“I’m not a politician”: Montrose commissioner Sean Pond enters U.S. Senate race

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice

“I’m not a politician,” Sean Pond said. “I’m just that guy that stood up and said no to federal overreach.” 

Pond said that decision eventually led him beyond local fights. Appointed to the Montrose County Commission in February 2025, Pond said the conversations didn’t stop once he took office.

A question sits at the center of Pond’s campaign launch video, released Sunday, and the conversations he said ultimately pushed him into the U.S. Senate race. “What keeps you up at night?”

Pond said the question at the center of his campaign launch video wasn’t new. He said he began asking it months earlier, including on social media, as a way to hear directly from Coloradans about what felt off in their day-to-day lives.

“What keeps you up at night?” he said. “What worries them? What’s missing in Colorado because it’s not the Colorado that I grew up in.”

He said the answers were strikingly similar, no matter where he asked. “People can’t afford a house. Young couples can’t afford to have kids. Jobs are disappearing.”

Over time, he said, the repetition mattered. “At some point you realize that’s not just noise,” he said. “That’s when I decided to run.”

Only after making that decision did he turn to how the launch should look. Pond said he rejected a traditional campaign rollout because he didn’t want the focus on himself.

“I told them no. I didn’t want to talk about me. I wanted to hear from the people.”

He said the goal was authenticity rather than polish. “I want them unscripted and just real people and real voices.”

“That was the entire intent,” he said. “To make it about the people and not about me.”

Pond is running in 2026 against Democrat Sen. John Hickenlooper, with several Republicans already in the mix—including state Sen. Mark Baisley of Woodland Park, Janak Joshi, George Markert and Dathan Jones—ahead of a June 30 primary.

Pond described his candidacy as the result of resistance rather than ambition. “I’ve been asked for probably six or seven months to run for higher office, and I’ve said no,” he said. “I’ve been asked to run for all kinds of things, and I kept saying no, that’s not me.”

Long before politics, Pond said urgency shaped his life decisions. “I joined the Navy at the age of 18 because I needed to eat.”

Pond talked about growing up as the oil shale bust hit Western Colorado. “Homes were foreclosed,” he said, “the mall was closed down,” and steady work dried up.

He said he grew up with a single mother who remarried several times. “Sometimes we lived in really cool places,” he said, including ranch land. Other times, especially in his early teenage years, they lived in low-income apartments.

“I was 18,” he said. “I walked from Clifton into downtown Grand Junction and went to the courthouse.”

He began with the Marines and took the ASVAB. He thought he was set until the recruiter told him he wouldn’t ship out until August. 

And then Pond spoke up. “I told him, ‘No sir, you don’t understand. I need to go now.’”

The recruiter didn’t argue. “Your ASVAB score’s high enough, you qualify for the Navy, and they’re across the hall,” Pond said. “He walked me over to the Navy, and I shook that recruiter’s hand. Three days later I’m in San Diego.”

Before the Dolores River fight, Pond said he voted but stayed out of the fray. Then the land proposal landed and he stopped staying quiet. 

He found himself speaking at public forums, including one attended by Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, after weeks of passing around petitions and organizing opposition.

What stuck with him wasn’t the politics, but how quickly a decision made far away can land on a community.

After that fight, Pond said he wanted to understand how similar policies continued advancing across the state. After the legislative session began in 2025, he said he started reading every bill introduced in Colorado.

“Once I read a dozen, I was flabbergasted,” he said. “Like, this can’t be real.”

The process itself unsettled him. “A law always takes away something from every freedom-loving American,” he said. “That’s what finally clicked for me when I started reading through them.” 

As he worked through the bills introduced that session, only a small number struck him as leaving individual freedoms intact.

Pond said the move into county government wasn’t about office or trajectory. It was about staying put in a fight he believed wasn’t finished, when he learned a vacancy seat had opened up. “There was one reason I threw my name in the hat. It wasn’t because I wanted to be in politics. It was because I had to stay in the fight to stop this federal land grab.”

Once he was sworn in, he said there was no easing into the role. “That two or three day process, I didn’t sleep.” He said he sat down to write the county’s response himself. “I didn’t know how to write a resolution. Nobody told me I had staff. I wrote it myself.”

After he was sworn in, the resolution passed. “I did it my very first day in that seat.”

Pond said the year that followed exposed him to a level of political conflict he hadn’t anticipated, both inside county government and in the community around it, forcing him to reconsider how division takes hold and feeds on itself.

“I thought the moderate unaffiliated voters were the problem,” he said. “What I’ve learned in the last year is they’re actually the solution.”

Those lessons ultimately pushed him toward a federal race. “Those decisions that affect people on the ground very often start from a federal policy.”

Public lands remain central to his platform. “We have got to amend or repeal the Antiquities Act of 1906. It gives a sitting president way too much power.”

Pond said success in Washington would not be measured by longevity. “If at the end of a term in the Senate I’ve helped restore a constitutional balance, I’ll be glad to go home,” he said. “I don’t want to be there forever. I want to do what I came to do and go back to my life.”

Pond said what ultimately changed his mind was the consistency of what he heard from voters across party lines. “When enough people tap you on the shoulder and ask you to step up, it gets harder and harder to say no,” he said. “When you realize that maybe you could do a little something to make a difference for the state that you’re from, at some point you step forward.”