November 18, 2010 02:38 AM UTC

Curry Concedes in HD-61

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• by: Colorado Pols

Unaffiliated Rep. Kathleen Curry’s surprisingly close write-in bid is over. Posted to her website a short while ago, she has formally conceded to Democrat Roger Wilson:

It is finally official – I did not win the race for House District 61. I came within 300 votes out of 30,000 cast – but it wasn’t enough.  The final count as I have it is Roger 9660, the “write in” 9368.   I called Roger Wilson to wish him luck a few minutes ago. I want to thank my family, my supporters, and the county clerks for their efforts to finalize the vote count these last few days.  I think the count is accurate and this district needs to know who it’s new representative is – Roger Wilson of Glenwood Springs.

We’ve been critical of Rep. Curry’s decision to disaffiliate from the Democratic Party early this year, which seems to have been made impulsively after equally ill-advised legislation she co-sponsored with a Republican–essentially to antagonize fellow Democrats on health care. Curry also sided unproductively with Republicans in key budget battles last year. Her decisions, first to alienate and then to disaffiliate from her party, directly resulted in her being forced to wage an unlikely write-in struggle for what should have been an easy re-election.

Despite this, we admit that we didn’t expect her to fare as well as she did with such a huge disadvantage, an indication of her enduring local support. There’s every possibility that, despite this self-inflicted setback, we’ve not seen the last of Kathleen Curry in Colorado politics.