This part of our preview covers Colorado and Utah. For the first half, covering the state of New York, click here.
Colorado
SD-18 (Boulder)
Judith Amabile vs. Jovita Schiffer
Result (>95% in): Amabile 76.5%, Schiffer 23.5% | Amabile wins
We’re happy to report that Boulder has two strong candidates for senate. Equity and inclusion consultant Jovita Schiffer may carry the Colorado WFP endorsement, but even Judith Amabile, a two-term state representative and “establishment” choice, is far more progressive than the average Democrat, especially when it comes to housing and criminal justice. Schiffer’s endorsements ultimately mainly come not from progressive groups but from local politicians, who are more familiar with her, whereas state politicians and unions know Amabile better and support her. Whoever wins, Boulder will continue to have some of the best representation in the state.
SD-19 (Northwest Denver suburbs)
Lindsey Daugherty vs. Obi Ezeadi
Result (>95% in): Daugherty 64.0%, Ezeadi 36.0% | Daughtery wins
The ideological divisions here are a bit sharper than in the 18th. Lindsey Daugherty, a member of the state house, and Obi Ezeadi, a Westminster City Councilmember, say very similar things about policy, and tend to talk about what they’ll bring to the statehouse in terms of their personal experiences. Daugherty argues the state Senate needs more women, while Ezeadi argues his experience as a first-generation immigrant is needed in the legislature even more. What betrays their intentions in office, however, are their backers. Daugherty may be “proud to be endorsed by” the Chamber of Commerce, but she’s less excited to talk about some of her fellow endorsers like landlord group Colorado Apartment Association and charter school PAC Better Schools For A Stronger Colorado. Labor unions, the WFP, and YIMBY Denver are among Ezeadi’s biggest supporters.
This campaign has gotten negative, with large amounts of outside money being spent on mailers attacking Ezeadi for votes he took on the council that put him on the opposite side of worker rights (according to the mailers at least—we haven’t actually been able to track down the listed votes to see how accurate the descriptions are). Daugherty, who bills herself as “a unifying voice,” put out a statement in the final week pointing out that her campaign wasn’t responsible for sending out the mailers, but not distancing herself any further from them.
SD-28 (Aurora)
Idris Keith vs. Mike Weissman
Result (>95% in): Weissman 53.2%, Keith 46.8% | Weissman wins
State Rep. Mike Weissman is running for a promotion, and some rich people out there really, really don’t want him to get it. Weissman suspects it’s because he’s been leading efforts to alter Colorado’s notoriously rigid tax structure to benefit lower earners at the expense of higher earners, but whatever the reason, someone out there is dropping over $500,000 to stop him from entering the Senate. Representation Matters, which doesn’t have to disclose its donors, is boosting business attorney Idris Keith. Keith, to his credit, isn’t trying to pass himself off as similar to the incumbent. He’s candid about his disagreements with Weissman, finding him, as well as the party as a whole, to be insufficiently pro-business. Weissman, despite being a progressive in most respects, represents the party mainstream here. It’s really only business groups like the Chamber of Commerce that are backing him, which would normally pale in comparison to the weight of most of the party, but that money being spent could go a long way.
HD-04 (Northwest Denver)
Tim Hernández (i) vs. Cecelia Espenoza
Result (>95% in): Espenoza 53.2%, Hernández 46.8% | Espenoza wins
Tim Hernández is an incumbent of the appointed variety. He sat on the board of the Denver teachers’ union and was the subject of a groundswell of student and parent support in 2022 after he was let go from his job as a Denver Public Schools teacher in. He landed on his feet, finding a teaching job in Aurora, and another in the state House in 2023. Hernández won an appointment convention for the seat vacated by the election of Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez to the Denver city council. Not long after being seated, Hernández, a socialist and the most junior DSA member in the state house, found himself in an unwanted spotlight because he attended a pro-Palestinian rally on October 10, refused to explicitly condemn Hamas when badgered by a right wing reporter, and liked a few posts on Twitter suggesting the October 7 attacks were a result of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The uproar was immediate and House leadership even suggested he resign.
Hernández realized pretty quickly he wasn’t going to last long in the House this way, and has changed his tone. He apologized for not condemning Hamas and for liking those posts, and appears to have attempted to personally reassure various Colorado politicians that he doesn’t support Hamas. Hernández hasn’t kept his support of Palestine a secret, but he has acted like a man who wants to get reelected, and hasn’t had any other moments like the October 10 rally. Given time, the anger over Hernández’s comments has died down, and now the majority of his Democratic colleagues (25/45) have endorsed him for reelection.
But of course that controversy will never fully go away, and moderates are foaming at the mouth to get rid of him. Former federal prosecutor Cecelia Espenoza is running full tilt at Hernández, flanked by massive amounts of outside money, and a somewhat unexpected supporter: state senate Pres. Steve Fenberg. However, Hernández is on good terms with his colleagues now, and the total weight of the state establishment is more on his side than hers. In addition, labor unions have been going blow-for-blow with Espenoza’s outside money supporters. In a world where Hernández remained a consistent bomb thrower, Espenoza might have been a good foil to him, but he didn’t, and the amount of scrutiny placed on Espenoza as a real candidate and not just not-Hernández hasn’t been good for her. Most notably, her ties to anti-trans activists have been difficult to explain away.
HD-06 (Central Denver)
Elisabeth Epps (i) vs. Sean Camacho
Result (>95% in): Camacho 61.1%, Epps 38.9% | Camacho wins
State Rep. Elisabeth Epps, a socialist and prison abolitionist, narrowly won the hardest-fought primary in all of Colorado in 2022, overcoming a well-funded opponent with the support of Denver DSA and a dedicated base of volunteers. Unlike her colleague Tim Hernández, she has not adjusted her tone nor made friends with many of her colleagues; instead, she’s sued state House leadership for violating the state’s open meetings law, joined pro-Palestinian protests on the House floor, and gotten into numerous fights with her colleagues. (She’s also pushed for a lot of progressive legislation that died despite Democrats’ oversized majorities due to moderate Democratic opposition, including a bill to lift the state’s ban on rent control and a bill to ban semi-automatic rifles.) State Democratic leaders are pushing hard to get rid of Epps, and they’ve coalesced around attorney and Air Force reservist Sean Camacho, a nominal moderate who was a registered Republican until 2017. Camacho, despite his GOP past, is backed by everyone from Gov. Jared Polis on down, including state House Speaker Julie McCluskie and state Senate President Steve Fenberg. He also beat Epps handily at the local county party’s convention, winning 68% of the vote to Epps’s 32%; Tim Hernández won 60% to Cecelia Espenoza’s 37% at that same convention. And he has a massive financial advantage as Epps’s fundraising has dried up.
HD-10 (Boulder)
Junie Joseph (i) vs. Tina Mueh
Result (>95% in): Joseph 59.0%, Mueh 41.0% | Joseph wins
First-term state Rep. Junie Joseph also sits on the Boulder City Council, where she recently voted to repeal the city’s archaic occupancy limit, which had capped the number of unrelated roommates who could live in a single dwelling, exacerbating the city’s already-severe housing crisis. After two tries, the state of Colorado preempted local occupancy limits earlier this year through an act of the legislature that was signed into law by Gov. Polis. (Joseph voted yes.) Occupancy limits are the biggest substantive disagreement we could find between Joseph and her opponent, Tina Mueh, who opposes the state’s preemption law and gets very, very amped about the necessity of local control. Joseph is backed by a broad coalition from Polis to members of the state House’s left flank like Javier Mabrey and Lorena Garcia, and she’s an elected incumbent, not an appointed one—generally much harder to oust.
HD-30 (Lakewood)
Kyra deGruy Kennedy vs. Rebekah Stewart
Result (>95% in): Stewart 58.0%, Kennedy 42.0%% | Stewart wins
Kyra deGruy Kennedy is a bit of a nepotism case; she’s running to succeed her termed-out husband, state Rep. Chris deGruy Kennedy. She also seems like the right choice. While both deGruy Kennedy and her opponent, Lakewood City Councilor Rebekah Stewart, present themselves as progressives, only Stewart is backed by the business PACs that are also spending in other races on behalf of moderate Democrats. They’ve spent hundreds of thousands on independent expenditures for Stewart, and deGruy Kennedy has gone hard after Stewart for the influx of dark money. Stewart is skeptical of rental housing and thinks that the reason for Colorado’s housing crisis is the state’s construction defects laws, which place liability on builders for shoddy work in home construction, and if that combo isn’t a surefire tell of a real estate candidate we don’t know what is. deGruy Kennedy thinks the state has a housing shortage and an especially acute shortage of low- to moderate-income affordable housing, and she’s correct on both counts. She’s also backed by organized labor and the Working Families Party, having once served as a state committee member of the Colorado WFP. deGruy Kennedy would keep this seat in progressive hands, while Stewart would hand it over to the Colorado Democratic Party’s business-backed moderate faction.
HD-31 (Thornton)
Julia Marvin (i) vs. Jacque Phillips
Result (>95% in): Phillips 54.2%, Marvin 45.8% | Phillips wins
When a vacancy needed to be filled for the 31st District, a committee of local Democrats chose former Thornton City Councilmember Julia Marvin by a vote of 9 to 6. The woman she beat was Jacque Phillips, also a Thornton City Councilmember until 2022 when the rest of the council decided by a vote to remove her from office because they believed she’d moved out of the city. Believing actual voters would choose differently, Phillips has decided to run in the primary. She has a few local unions and politicians in her corner, including the Thornton firefighters’ union, and she’s outraised and outspent Marvin. Both Marvin and Phillips are fairly standard Democrats on paper, but the Colorado WFP feels there’s enough of a difference that they endorsed Marvin, and some centrist super PACs that have waded into other, more clearly ideological primaries are backing Phillips.
HD-36 (Aurora)
Michael Carter vs. Bryan Lindstrom
Result (>95% in): Carter 61.4%, Lindstrom 38.6% | Carter wins
Bryan Lindstrom, an Aurora schoolteacher, is running to join the progressive bloc in the Colorado House. Lindstrom wants to revamp the state’s regressive tax code to fully fund public schools, explore a state-level single-payer system, and begin developing state-owned social housing, and he’s backed by Denver DSA, Colorado WFP, and like-minded groups. He’s also backed by most of organized labor, probably in part because Lindstrom is a leader within the Aurora Education Association. Realtors, landlords, and the Chamber of Commerce love his opponent, Aurora Public Schools board member Michael Carter; Carter bristles at Lindstrom’s charge that he’s not a progressive, but business interests seldom invest in progressives the way they have invested in Carter’s campaign. Lindstrom’s campaign hasn’t been without stumbles; he lost the endorsement of the gun control group Colorado Ceasefire over some tweets that indicated he was way more pro-gun than he let on in the group’s endorsement questionnaire. He’s skeptical of gun control because of racial disparities in the criminal enforcement of gun laws—but if that’s you, maybe don’t present yourself to a gun control group as being simply pro-gun control.
HD-49 (Boulder and ski towns)
Lesley Smith vs. Max Woodfin
Result (>95% in): Smith 71.8%, 28.2% | Smith wins
Lesley Smith is easy to figure out—she’s a member of the Board of Regents and previously served on Boulder’s local board of ed. Her politics line up strongly with the party mainstream, though if that’s mainstream for Boulder is an open question. It’s Max Woodfin we have a harder time figuring out. On one hand, a pretty reliable rule of thumb is that if a candidate’s issues page is vague and noncommittal right up until they start talking about cutting taxes, then they’re a moderate, and that is absolutely the case with Woodfin. His “plan” for housing is to “bring creative and realistic solutions to the table” - come on man. But he’s also endorsed by the Colorado WFP. He also does get more specific when asked about policy and says some promising things about the need to expand transit services outside of urban hubs, as well as giving a barely-prompted long explanation of his belief that Israel is committing war crimes and its leaders should be prosecuted for them. But he’s also the kind of candidate who likes to complain about polarized politics and extreme views. On the whole, we’d take him over Smith, but we wouldn’t be too disappointed if she won, either.
HD-52 (Fort Collins)
Ethnie Treick vs. Yara Zokaie
Result (>95% in): Zokaie 64.4%, Treick 35.6% | Zokaie wins
Fort Collins is an often-ignored but very real hub of growing progressive organizing in Colorado. Surprisingly, the city of roughly 170,000 hasn’t seen a contested house primary since the early 2000s, and it’s only natural that the first one in two decades would be a clash between the moderate old guard and newer progressive groups. Larimer County tax accountant Yara Zokaie is running on a platform of single payer healthcare, ending cash bail, and enacting rent control. She has the support of DSA and WFP, but also organized labor groups like SEIU and the teachers unions, and both of the Democrats currently representing Fort Collins in the house. Surprise—the reason this is a major battle isn’t because progressives want to topple the establishment, but because the establishment has gotten more progressive, and business money wants to reverse that.
Energy industry lobbyist Ethnie Treick would normally have a tough time getting elected against a broadly accepted progressive, but that’s where hundreds of thousands of outside money comes in, with a pair of super PACs dropping massive sums into advertising and a field program boosting Treick. Zokaie has super PACs on her side, too—one a labor-affiliated PAC and another funded by a shadowy Portland nonprofit. Zokaie’s campaign committee has fundraised almost as well as Treick’s has, so she’s not without resources to get her own message out even absent the outside help. Hopefully it’s enough to get her over the finish line.
Denver DA
Leora Joseph vs. John Walsh
Result (>95% in): Walsh 58.1%, Joseph 41.9% | Walsh wins
This primary is kind of depressing, and reflective of the rightward turn many wealthier cities out West have taken on the issue of criminal justice. Both John Walsh and Leora Joseph are career prosecutors who want to focus on car thefts, gun violence, and fentanyl; it’s only from taking a closer look at their rhetorical styles that one can discern that Walsh isn’t quite as harshly carceral as Joseph, who wants longer sentences for repeat offenders. (Walsh only specifically calls for longer sentences in regards to fentanyl distributors.) Walsh also talks at length about police accountability—which isn’t worth much given prosecutors’ tendency to renege on promises of holding police accountable, but is worth something given how conspicuously Joseph avoids the issue. Joseph is backed by the police union, which would be enough on its own to steer us towards Walsh; in combination with the differences in rhetoric and policy commitments, it makes Walsh a clear choice, if not an exciting one.
Utah
HD-23 (Northeastern Salt Lake City)
Jeff Howell vs. Hoang Nguyen
Result (>95% in): Nguyen 56.3%, Howell 43.4% | Nguyen wins
Outgoing House Minority Leader Brian King is running a thankless campaign for governor, leaving his Salt Lake City district open. King’s pick, tech sales manager Jeff Howell, has most area politicians in his corner, though Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson and organized labor are backing entrepreneur and former Vietnamese refugee Hoang Nguyen. Both tout standard Democratic priorities—defending public schools from GOP interference and culture-war bullshit, supporting abortion rights and LGBTQ rights, and so forth. Our tiebreaker is Howell’s repeated mentions of bipartisanship and civility—while bipartisanship is essential for a Democrat in a GOP supermajority to get boring-but-necessary legislation passed, it’s a means to an end, not a goal, and civility isn’t coming back as long as Republicans use their unchecked legislative power to target vulnerable Utahns.
HD-24 (Eastern Salt Lake City)
Joel Briscoe (i) vs. Ramón Barthelemy vs. Grant Miller
Result (>95% in): Miller 49.4%, Briscoe 32.7%, Barthelemy 17.9% | Miller wins
State Rep. Joel Briscoe faces a spirited challenge from public defender Grant Miller, whose work with homeless populations and low-income tenants has spurred him to push for more funding for homeless services, a “Homeless Bill of Rights,” and tenant protections. Miller, who is Palestinian-American, also expresses concern for the First Amendment rights of pro-Palestinian protesters, who were targeted by police and Gov. Spencer Cox at the University of Utah recently. Briscoe has outspent Miller and doesn’t have any glaring vulnerabilities to speak of, but Miller beat Briscoe 73%-27% at the Salt Lake County Democratic Party’s nominating convention; had the incumbent not also gathered petitions to guarantee a slot on the ballot, the race would have ended there. Astronomy professor Ramón Barthelemy is also running, but has skipped debates and has not filed campaign finance reports.