When initial results dropped in Colorado’s primary elections this week, the early signs in several prominent Democratic legislative races lent themselves to an easy characterization: “moderates win, lefties lose.”
Left-wing candidates like Denver Reps. Elisabeth Epps and Tim Hernández indeed were trailing in races that had been soaked in outside spending supporting more moderate Democrats, and several — including those two — ultimately lost. But a closer examination of Tuesday’s primary results offers a more nuanced perspective on a series of nine distinct, but connected, races in Denver, Aurora, Lakewood, Fort Collins, Thornton and Boulder.
Those involved in the campaigns, along with lawmakers and officials handling the heaviest spending on both sides of the races, eschewed attempts to oversimplify their outcomes, which were largely in safe Democratic districts. While prominent progressive lawmakers lost, the party’s primary winners in several state Senate districts likely will nudge that chamber in a more left-progressive direction, assuming they win the November election.
Instead, several argued, the focus should be on the importance of campaigns and candidates, and on translating electoral success into political coalition-building. Ultimately, they said, candidates should focus on positioning themselves as representing views that are mainstream in a Democratic Party that surged to dominance in Colorado over less than a decade — now holding large majorities in both legislative chambers — and is no stranger to infighting over its ideological center.
Deep Badhesha, a left-wing activist who ties to several of the campaigns, said a main takeaway for progressives was that many of their stances are popular. But the messenger matters.
“All the attacks that seemed like they stuck were about controversies that were around (the candidates),” he said. “If you take politics as a game, you have to play underneath the rules. You can’t appear to be disagreeable; you have to appear to voters as someone who’s getting things done.”
To put it another way, Badhesha said: “Don’t be an easy target.”
The same was true in several Republican legislative primaries where right-wing or extremist candidates lost, including some who had challenged more mainstream incumbents.
Lumping the Democratic candidates and races together was made easier by the outside spenders who sought to influence the primaries, to the tune of more than $4 million. Those groups broke down generally as education reformers, business groups and trade unionists on one side versus the AFL-CIO, the Colorado Education Association and traditional progressive groups on the other.
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That amount of money certainly played a role, and it likely was particularly influential in races with lower voter turnout, including Hernández’s in northwest Denver. Though he gained the seat through a vacancy committee last year, his loss to Cecelia Espenoza by a 6-point margin, as of Wednesday evening, was among the most surprising for players on both sides of the spending.
It’s undoubtedly true that more left-wing candidates lost Tuesday in those primaries, chief among them Epps, Hernández and Bryan Lindstrom. Lindstrom, a teacher, …read more
Source:: The Denver Post – Politics
