The days of White House hopefuls crisscrossing Colorado during primary season seem like a distant memory this year, with a visit to the state Tuesday by Republican Nikki Haley marking the rare appearance by a candidate ahead of the March 5 contest.
Four years ago, Colorado voters could have seen a wide array of Democratic contenders in the flesh in the weeks leading up to the March 2020 primary, including Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, Mike Bloomberg and Tulsi Gabbard, while Joe Biden hit up donors in Denver. Several campaigns had paid staff on the ground here for weeks or months.
Even then-President Trump stopped by for a visit just weeks before the primary, landing in Colorado Springs for a rally at the Broadmoor World Arena.
“This election is not going to be confused with past presidential primaries in Colorado,” said Eric Sondermann, an independent political analyst. “This year strikes me as a going-through-the-motions exercise.”
Ahead of Haley’s rally in Centennial, her campaign on Monday announced her “Colorado state leadership team” — a list of prominent supporters who will try to build support as primary voters return their ballots in the next week. Among them are former U.S. attorneys Troy Eid and Jason Dunn; Tom Norton, a former state Senate president and a former Greeley mayor; Todd Chapman, a former diplomat and U.S. ambassador; and Wendy Buxton-Andrade, a Prowers County commissioner.
But in terms of paid staff, Haley has a minimal state operation, with one staffer on the ground.
The reasons for Colorado’s quiet campaign season begin with the slate of candidates on the Republican side being effectively winnowed down early to a David-and-Goliath battle between Haley and Trump. And despite polls showing that voters have concerns about the physical and mental stamina of 81-year-old President Biden, who’s less than four years older than Trump, no serious Democratic contender has arisen to take him on.
The other major reason is that as Colorado has continued to drift to the left — fully shedding its status as a swing state — candidates can’t afford to waste time or money in a place where their political prospects are already evident.
“Nobody should be spending money in Colorado when all those other swing states need to get their infrastructure built,” said Ian Silverii, a longtime Democratic strategist, referring to Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and other states likely to be in play in November. “A Biden win in Colorado is all but guaranteed — the question is by what margin.”
Biden bested Trump in 2020 by 13.5 percentage points.
Sheena Kadi, a spokeswoman for the state Democratic Party, said she was not aware of a campaign office or a state director for Biden’s reelection effort in Colorado. The same goes for Dean Phillips, a Minnesota congressman who’s the best-known Democrat taking on the president.
Biden was last in Colorado in November, when he promoted recent economic investments at a wind tower factory in Pueblo and attended a private fundraiser in Cherry Hills Village.
“Not speaking for either campaign — campaigns take three finite things: time, money, and resources,” Kadi said. “They are making the best decisions they can with the information they’ve got.”
Then-President Donald Trump speaks to supporters at the Broadmoor World Arena in Colorado Springs on Thursday, Feb. 20, 2020, ahead of the Colorado primary. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)
Inquiries to the Biden, Trump and Phillips campaigns about their operations in Colorado went unanswered last week. Colorado Republican Party head Dave Williams also didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Trump last month named Justin Everett, a Republican former state lawmaker from Littleton, as the state director of his campaign in Colorado. But the extent of the operation is unclear, in terms of paid staff and campaign offices.
If Trump wins the nomination, whether he will build the kind of multifaceted general election campaign organization he assembled in Colorado in 2016, during his first presidential run, is yet to be seen.
“Biden and Trump are pretty confident where they are in the presidential primaries,” said Dick Wadhams, a former chair of the Colorado Republican Party.
Colorado allows unaffiliated voters to participate in the party primary of their choosing. Those voters received mail ballots for both parties but may return only one of them.
Wadhams said perhaps the most interesting thing about Colorado’s March 5 primary is the “noncommitted delegate” option at the bottom of the listed Democratic candidates on the ballot. While Kadi, with the state Democratic Party, said that option was added to the ballot because “Democrats are the party of choice, the party of empowering people,” others see it differently.
“It will allow voters who are concerned with Biden’s physical and mental state to vote for someone else,” Wadhams said. “It’s a potential embarrassment for Biden if that gets a significant number of votes.”
Kristi Burton Brown, another former chair of the Colorado GOP, called the uncommitted line a potential “protest vote” for disaffected Democrats.
“They’re trying to gauge how much dissatisfaction is out there,” Brown said of the Democratic Party.
Fellow Democrat David Skaggs, who represented Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District in Washington, D.C., for a dozen years, wrote in a column in The Post last week that had cast his ballot for “uncommitted.”
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“It is the ballot option that could lead to an open convention, where Democrats can pick a ticket that could more assuredly save the nation from the disaster of a second Trump administration,” he wrote.
An NBC News poll released earlier this month showed Biden with the lowest approval ratings of his presidency. But Silverii said that whatever headwinds Biden is facing nationally, he won’t lose Colorado in November.
That’s because of the state’s large contingent of unaffiliated voters, who broke hard for the president in 2020.
“Unaffiliated voters have proven twice now that they will not vote for Trump — and in increasing numbers,” he said.
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