Charlie Neibergall/AP Photo
Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, then a Democratic presidential candidate, spoke at the Presidential Gun Sense Forum, in Des Moines, Iowa, August 10, 2019.
When John Hickenlooper entered the race for Colorado’s Senate seat, he was considered as close to a sure thing as a candidate can get. The Republican incumbent, Cory Gardner, was already atop the list of most-endangered Republicans, saddled with the burden of representing Donald Trump’s party in this increasingly blue state. As his likely Democratic challenger, Hickenlooper enjoyed relatively high favorability ratings after serving two terms as governor between 2011 and 2019, a period during which the Colorado economy flourished. He sported a sizable bank account. He’d even boosted his name recognition (somewhat) with a brief and not entirely embarrassing run for president. That was more than enough for Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which endorsed Hickenlooper two days after he formally announced his candidacy.
But, with June 30’s Election Day looming, Hickenlooper’s campaign against his progressive primary challenger, Andrew Romanoff, former Speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives, is deteriorating rapidly. Once viewed as a near-lock to take on and beat Gardner, Hickenlooper now appears to be the Democratic candidate most likely to blow it in what’s arguably the most flippable Senate seat in the country.
In recent days, Hickenlooper has been ceaselessly plagued by a succession of foot-in-mouth statements on the issue of race: He said, “Every life matters,” in response to a recent debate question about Black Lives Matter, for which he had to apologize. Then, a 2014 video surfaced in which he compared working with political staffers to be whipped aboard “an ancient slave ship,” for which he had to apologize. Then, a 2019 video surfaced in which he described black ministers as “articulate,” leading to further allegations of racial insensitivity (no apology on that one, yet).
And if Hickenlooper’s inability to say even formulaically appropriate things on racial justice, now more salient to Democratic politics than ever, has disappointed, the new wave of ethics concerns he now faces is even worse. In late May, a state ethics board ruled that Hickenlooper violated state law when he took a flight aboard a corporate jet owned by a top political donor and was ferried around in a Maserati limousine, paid for by Fiat Chrysler, at a conference in Italy. The board’s ruling, which concluded the state’s most high-profile ethics trial since voters approved a ban on public officials receiving gifts in 2006, came despite Hickenlooper’s belligerence and obfuscation. Initially, he defied a subpoena from the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission, only testifying after the nonpartisan panel held him in contempt. For the offending travel, Hickenlooper claimed not to have noticed or remembered, a common refrain in response to many of the allegations the board considered.
Ultimately, the ethics commission let him off the hook for other travel of dubious provenance, including a ride aboard a private plane owned by a company connected to his chief of staff, Pat Meyers; a flight aboard the private plane of a restaurateur brother of Elon Musk; and a flight on billionaire Ken Tuchman’s plane, too. Hickenlooper claimed that last trip was purely nonpolitical, but he did meet with Vernon Jordan, a major, if aging, Democratic power broker, to discuss his potential 2020 presidential bid, and attend a Bloomberg Philanthropies event.
In the wake of the commission’s ruling, The Colorado Sun reported that the Hickenlooper camp, while refusing to comment on the violations themselves, “acknowledged that they expect it to be exploited in negative campaign ads.” He was also slapped with a $2,750 fine.
That is small potatoes compared to the amount of off-the-books donations from corporations Hickenlooper took during his time as governor, recently uncovered in an investigation by CBS4, and corroborated by The Colorado Sun. The local news station found that Hickenlooper accepted millions in donations to fund programs and positions in his office without any public oversight and little disclosure. Of particular note, he accepted more than $300,000 from Anadarko, one of the state’s foremost fracking operators, during his tenure in the governor’s mansion, including $25,000 a few days after a leaky Anadarko gas pipe exploded and killed two men. He even opposed efforts to make maps of buried gas pipelines available for public inspection in that event’s aftermath. Hickenlooper also accepted $10,000 from the grocery chain Safeway the same year he signed legislation allowing grocery stores to participate in lucrative alcohol sales.
Hickenlooper is not the only Colorado governor to have participated in such schemes—governors in Colorado have taken these off-the-books donations for two decades—but he dramatically expanded the practice, and seems to have played faster and looser with it than his successor and his predecessors.
With Election Day fast approaching, Hickenlooper has gone from safe centrist in a purple state to politically imperiled moderate in a blue Colorado, scrambling to keep up.
His polling and his campaign treasury: That, neatly bundled together as “electability,” has been the basis of the Hickenlooper sales pitch. Hickenlooper has indeed raised four times as much as Romanoff. Even with that cash advantage, though, his campaign has proven to be so leaden that he’s still required an infusion of outside funding. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC has spent more than $1 million to buoy him, while, as The Intercept reported, the DSCC warned off consultants who were considering working with Romanoff.
Even as Hickenlooper’s deep pockets aren’t proving to be as deep as expected, his favorability, even before these scandals, may not have been as robust as it looked. Politically, the Colorado that Hickenlooper came to govern in 2011 is leagues apart from the Colorado of today, which went for Bernie Sanders in the Democrats’ March presidential primary, and features an increasingly progressive state government. Hickenlooper’s retrograde stance on environmental issues now seems a particularly poor fit for the state. His embrace of fracking, which he has tried to temper in recent months, goes well beyond Joe Biden’s Pennsylvania-conscious support. In fact, much of Romanoff’s campaign, which has led with his environmental bona fides and embrace of the Green New Deal, is predicated on a willingness to clean up, at the federal level, the environmental mess that Hickenlooper made while running the state. Romanoff has pledged to seek a national ban on fracking and an end to the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure, a clear rejoinder to his opponent, who once drank fracking fluid to signal his enthusiasm about the technology. Some 80 percent of Coloradans consider climate change a serious issue, including 93 percent of Democrats.
With Election Day fast approaching, Hickenlooper has gone from safe centrist in a purple state to politically imperiled moderate in a blue Colorado, scrambling to keep up. That trend is starkly clear in recent polling. According to the Romanoff campaign’s most recent internal tally, the former state House Speaker has closed the once gargantuan gap between Hickenlooper and himself. Romanoff now trails Hickenlooper 51 percent to 39 percent, down from a 49-percentage-point spread in October. Internal polls can skew favorably in the direction of the candidate who commissioned them, but it’s clear Romanoff is riding a surge of support and closing fast. An Associated Press report on the state of the Hickenlooper campaign, published Thursday, referred to it as “a hot mess.”
If Hickenlooper is able to survive, dragged across the finish line by the Schumer machine that no doubt coronated him in part because it didn’t expect to have to spend lavishly to help him win, he will limp into a general-election standoff with Gardner. Already, the Gardner camp has run ads hitting the former governor on corruption. As the November election promises to be a referendum on the far-reaching corruption of Donald Trump, that attack could set up a messaging nightmare. Still, if Democrats are going to flip any Senate seat in what is a fairly challenging electoral map, Gardner’s remains the most likely. Nominating Hickenlooper, however, may make that task much harder.
