From the Colorado Daily:
Jim Rettew, a Democrat running for the state House District 13 seat in 2006, has decided to petition in an attempt to get on the August primary ballot.
Rettew lost to fellow Democrat Claire Levy in last Saturday’s HD 13 assembly by roughly 71 to 29 percent, with 107 delegates voting. Assembly participants must earn at least 30 percent of delegate votes to automatically qualify for the next contests, and Rettew missed 30 percent by two votes.
Rettew said he decided to continue in part because Saturday’s delegate totals are only a small fraction of eligible HD 13 voters, and any registered Democrat from the district can vote in the primary.
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FYI, for those who don’t know: it takes 1000 votes to petition on to the ballot, and he has about 30 days to get the signatures.
This is a solid Dem district, and at this time we haven’t heard of a GOP opponent…
For those interested in what happened at the Assembly the Colorado Daily had an article on Sunday that was not noted on ColoradoPols. You can find it at http://www.coloradodaily.com/articles/2006/04/22/news/c_u_and_boulder/news4.txt
Assemblies are rarely an accurate reflection of the entire electorate but this one was one heck of a good focus group. Rettew has been campaigning since September and had raised a good amount of money before Claire Levy joined the race in January.
Rettew initially chose to go the caucus route that he now finds so unrepresentative. Indeed, his first fundraising letter sent out to Boulder’s monied liberals challenged donors to send him “$400 now” so that he could freeze out any competition. Today, he is the aggrieved populist fighting the party insiders.
Under these circumstances it is a bit silly for him to be acting as if his message was ignored by party insiders. He had a receptive crowd at the assembly, he just came in a very distant second.
OTOH, he lost his opportunity to be in a primary by just over 1 vote (30% was something like 1.1 more votes…) That is close enough for him to claim some legitimacy to be on the ballot, and I heard one person claim that they voted for Claire because they thought Claire needed the votes for balance. (How they determined this, I’m not sure; Claire gave out more stickers, and it was pretty obvious doing a visual poll…)
But you’re right – the distance was not minimal. Still, how many people – how many voting Democrats – are in that district? We sent 107 people to vote, out of maybe 500 people in the caucuses… I think the petition process is a valid check on what can be a very exclusive system; if Rettew makes it on to the ballot via petition, then he’s managed to do the legwork to get the support to validate his candidacy.