By Rocky Mountain Voice Editorial Board
One of Colorado’s biggest races still isn’t settled.
Two days after the polls closed, the Republican primary for governor had not been called. Victor Marx led Barb Kirkmeyer by about 2,000 votes statewide—39.86 percent to 39.43 percent, with Scott Bottoms third at 20.71 percent—in the Secretary of State’s Thursday morning count. Marx’s edge, 2,181 votes out of more than 500,000 cast, sits just outside Colorado’s mandatory recount range, which trips at half a percentage point.
On the Democrat side, the race was settled. Attorney General Phil Weiser defeated U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, 56.71 percent to 43.29 percent.
Colorado doesn’t finish voting when the polls close. And neither do Colorado’s campaigns.
The real story from Tuesday isn’t who won or lost. It’s what the numbers say about the next four months.
Colorado doesn’t belong to either party anymore. More than half of active voters are unaffiliated, while Democrats make up about a quarter of the electorate, and Republicans slightly less.
Those voters—not the party faithful—will decide November.
Some read Tuesday’s turnout as proof Colorado keeps moving left. It’s a tempting read, and an incomplete one.
Of the ballots returned, Democrat ballots outnumbered Republican ones by about 62 percent to 38 percent. Much of that gap comes from unaffiliated voters—the more than 308,000 who chose a Democrat ballot against about 120,000 who chose a Republican one.
But they don’t predict November.
This year’s Democrat ballot had competitive statewide races for governor, attorney general, secretary of state and U.S. Senate. The Republican ballot had few. When unaffiliated voters can pick either one, many go where the real contests are.
That’s strategy. Not necessarily ideology.
Which primary a voter pulled in June is not how that voter marks a ballot in November.
Organization, not just money
If Tuesday proved anything, it’s that the biggest checkbook doesn’t win a mail-ballot state. The ground game does.
A tweet from Free State Colorado about roughly $1.5 million in spending by One Main Street Colorado IEC sent RMV into the state’s campaign finance filings. The filings didn’t just confirm the figure. They accounted for it to the dollar—$1,509,536—and showed where the money went.
What turned up wasn’t a committee. It was a network. One Main Street‘s independent expenditure committee bankrolled six committees carrying progressive-sounding names: Blue Collar Progressives, Colorado Mountain Progressives, Fighting for a Better Aurora, Promoting Progressive Women, the Progressive Leadership Fund and one more. The checks ran $527,500, $342,000, $225,250, $182,500 and $180,000, down to $52,000 for the last—nearly every dollar those committees spent.
Four of them file from the same house in Durango, 1275 Escalante Drive, under the same registered agent. On one day in May, One Main Street cut three checks to three of those committees at that single address: $100,000, $100,000 and $75,000. A fifth committee banks at the same Denver credit union branch as One Main Street itself.
The money’s origin is where the disclosure stops. One Main Street’s committee is fed almost entirely by a nonprofit its own filings call a “labor-led 501(c)(4)”—about $1.4 million from a group at the same address that doesn’t have to name its donors.
The rest it discloses: $75,000 in checks from building-trades unions, the plumbers, the laborers and a pipe-trades local. From there the money moved sideways between the committees, $20,000 here and $52,000 there, before going out the door to consultants in Delaware, Tennessee, Wyoming, Pennsylvania and California for mailers and digital ads.
Then the votes came in, and the network lost. It spent to elect Andrés Carrera in Senate District 34; he lost by 38 points. It spent to beat incumbent Rep. Jamie Jackson in House District 41 and lost that one too. Of the five candidates it paid to support, four went down.
Republicans ran their own operation, and it tells the other half of the story. The Colorado Conservative Leadership Fund reported $811,648 in spending in the two weeks ending June 24—and it put more than $325,000 of that into door-knocking through two firms, Victor’s Canvassing and Blitz Canvassing, on top of direct mail and a six-figure television buy.
Its candidates won at least five of the seven races where it backed a contender, some by wide margins.
Roughly the same money. Opposite result. Both networks spent on mail and digital. Only one also spent on the doors. The Democrat network’s six committees hired no canvassers at all—every dollar went to mailers and digital ads.
A second difference is harder to miss.
The Republican fund operates as a single committee under its own name, banks under that name and reports its donors—charter-school and business groups, a shooting association and a couple of wealthy individuals.
The Democrat network used names such as Blue Collar Progressives and Colorado Mountain Progressives, moved money between the committees before spending it and traces back to a labor-led nonprofit that won’t say who funds it—then spent to defeat fellow Democrats, and lost most of those races.
Both are networks. One is built to be seen. The other is built to be hard to follow.
But both parties got the same lesson Tuesday, and it’s the oldest one in a mail-ballot state. Campaigns here aren’t won by the sharpest commercial or the biggest ad buy. They’re won by registering voters, identifying supporters, knocking doors, following up when ballots land and curing the signatures that get flagged—thousands of personal contacts over months.
It’s unglamorous work, and it’s the work that wins. The network that spent on it won. The network that spent around it did not.
The congressional races made the point
On the Western Slope, the loudest story heading into the primary was the anger at Rep. Jeff Hurd from the wing of the party that wanted a fighter and saw a moderate. Online, it looked like a revolt. At the ballot box, it wasn’t a contest. Hurd beat challenger Ron Hanks two to one—66.5 percent to 33.5 percent, a 33-point win. The noise didn’t move the numbers.
In Denver, the same principle cut the other way. Rep. Diana DeGette, in office since 1996, lost her primary to Melat Kiros, a democratic socialist backed by the party’s organized left. Fifteen terms and near-universal name recognition weren’t enough against a challenger whose side did the ground work. A long-tenured incumbent fell—not to a better-known name, but to a better-run operation.
And in the 8th, the district that may decide control of the U.S. House, Democrats picked Manny Rutinel over Shannon Bird by about 30 points. Rutinel entered as the best-funded candidate in the field and left as the nominee who will face Rep. Gabe Evans in the fall—carried by resources and reach more than by a closing debate that ran thin on specifics.
Three races, three kinds of winners. What they shared wasn’t ideology or incumbency. It was the operation behind them.
None of this means a party can turn its back on its own voters. In a mail-ballot state, a base that doesn’t return its ballots is a loss before the first swing voter is ever reached—and Republicans, with fewer contested races at the top of this primary, saw how quickly their own turnout can lag.
The base isn’t the ceiling. It’s the floor. The mistake isn’t courting your voters. It’s stopping there.
Neither party owns the middle
Republicans should think on that. They haven’t won a statewide race since 2016, they face a hard climate this fall, and pretending otherwise helps no one.
Winning the most committed corner of your own coalition is not the same as winning Colorado.
Both sides got the same message Tuesday. Neither owns the state’s political middle—the more than half of voters who skip the party meetings, keep their yards free of signs and split their tickets. For the next four months, those are the people worth talking to.
The campaigns that spend the summer preaching to their own may find the state’s largest bloc quietly chose someone else.
Tuesday’s primary wasn’t a verdict on November. It was a map for how November gets won.
The primary is over. The real election just began.
Editor’s note: Primary election results are unofficial and still being counted. Figures reflect the Colorado Secretary of State’s reporting as of Thursday morning, July 2, with all 64 counties reporting and post-election processing under way.