About 20 years ago, the Colorado General Assembly moved the state’s primary election from September to August. Cynics figured there was a reason, something like this: Coloradans are on vacation in August, or at least getting outdoors at every opportunity, so they’re not paying attention to politics the way they would in September. An August primary thus means less attention and a lower turnout, thereby giving the party establishments more power.
But if that was the plan, it went seriously off the rails this year. It’s a vote-by-mail election that concludes on Aug. 10, and already county clerks are reporting returns of 20 to 25 percent — high for a primary.
That’s because both major parties have hot races. The statewide contested Democratic race is for U.S. Senate. Ken Salazar won the seat in 2004, but resigned to become Secretary of the Interior. Gov. Bill Ritter {who is not seeking re-election) appointed Michael Bennet to serve until the election.
Bennet was a surprise. He had been Denver school superintendent and chief of staff to Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper (the Democratic nominee for governor), but he had never held a political office.
Enter Andrew Romanoff, who had been speaker of the state House of Representatives before leaving office on account of term limits. Romanoff, though based in Denver, was fairly well-known statewide because he traveled widely to support candidates and issues.
While some mud has been slung, there really isn’t a lot of policy difference between the two. They’re both fairly centrist Western Democrats.
But most of the excitement is on the Republican side. The U.S. Senate primary has Jane Norton facing Ken Buck.
Norton served as lieutenant governor from 1999 to 2003. She once supervised lobbyists but insists she never was one — this is a year when being a “Washington insider” is toxic (I’m not sure why. Seems to me a well-connected “insider” could do more for us than an “outsider,” but logic and politics seldom mix.)
Ken Buck is district attorney in Weld County, north of Denver. He appeared to have some Tea Party support against Norton the establishment candidate; that is, until he referred to “dumbass birthers.”
They’re neck-and-neck in the polls. The better show, though, is in the GOP race for governor.
Last winter, the state’s Republican hierarchy decided to winnow the field. Josh Penry, a state legislator from Grand Junction who had declared for governor, was told to walk the plank.
His old boss, Scott McInnis (Penry worked for him when McInnis was in Congress), would get the nomination. But Dan Maes, an Evergreen businessman, didn’t listen to the party elders, and stayed in the race.
However, McInnis ran into a plagiarism scandal. Maes was fined for campaign finance and reporting violations, and his financial records showed he wasn’t all that successful in business.
Tom Tancredo, former Republican congressman from Colorado’s sixth district (and fervent foe of illegal immigration as well as a candidate for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination), announced that unless both McInnis and Maes stepped down, he’d run as the candidate of the obscure American Constitution Party.
McInnis and Maes stayed in, so Tancredo entered the race, likely taking a share of the Republican vote in the general election.
Maes was briefly leading in the primary polls, but that was before it became known that he denounced Denver’s bicycle-sharing program (supported by Hickenlooper) as a United Nations plot to subvert American freedoms.
Could it get any weirder? Only a few days remain before the ballots are tallied, so perhaps not. There’s a lot of speculation, though, that whoever wins the Republican primary will be asked to step aside, so that a party vacancy committee can come up with a respectable nominee for governor — one who may have little chance of winning, but also one won’t sink the entire Colorado GOP ticket in what had initially looked like a good year for Republicans.
At any rate, if Colorado Republicans ever had a reputation for being dull, it’s long gone by now. I defy any Western state, or indeed any state in the Union, to come up with a primary half as bizarre as this one.
And as a Democrat, I’m thinking of starting a fund to help keep Dick Wadhams as the state Republican chairman. In recent years, he’s done more for us than we disorganized Democrats could ever do for ourselves.
Ed Quillen is a freelance writer in Salida, Colorado.
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