaign the team ran. “I think that carries through.”
With the dust settling around them and their eyes adjusting to a new horizon, the MAC Group team knows that Kiros’s victory was not entirely the product of their genius, that it was not even entirely the product of Kiros’s genius. They’ve known for a long time what many learned from Diana DeGette’s 13-point loss on June 30: the Democratic Party is changing. It will either change into an organization capable of meeting the moment, or it won’t – and primary races are the determining factor.
“We are obviously, as a party, going through a reckoning,” Orloff said. “That’s especially true when it comes to political consultants and what our role is, and I think that everyone who does this for our party needs to take a hard look in the mirror and think about what they’re doing, and the larger impact they’re having. Because, all of these races? They add up to our party.”
Author’s note, 7/29: Campaigns of this scale require dozens, if not hundreds, of committed volunteers and staffers. In the case of the Kiros campaign, an enormous number of people contributed to the victory, including the Denver chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which coordinated a large volunteer effort for the campaign. In this piece, I chose to focus on the consulting angle not because I believe it matters more than the rest of the effort, but because of my own experience as a consultant – it’s what I know, and it’s what I was most curious about. Like most things worth doing, running a good campaign takes a village.
