April 15, 2026 05:11 PM UTC

TL;DR Julie Gonzales Didn't Raise Any Money

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• by: Colorado Pols

After taking stock of incumbent Sen. John Hickenlooper’s $1.4 million fundraising haul for the first quarter 2026, Hick’s fifth consecutive quarter of over $1 million raised putting him in a commanding position ahead of the quickly-approaching June 30th primary, we’ve been watching to see what his underdog primary opponent state Sen. Julie Gonzales would herself report. Gonzales’ own polling in this race shows Hickenlooper with an enormous 30-point lead, which Gonzales’ campaign says they can chip away at with a lengthy dose of negative messaging.

But for that, you need money. And in a guest post on somebody else’s Substack today, we learned that Gonzales has once again failed to pull in that vital ingredient:

When my campaign for the U.S. Senate files our FEC report, it will come as a shock to no one in the D.C. establishment that we did not raise millions of dollars. In fact, we didn’t even come close. In the first three months of 2026, we raised just over $260,000, spent about $300,000, and had roughly $100,000 in our bank account at the end of March. I’m gonna be real with you: that is more money than I have ever had in a bank account in my entire life. To the D.C. insiders, those numbers make my campaign “not viable.”

It’s more than a lot of people have ever had in their individual bank accounts, but as Lauren Boebert can tell you, campaign cash is not personal wealth! Evaluated as it should be as campaign fundraising, in the first quarter of 2026, Gonzales raised less than 20% of what Hickenlooper raised for the same period, and assuming these numbers are correct, currently has somewhere around 2.5% of Hickenlooper’s $4 million cash in the bank. CD-1 upstart Melat Kiros, by comparison, raised $174,000 in the same period and has more cash on hand–not enough to beat Rep. Diana DeGette, but enough to embarrass Gonzales.

I’ve got a problem with that.

With what? Reality? The truth is that Gonzales is right on track to lose the Democratic primary like underdogs before her, by a margin similar to what her own polling shows–before the push poll-style questions her poll relied on to obtain a saleable result. Gonzales does not have the resources to mount the kind of mass media campaign necessary to pump Democratic primary voters full of her negative messages about the incumbent, which is what the poll her campaign depends on for relevance prescribed. This isn’t an opinion, it’s an arithmetic fact. Consultants who tell candidates that these fundamentals do not matter are lying.

The Democratic Party establishment wants candidates to believe that the only measure of their worth is their cash on hand, but as someone who has lived paycheck to paycheck, who lives in affordable housing, and who has had to go without in order to get by, I know that our true worth is never determined by our net worth. John Hickenlooper will outraise me. He cannot outwork me, and he cannot outorganize me.

Political bloggers can go ahead and waste their time poring through our FEC report looking for proof that I don’t have a shot. [Pols emphasis]

With all due respect, we don’t need to do that. There were only two numbers in Gonzales’ report that mattered, and Gonzales herself disclosed them hoping to get ahead of the unequivocally bad news. There is no prejudice in these observations. If Gonzales were able to match her pugnacious rhetoric with a competitive campaign, we would acknowledge it. If the endorsements Gonzales has pulled down in recent weeks turn into tangible support in the future, we still will.

What we’re not going to do is take the blame for the news we accurately report. Julie Gonzales has an infinitesimal fraction of Hickenlooper’s resources going into the decisive period of the primary campaign, and Hickenlooper enjoys a prohibitive lead in Gonzales’ own poll. The only way Gonzales has identified to change this course, a scorched-earth negative campaign against a popular incumbent, requires investment that Gonzales can’t as of this writing come even remotely close to sustaining.

Don’t tell us insurgent primary candidates can’t raise money. That’s happening in plenty of races around the country.

The ones who succeed do.