These Colorado candidates are pitching primary voters on flipping seats in November

DENVER (CN) — If past trends hold, Coloradoans will have a pretty good idea of who their governor will be months before the general election. Voters have given just one Republican the keys to the governor’s mansion in the last 50 years.

But three candidates asking Republicans and unaffiliated voters to pick them in the June 30 primary claim they can beat the odds and break up the state’s single-party rule.

“Never say never. The Colorado Democrats are at the lowest they will probably ever be,” said liberal strategist Chris Crosby of COBlue LLC.

Even with Democratic Party infighting, Crosby doesn’t think the Republican Party offers voters a competitive alternative between viral pastor Victor Marx, who claims to have the fastest gun-grab in the West, Colorado Springs Representative Scott Bottoms, who has struggled to get bills out of committee, and Greeley Representative Barb Kirkmeyer, whose past support for northern Colorado seceding from the state threatens to overshadow her bipartisan work.

“In this particular race, whatever Republican wins doesn’t have a chance,” Crosby said.

Still Republicans who watched the state move to the left during the Covid-19 pandemic see opportunity in Democrat Jared Polis being both term-limited and in political exile. His party censured him for commuting the 9-year sentence of former elections clerk Tina Peters in May.

Both Democrats running to replace Polis heavily criticized the decision to free the woman convicted for her role in leaking voting machine data, as did Kirkmeyer.

President Donald Trump threatened to withhold state funding over Peters’ jailing, which Polis said did not influence his clemency decision. Kirkmeyer argued the Colorado governor should have waited for Peters’ appeal to play out before intervening.

“That process should have been carried out,” Kirkmeyer told Courthouse News over the phone.

Kirkmeyer moved from her parents’ dairy farm to the Weld County Board of Commissioners and into the state Senate as a “common sense conservative.”

“I didn’t just want to go down to the Senate to make a point,” Kirkmeyer said. “We stayed in the minority my whole six years, but I went because I wanted to make a difference.”

This past session, the governor signed more than a dozen bills Kirkmeyer sponsored, including measures that cut spending, reallocated funds and supported schools. She hopes this work makes her stand out against political newcomer Marx and Bottoms, whose only bill to make it out of committee in two years created the “In God We Trust” license plate.

“I ran many bills,” Bottoms told Courthouse News. “And the Democrats vote unanimously every single time to keep pedophiles out of jail, to keep traffickers out of jail.”

Bottoms stands by these measures.

Both candidates say they uphold the Constitution but differ vastly when it comes to the word “compromise.” The difference in philosophy earned Bottoms a score of 98 on the local conservative Liberty Scorecard, and Kirkmeyer a 58.

“Compromise is not a bad word,” Kirkmeyer said.

But Bottoms believes the majority party increasingly infringes on rights no one should compromise on.

“We run so many bills in the Colorado State House that are not constitutional,” Bottoms said. “They fly in the face of the Constitution. And we even had Democrats come down to the well and say, well, we’ll pass the bills, you sue us.”

While Bottoms and Kirkmeyer represent flip sides of the Republican Party coin, voters have a third option: Victor Marx. A controversial political outsider, Marx claims to have “led more than 150 high-stakes missions across some of the world’s most dangerous regions,” befriended the late Charlie Kirk, and earned a black belt in Keichu-Do, a “Cajun Christian” martial art developed by his father.

Marx boasts endorsements from Congresswoman Lauren Boebert and musician Ted Nugent.

Despite his questionable resume, Marx is outpacing both opponents in fundraising and polling with Cygnal giving Marx 42% of the vote over Kirkmeyer’s 13% and Bottoms trailing behind.

According to campaign reports on TRACER, Marx raised $2.8 million, more than two-thirds of the $4.1 million raised by Republican candidates for the race, Kirkmeyer reporting $608,024 and Bottoms $227,156.

Marx also faces more than two dozen complaints over campaign finance issues, including spending a majority of money raised on consultancy and accepting donations that exceed caps, including from 152 donors to whom Marx must return more than $100,000, according to complaints filed by former GOP staffer Darcy Schoening.

Each candidate hopes to convince voters in the general election to put a new party in power. In recent election cycles however, Republicans have struggled to win more than 40% of the vote, making it easy for many liberal strategists to see the winner of the Democratic primary as the future governor.

While the Republican ticket offers three very different conservative-based ideologies, both Democratic candidates promise to expand access to affordable homes, early childhood education and healthcare.

A former superintendent of Denver Public Schools, Michael Bennet has sat in the U.S. Senate since 2009, when he was appointed to fill a vacancy. He briefly campaigned for president in the crowded 2020 primary but dropped out before the election.

Phil Weiser, the current attorney general and past dean of the University of Colorado Law School, hopes to convince voters to “keep Bennet in the Senate.”

“Something the Weiser campaign pointed out and what some voters are considering is, we need our full forces against the Trump administration,” Crosby said. “If we lose a really effective senator, who’s going to take his place? Are they going to do as good of a job? Are we going to lose something in combating Trump through that?”

While Bennet leads Weiser in polling from Public Policy Polling, the outgoing attorney general has raised $6.5 million, outpacing the senator’s $4.8 million.

“This is going to be a really tight race,” Crosby said. “I don’t think anybody is the underdog at this point.”

Marx, Bennet and Weiser did not respond to request for an interview.

8th Congressional District

Many of Colorado’s political offices are expected to remain with their current party, but the 8th Congressional District is an outlier. Drawn to be competitive by a nonpartisan committee, the district has flipped in both of its elections, changing from Democrat Yadira Caraveo — who beat out Kirkmeyer in 2022 — to Republican Gabe Evans in 2024.

Spanning three Front Range counties and the population centers of Thornton, Commerce City and Greeley, the 8th District voted in favor of Democrats for state office across the ballot in 2022. In 2024, however, 50% of voters cast ballots in favor of Donald Trump.

While Evans is running unopposed in the primary, he will face one of two Democrats from the statehouse, in addition to the Libertarian and independent candidates who have until July to finalize their paperwork.

In a May report, researchers from the Center for Effective Lawmaking ranked Westminster state Representative Shannon Bird as the most effective lawmaker in Colorado from 2023-24, largely because her position on the Joint Budget Committee allowed her to sponsor more bills than the average lawmaker and ensure they passed a critical hurdle.

In addition to key committee positions, the report from Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia found being in the majority party and having seniority increase a lawmaker’s ability to pass bills.

The report’s co-author Alan Wiseman told Courthouse News, “Given Representative Bird’s institutional position, she had a very specific privilege that allowed her to be much more legislatively prolific than the average rank and file member could be."

Bird is running against Commerce City state Representative Manny Rutinel to challenge Evans. While Bird ranked high on the center’s list, Wiseman attributed Rutinel’s low score in part to his appointment partway through the legislative session.

“The scores are not adjusted for how much you are actually in the session,” Wiseman said.

Both Bird and Rutinel criticize the incumbent Evans for consistently voting in support of Trump’s budget cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, as well as failing to use Congressional power to limit the influence of ICE.

“People here need a representative who is accountable to them and making votes that are fighting for the people in the district, not placating a president,” Bird told Courthouse News.

Bird hopes her record of bipartisan legislation sways voters.

“What I have heard overwhelmingly from people in the district is they want someone who actually gets things done,” Bird said.

Evans and Rutinel did not respond to requests for an interview.

While Rutinel has raised $3.4 million to Bird’s $1.7 million, a poll from Normington, Petts & Associates gave the latter a single point lead on the former, when most voters were undecided in April.

Whichever Democrat comes out on top, they face a competitive run in the general election and will shape the state of Colorado for years to come.

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