Kudos to 5th Congressional District U.S. Rep. Jeff Crank of Colorado Springs for pressing an essential question: Just how comfortable are Democrats with their party’s growing embrace of socialism?

As Gazette news affiliate Colorado Politics reported, Crank passed a resolution Tuesday condemning socialism, largely along party lines, in the U.S. House.

HR 1490 cleared the House 220-192. Eight Democrats joined every Republican.

None of Colorado’s Democrats were among them.

That includes U.S. Reps. Joe Neguse, Jason Crow and Brittany Pettersen, all seeking reelection — as well as the departing Diana DeGette.

“The Democratic Socialists of America was a fringe movement a decade ago,” Crank said. “Now they’re growing within the Democrat ranks, winning primaries and threatening the foundation of what makes this country the greatest on earth.”

He’s right. In Colorado’s capital city, a new survey from the Colorado Polling Institute shows more Denver voters now identify as socialists than Republicans.

Seventeen percent identified as socialists, The Gazette reported — up from 12% last year and more than the 15% who call themselves Republicans.

That clout helped Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros unseat longtime liberal Democratic stalwart DeGette by 13.4 points in Denver’s June primary — a stunning defeat for the 15-term incumbent. 

But Colorado Polling Institute’s Kevin Ingham found the data more nuanced. Voters expressed “more dissatisfaction with the status quo generally than opposition to capitalism specifically,” he said. They’re drawn to “what they believed socialism offered: universal health care, a fairer economy and a more equal society.”

In short, voters’ socialist identification might be less about an understanding of socialist ideology than a general mood of the moment.

Still, that so many now blithely embrace the socialist label should alarm rank-and-file Democrats about the DSA’s clout in their party.

Moods often elect candidates. The winners tend to remain in office. Incumbents are hard to beat, and they shape the party’s image — however far outside the mainstream they might be.

The socialist label is especially popular among young adults, with 35% of Denver voters under 35 embracing it, according to the survey.

Of course, they’ve never witnessed socialism’s real-world results. Political naivete has consequences. 

Crank’s nonbinding resolution ties today’s Democratic Socialists to the grim legacies of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, whose regimes carried out mass murder and brutal repression for generations in the name of socialism.

In a 9News interview, Democratic Socialist Kiros defended calling the 9/11 attacks an “inevitable consequence” of American policy.

“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,” Kiros said. “(O)ur responsibility is to get rid of those conditions that lead to violence in the first place.”

Crank rightly pounced on that answer.

“So, tell me why that’s different?” he told Fox News Digital. “When you have a bunch of terrorists on Sept. 11 killing Americans because of ideology, how is that different than what (Chinese dictator) Mao did? It isn’t. This is the insidiousness of this movement.”

Crank sees Bernie Sanders-style socialism fusing with “the antisemitism of this sort of radical Arab movement.”

“If that’s a marriage, their child is violence, right? It’s violence and intimidation,” he said. “It’s showing up at town hall meetings and trying to shout elected officials down, which, by the way, is completely anti-democratic.”

And yet, voters in our state’s largest city are increasingly comfortable with calling themselves socialists.

Perhaps that is about mood more than ideology. But when moods hold sway, they shape political parties. Colorado Democrats must answer where theirs is headed.