Election forecaster nudges Colorado’s US Senate seat from ‘solid’ to ‘likely’ Democrat |

While the election forecasters at Cook Political Report aren’t yet ready to say Colorado’s U.S. Senate race will be competitive this fall, they bumped the contest one notch in that direction on Friday, suggesting that a a more difficult national environment for Democrats could put U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet’s bid for a third term in play.

The venerable site shifted Colorado’s rating from “Solid Democrat” to “Likely Democrat” — still two steps away from a pure “Toss Up” rating — at the same time it moved North Carolina’s open U.S. Senate seat one click to the right, from “Toss Up” to “Lean Republican.” Of the 34 seats up for election this year, Cook currently ranks nine as pure toss-ups: Democratic-held seats in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, and GOP-held seats in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The tea leaves point to Colorado’s potential as a battleground, the site’s prognosticators say, though much depends on which of the seven Republican candidates makes it through a June primary to the general election.

Bennet campaign manager Justin Lamorte said his boss isn’t taking anything for granted.

“He delivers for Colorado and is in a strong position to win in November,” Lamorte told Colorado Politics in a text message. “He is running on a record of supporting working families by passing the infrastructure bill to create hundreds of thousands of good paying jobs and leading the fight to expand the Child Tax Credit to provide tax relief for working families. And protecting the environment by restoring Colorado’s forests from the worst wildfires in Colorado’s history, cleaning up pollution from abandoned oil and gas wells and so much more.”

Colorado GOP Chairwoman Kristi Burton Brown took a contrary view in a statement that celebrated the Cook Political Report’s announcement.

“It seems that Bennet is competing with Biden to see who can become less popular with the people of Colorado,” she said. “This rating change shows that Bennet’s failure to deliver for Colorado is catching up to him. This November, Coloradans will go to the polls and vote for a candidate who will fight for Colorado, not just rubber-stamp the failed Biden-Harris agenda.”

If Bennet winds up with a tough race on his hands, it’ll be something of a surprise, the political meteorologists at Cook say, since Democrats have carried the state by wide margins in recent cycles, including when Republican U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner lost his bid for reelection in 2020 by 9 points. Leading Republicans, however, suspect that Colorado’s electorate has been primarily voting against former President Donald Trump rather than outright rejecting the GOP when it handed the party all those losses — a proposition the report finds plausible when coupled with other data and trends.

“But the key component Republicans are still missing is a candidate,” Cook Political Report writes.

And that’s where the state’s bifurcated nomination process could be a factor, with only one prominent Republican — wealthy construction company owner and self-funder Joe O’Dea — seeking the ballot by petition and the rest going through the caucus and assembly process. Cook pegs four candidates going the assembly route as the ones to watch: 2008 Olympian and Air Force veteran Eli Bremer, real estate developer and former Fort Collins Councilman Gino Campana, former talk radio host Deborah Flora and state Rep. Ron Hanks, a freshman lawmaker from Fremont County.

As Colorado Politics has reported, delegate math means it’s likely that GOP primary voters will be faced with a choice between only two or or three Republicans, rather than the more crowded primary fields Republicans have encountered for major statewide races since 2016, when Bennet was last on the ballot.

Hanks, Cook writes, “would be, by far, the most disastrous nominee for Republicans,” noting that the freshman state lawmaker has run a “conspiracy-laden campaign centered around the false premise that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump — but that could gain him traction with a certain part of the GOP base coming to the assembly as well.”

Campana, meanwhile, has been “courting the Trump base” and unfurled endorsement after endorsement from former Trump aides, including enlisting Kellyanne Conway as a senior advisor, “but also hasn’t fully embraced conspiracy theories in the same way Hanks has.”

O’Dea, Cook notes, is almost assured of making the ballot and when he does “will be not just flush with cash but also is striking a more moderate posture.” He could prove to be a stronger general election opponent against Bennet, the report says, if O’Dea can survive what it describes as a “proxy battle of the two divergent wings of the GOP,” meaning the the Trump die-hards and the GOP’s more traditional voters.

Voters begin selecting delegates to the GOP’s April 9 state assembly at precinct caucuses next week. Petitioning candidates have until March 15 to finish gathering signatures. The primary election is June 28.