November 06, 2025 10:41 AM UTC

How Trump Ruined Everything For Mayor Mike Coffman, Again

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• by: Colorado Pols

Assessing Tuesday’s unexpectedly historic off-year elections as the final results trickle in, one of the biggest shock victories for Democrats in Colorado is what appears to be the dismantlement of Aurora Mayor and former GOP Congressman Mike Coffman’s carefully and expensively crafted Republican-in-all-but-name majority on the Aurora City Council. If the results hold giving Democrats on the nominally nonpartisan council a 6-5 majority, it marks the undoing of years of work by Coffman to carve out a conservative bastion in the deepening blue Denver metro area–in the state’s most economically and culturally diverse suburban city no less, a state of affairs that has bedeviled Democrats to the delight of beleaguered local Republicans for years.

As the Denver Post’s John Aguilar reports:

Since Coffman won the mayor’s race six years ago, liberal voices on the Aurora council have been in the muted minority. And things looked difficult for left-leaning hopefuls headed into Tuesday’s election, as they found themselves battling against a tidal wave of outside money supporting conservative candidates. (Officially, candidates run for council seats without party affiliations.)

But as of late Wednesday afternoon, results from the Colorado Secretary of State’s website showed definitive leads holding for five progressive candidates. In the at-large contest, Rob Andrews and Alli Jackson were the top two vote-getters, at 26.1% and 25.7%, respectively. That means the tenure of conservative firebrand Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky — who was running third, at 22.1% — is likely over.

Jurinsky made national headlines during last year’s presidential race when Aurora exploded into the larger debate over immigration. Fellow incumbent Amsalu Kassaw, a conservative who has held his seat for less than a year, was in fourth place out of five at-large candidates.

Last night, far-right Aurora City Councillor Danielle Jurinsky, who just a year ago was sharing the stage with President Donald Trump at a campaign rally while entertaining dreams of higher office, conceded defeat with the closest to graciousness she has managed in her brief but cacophonous political career, during which she earned her the nickname “Temu Lauren Boebert.”

“While last night’s election didn’t go the way we had hoped, I am deeply proud of the work we’ve accomplished together — the initiatives I led and the efforts I was privileged to support,” Jurinsky said in social media posts. “Four years ago, I was told I couldn’t win. But we did. And I have served my hometown and all of you with every ounce of passion, loyalty, and heart that I have.”

Meanwhile, as the Aurora Sentinel reports, Steve Sundberg, who achieved infamy when a series of dreadfully unfunny racist promotional videos resurfaced a few years ago, has been relieved of his City Council seat by Ward II voters:

Democratic challenger Amy Wiles was about 700 votes ahead of Ward II Republican incumbent Steve Sundberg on Wednesday…

“I am feeling grateful,” Wiles said. “Grateful to our community members who voted, to our volunteers who helped us every day for the past 10 months and to my fellow candidates.”

The ouster of the conservative majority on the Aurora City Council in this election, where despite the absence of Donald Trump from the ballot voters were looking to punish Trump and the GOP wherever possible, is the second time that Trump has undone the career designs of Mayor Coffman–the first being when Coffman was removed from his long-held CO-06 seat in Congress by Democratic Rep. Jason Crow in 2018, another election in which downballot Republicans paid the price for Trump’s unpopularity. It’s important to understand how closely Coffman has been personally involved in constructing and backing this Aurora City Council majority, even changing city campaign finance rules to allow himself to support his favored candidates.

After Trump’s re-election campaign seized upon wildly exaggerated online rumors that Aurora had been “overrun” by Venezuelan gangs last year, vowing to launch a crackdown on immigrants briefly known as “Operation Aurora” before the online rumor mill moved on to the next shiny object, Mayor Coffman was faced with a similar dilemma to what doomed his congressional career–striking an impossible balance between criticizing Trump’s misdeeds and not provoking Trump’s vengeance against any dissent. Coffman’s half-hearted defense of the reality of life in his city against Trump’s absurd mischaracterizations ended up pleasing no one, and demonstrated the ineffectual nature of Coffman’s “resistance” to a politician he refuses to criticize by name.

All the while, Aurora voters who knew very well that their city had not been “overrun” and were disgusted by both Jurinsky’s insistence otherwise and Coffman’s timidity in standing up to Trump were preparing their own response–a result that shocked the local press and pundit class. Despite a massive disparity in resources and the presumption that conservative control of the Aurora City Council was unshakable, Mike Coffman’s conservative fiefdom in the heart of deep-blue Colorado just came crashing down.

Other contests received more press, but the end of Mike Coffman’s Aurora experiment is as big a deal as anything that happened Tuesday night.