January 03, 2017 10:52 AM UTC

Winners and Losers from 2016

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• by: Colorado Pols

Today is the first “official” workday following the Holidays, and since we’re still practicing writing “2-0-1-7,” let’s take one more look back on the year in politics that concluded (finally) over the weekend…

WINNERS

Michael Bennet
Few politicians entered 2016 with more at stake than Bennet, who was widely considered to be the number one Senate pickup opportunity for Republicans in the entire country (with Harry Reid’s retirement, Bennet was in fact the only incumbent Democrat facing re-election in a swing state in 2016). Bennet ran a strong re-election race, raising tons of money and making himself a consistent presence in TV ads for months leading up to Election Day, but his re-election was all but assured when Colorado Republicans turned the GOP Senate nomination into a dumpster fire. After a 2010 campaign against Republican Ken Buck that went down to the wire, Bennet no doubt appreciated being able to shift into cruise control for most of 2016.

Mike Coffman

After more than 30 years in elected office, the Aurora Republican can finally exhale. Four years ago, Coffman nearly lost his seat in CD-6, eking out a 2-point win over a fairly weak challenger in Democrat Joe Miklosi. Democrats smelled blood in the water, but since then Coffman has handily dispatched two difficult Democratic opponents (9-point victory over Andrew Romanoff in 2014 and 8-point win over Morgan Carroll in 2016). Coffman’s consistent obfuscation seems to be the right formula in his Aurora-centered district, where he keeps winning big no matter the coattails (or lack thereof) in Colorado. The 61-year-old Coffman is not particularly well-liked among Republicans and is unlikely to be a factor for higher office in Colorado, but Democrats won’t likely expend serious effort at defeating him again…at least until redistricting muddles the picture in 2022.

Scott Tipton
Democrat John Salazar represented CD-3 until Tipton took back this geographically-enormous (“geonormous!”) district for Republicans in 2010, which is a big reason why Democrats had held out hope that CD-3 could swing back to blue in the near future. But Tipton’s 14-point blowout win over well-funded Democrat Gail Schwartz in 2016 should take CD-3 off the table for Democrats until and unless big changes are made when the district is re-drawn before the 2022 election. Like his colleague in CD-6 (Rep. Coffman), Tipton isn’t particularly well-loved by Republicans, which makes it unlikely that he will mount a serious effort for higher office anytime soon. But barring a serious scandal, the 60-year-old Tipton can probably keep this seat for as long as he wants.

Ed Perlmutter
All he does is win. Perhaps Colorado’s most underrated politician, Perlmutter’s 15-point re-election win over Republican George Athanasopoulos in 2016 is perfectly in line with a career average margin-of-victory of about 15.5 points. Perlmutter represents a Jefferson County district that is fairly-equally divided among Democrats, Republicans, and Unaffiliated voters, yet in the last decade no Republican candidate has closed within single digits of the Golden Democrat. If you’re wondering why Perlmutter is the current favorite for Governor in 2018, you can start and end with this statistic.

Public Education
Colorado voters continued a trend that started with high-profile school board recalls in 2015 by again speaking out in favor of progressive public education policies and against conservative privatization efforts. For the first time in 50 years, Democrats took control of the State Board of Education with Rebecca McClellan’s narrow victory in CD-6; McClellan was an open opponent of school vouchers who was able to win a BOE seat in a district that favored Republican Rep. Mike Coffman by 8 points. Voters also generally approved requests for funding increases via bond or mill levy elections.

Advertising Budgets in Local Races
With a mess of candidates at the top of the ticket and a relative dearth of spending in Colorado from Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign, Colorado Republicans realized early in the 2016 cycle that they needed to focus resources on maintaining their one-seat majority in the State Senate. More than $1.8 million was spent in SD-19 alone, where Democrat Rachel Zenzinger knocked off incumbent Republican Laura Woods; that works out to about $23 for every vote received by Zenzinger or Woods. Total spending on campaigns for local offices (from school board to the legislature) increased by 50% over the last Presidential election year.

Kevin Priola
While most political pundits were focusing on SD-19 (Arvada) as the biggest State Senate race to watch, Priola’s 4-point victory over Democrat Jenise May in SD-25 proved to be the race that kept Republicans in control of the Senate.

Rhetorical Nonsense
Here’s to you, Sen. Cory Gardner; 2016 was the year in which nothing that anybody said seemed to matter. Donald Trump is the most obvious example here, but plenty of Colorado politicians – from Mike Coffman to Darryl Glenn – spent most of the election cycle saying whatever they damn well pleased. Contradicting yourself, which Gardner did so well in 2014, seemed almost to be a point of pride among Republican politicos. Nobody did bullshit quite like Trump, but Glenn tried his best, from inventing another Darryl Glenn to comparing himself to a unicorn.

Marshall “Mitchell” Zelinger
A growing distrust of the media was a consistent theme in 2016, and while some of it was well-earned (we’re looking at you, Chuck Plunkett), some Colorado reporters reminded us that journalism isn’t dead quite yet. No political reporter in Colorado had a better year than Denver7’s Mitchell Marshall Zelinger, whose delightfully-awkward interview with GOP Senate candidate Jon Keyser was one of the most entertaining pieces of television we saw all year; Keyser called Zelinger “Mitchell” not once, but twice, and then proceeded to basically threaten the reporter with his great dane, Duke. Zelinger’s reporting on Keyser’s petition troubles was thorough and fair, but he was more than just a one-story hit. Zelinger’s coverage of politics on both sides of the aisle in 2016 helped him become Colorado’s pre-eminent political journalist.

LOSERS

Republican Recruits for State Legislature
Colorado Republicans managed to maintain a one-seat majority in the state senate, thanks to Kevin Priola, but Democrats picked up a total of three new seats in the legislature with big victories in the State House. Democrats ran strong campaigns across-the-board in both the house and senate, but in races where things looked to be more competitive, Republicans ran into trouble with underwhelming performances from a handful of highly-touted recruits. The GOP had a particularly tough time in Arapahoe County, where Nancy Doty (SD-26) and Katy Brown (HD-3) – both hyped as rising stars by Republicans – were easily defeated for open seats by Democrats Daniel Kagan and Jeff Bridges, respectively.

Oh, and don’t forget Rep. Tim Leonard, who in January was selected by a vacancy committee in HD-25 (replacing Jon Keyser) and 11 months later became the first sitting legislator in more than 40 years to serve time in jail.

John Hickenlooper
There was plenty of talk in 2016 – both in Colorado and around the country — of the rising national profile of Gov. John Hickenlooper, rumored to be a top choice for Hillary Clinton’s running mate and then later as a likely nominee for a top cabinet post in a Clinton administration. Hickenlooper did his part in helping Clinton to win the State of Colorado, but her Electoral College loss to Donald Trump leaves Hick without an obvious next step politically after he is term-limited in 2018.

Ken Salazar
As the chair of Hillary Clinton’s Presidential transition team, Salazar seemed to be in the enviable position of being able to chart whatever political path he chose for the next decade. Now…not so much. Salazar has long been rumored to be considering a 2018 run for Governor, but his close association with Clinton’s disastrous campaign will be a tall hurdle to overcome among Democrats who are eager to move along from all things Clinton-related.   

Steve House
The Chair of the State Republican Party probably should have had a better year in 2016 given now much the national electorate swung toward the GOP. House says he is undecided on whether to seek another term as State Chair (he’s laughably weighing a run for, ahem, governor); whatever he decides, House is going to have a hard time living down his #NeverTrump fiasco.

Jon Keyser
You already know the story. We could rename this entire category after Keyser.

Eric Nelson
Apparently there is a limit to how much bullshit you can feed voters. We know this to be true thanks to Eric Nelson, the Aurora School Board Member who tried to win a Democratic Primary for State House in HD-42 with a resume that had more problems than Mariah Carey on New Year’s Eve. Nelson appears to have invented as many as seven different college degrees, as well as falsely claiming to have served in the Air Force, though he definitely does have a long criminal record. He is also, for good measure, a bigamist. We join the Aurora Public Schools community in just wishing that Nelson would go away already.

Dick Wadhams
Wadhams is a longtime Republican strategist who also hasn’t been able to win consistently for a long time, and his 2016 return to Colorado politics played out in familiar fashion. The architect of some of Colorado Republicans’ biggest wins in the late 1990s has been fairly quiet for several years; he reemerged briefly in ’16 as the campaign manager for Jack Graham when the former Colorado State University Athletic Director entered the Republican Senate race with “$1 million and a Wadhams.” Graham was the first Republican candidate to make it onto the ballot through the petition process, but he was never able to generate any momentum and ended his campaign on a whimper, finishing 13 points behind Darryl Glenn in the GOP Senate Primary. Graham’s inability to even be competitive in an absolutely terrible field of candidates should mark the end of whatever significant political influence Wadhams had left.