8 AUGUST 14-20, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | lege campuses, Kiros says she published an article in support of the protesting students, some of whom were being suspended, expelled or having job offers rescinded. Kiros says her employer told her to take the article down and when she refused, she was fi red. Though she lost her job, the experience and the student protests made her realize the power of “fi ghting against the powers that be and fi ghting for the dignity of people,” she says. “I come from the northern region of Ethiopia, Tigray, where there was a genocide a few years ago that claimed the lives of at least 600,000 civilians. I protested when that was happening,” Kiros explains. “I wasn’t going to compromise on my values. I wasn’t then, I won’t now.” Kiros then moved back to Denver and began a public affairs Ph.D. program at the University of Colorado, to research policy solutions to reform the national political system. She decided to run for Congress after Trump was re-elected in 2024, saying Demo- crats aren’t doing enough to resist harmful actions from the Trump administration or to offer a plan after Trump leaves offi ce. “There are people in the party and in the city who are interested in seeing a new generation of leadership rise up,” Kiros says. “We have to build a new system, new policies, bolder legislation that protect the dignity of people as our society shifts dramatically over the next few decades. I want to be a part of that conversation.” Carter Hanson Hanson, 27, is a substitute teacher and mas- ter’s student studying environmental policy at the University of Denver. His campaign is centered on environmentalism; he wants to reform longstanding laws that were created to protect the environment but instead get in the way of projects that would help in the long term. He advocates for fast-track- ing energy transmission proj- ects, mass transit infrastructure and more housing construction in areas that would reduce daily vehicle commutes. “We live in an atmosphere further from a normal carbon level than the last ice age. And it’s getting worse, not better,” Hanson says. “You and me, we do not have a future in that sce- nario. ...The American people need someone who they can trust with environmentalism as their main thing to go in and change those laws.” Hanson says he was inspired to run for office when some of the fed- eral funding sources for his university’s microbiology lab were cut by the Trump administration earlier this year. Hanson has worked part-time in the lab since 2023 and was researching wastewater surveillance as a means of tracking bird fl u before the funding was pulled. “My lab offi cially lost funding on June 15, and I declared [my candidacy] on June 19,” he says. “That was the last straw for me. It’s clear that there are very powerful people in the world who want to make my fi eld go away, and I can’t take that lying down. ...Politics wasn’t something that I ever seri- ously considered doing until the doors that I was trying to go through started closing because of politics.” Hanson was born in San Francisco, Cali- fornia, and grew up in Michigan and Texas before moving to Colorado for college in 2016. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies from the University of Colorado Boulder, he says he went on to work for an air emissions testing company for a year. He was fi red from the position in 2023 for allegedly revealing confi dential com- pany information online, though Hanson describes the situation as “whistleblower retaliation,” claiming that he was terminated for discussing misconduct regarding how his employer handled emissions reporting for certain polluters. Hanson argues that DeGette does not understand the economic situation of young people like himself, pointing to the reduc- tion of entry-level jobs, the emergence of artifi cial intelligence in the workforce and increasing housing prices. Long-standing members of the Democratic Party, like his opponent, are not addressing such issues with enough urgency, he claims. “The Democratic Party has not been meeting the moment,” Hanson says. “Are we going to expect the people who have been in that party for my whole lifetime to suddenly retrain themselves and suddenly learn new expectations and new techniques? Or should we let people who don’t have those past ex- pectations holding them back give it a shot?” One of those so-called restrictive past expectations is bipartisanship. Hanson’s campaign videos and website are fi lled with digs at Republicans, including describing the people running the country as “evil,” “visionless sellouts” and “mediocre fascist men bent on destroying the country because they’re not smart or hardworking enough to contribute anything worthwhile.” Hanson defends these opinions as a “ra- tional reaction to what’s going on,” saying his statements are only reinforced by his personal interac- News continued from page 6 “We need new people to come up and change the image of what the Democratic Party is,” Carter Hanson says. COURTESY CARTER HANSON continued on page 10
