On Monday, Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold formed an exploratory committee for a possible bid against GOP Sen. Cory Gardner. Griswold’s campaign consultant and brother, Chris Griswold, said that the secretary would decide quickly whether or not to join the crowded Democratic primary.
Before she sought office for the first time in 2018, Griswold worked for Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign, where she trained other attorneys and poll-watchers, and later as then-Gov. John Hickenlooper's liaison to the federal government. Last year, Griswold won the Democratic nod for secretary of state without any opposition and unseated Republican incumbent Wayne Williams 53-45 in the fall. Griswold's victory made her the first Democrat elected to this post since 1958, when Democrat George Baker won re-election.
If Griswold runs, she’ll face a number of rivals for the party’s nomination. The current field includes former diplomat Dan Baer, former state Sen. Mike Johnston, former state House Majority Leader Alice Madden, former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, former U.S. Attorney John Walsh, and state Sen. Angela Williams. However, not all these candidates may end up running in next year’s primary because getting on the ballot in Colorado is a very challenging and often expensive task.
Candidates can try to reach the primary in one of two ways: either by winning the support of at least 30% of the delegates at their party’s biennial convention (also known locally as an “assembly”) or by collecting enough signatures to appear on the June ballot, regardless of what happens at the convention. (Typically, the conventions take place about two to three months before the primary.)
As we'll explain—and as some candidates learned the hard way last year—both approaches present risks even for serious contenders and introduce quite a lot of unpredictability into the entire process. Campaigns can opt to try both methods, but doing so still doesn’t offer a guarantee: If a candidate takes less than 10% of the vote at the convention, then their campaign is over no matter how many signatures they turn in.
Candidates who want to successfully petition their way onto the ballot for U.S. Senate or governor must collect 1,500 valid signatures in each of Colorado's seven congressional districts from registered members of their political party. (Contenders for other statewide office, such as attorney general, need 1,000 per district.) That's a time-consuming undertaking that can become quite expensive: Last year, the Denver Post reported that such efforts can cost more than $200,000.
And it’s particularly difficult for Democrats, who need to gather signatures in rural (and heavily Republican) districts where dense urban clusters of Democratic voters are few in number. To make things even more complicated, voters can only sign one petition for each race. If a voter signs petitions for multiple contenders, it only counts in favor of the first candidate to turn in their signatures, so there’s a rush for everyone to submit—which introduces even more problems.
Even top-tier candidates have had trouble getting enough valid petitions. Last year, Secretary of State Wayne Williams (the Republican whom Griswold would go on to unseat) initially announced that Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Robinson had failed to turn in enough signatures to qualify. However, Robinson went to court and ended up making the ballot. Another gubernatorial hopeful, Democrat Donna Lynne, also came close to getting bounced: Williams’ office ruled that she’d collected just 56 more valid signatures out of the conservative 4th District than the bare minimum she needed.
Walker Stapleton, who was the frontrunner in last year’s GOP primary for governor, also had a stressful path to the ballot. Stapleton had planned to turn in petitions but instead, he ended up taking the unusual step of asking Williams to toss the signatures his campaign had collected, saying that the company he'd hired had engaged in fraud. (The pressure to gather petitions and turn them in quickly seems to regularly lead to misconduct in Colorado: Jon Keyser, a Republican candidate for Senate in 2016, turned in a number of signatures that had been forged—including at least one from a dead voter—but still made the ballot.)
To keep his campaign going, Stapleton had to pursue the second route to getting on the primary ballot by competing at the state party convention. Stapleton ended up winning the backing of 43% of delegates, which was more than the 30% he needed to keep his campaign afloat, and because he earned more support than any other candidate, he earned his party’s official endorsement, which gave him the top slot on the primary ballot.
However, while Stapleton’s victory on the convention floor wasn’t a massive shock, there were some surprises for the GOP that day. Former Parker Mayor Greg Lopez, who had been running a nondescript campaign, took second place with 32% of the vote thanks to a strong speech that impressed delegates, some of whom admitted to knowing nothing about him when the day began.
Attorney General Cynthia Coffman wasn’t so lucky, though. Coffman had planned to petition her way on, but thanks to poor fundraising (in part due to Colorado’s strict donation limits for state candidates), she simply couldn’t afford to and had no choice but to throw herself on the mercy of convention-goers. But despite holding statewide office, she took just 6% of the delegates, which ended her campaign right on the spot. Stapleton wound up winning the GOP primary a few months later before getting crushed in November by Democrat Jared Polis.
As candidates found out last year, either path to the ballot can be uncertain and fraught with peril. However, while every Democrat seeking to challenge Gardner has plenty of time to decide which route they’ll pursue, they’ll all need to decide how they want to get there.
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