May 08, 2026 01:42 PM UTC

Boulder Man Will Proudly Light Millions of Dollars on Fire

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Jesse Paul reports today for the “Unaffiliated” newsletter (via The Colorado Sun), a Boulder businessman who was a registered Republican as recently as August is now running for the U.S. Senate in Colorado and plans to waste a lot of money in the process:

Robert “Bob” Chew, a businessman and Navy veteran, launched his campaign March 20, when he filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission making his candidacy official. The 67-year-old loaned his campaign $150,000 in March, but plans to self-fund his candidacy with a minimum of $1 million — and up to $2 million or “whatever it’s going to take” — to make his bid viable.

(Chew didn’t directly answer when asked whether all the money he invests in his campaign will be in the form of loans, but he said “I am not expecting to get any money back.”)

“These are serious issues. I’m a serious candidate. I’m going to put serious money into it,” he said in an interview Thursday with The Unaffiliated. “And I’m going to make the major parties take me seriously.”

Colorado voter records show Chew was a registered Republican up until August, when he became a member of the Forward Party. He describes himself as a “John McCain Republican.”

Um, okay.

Chew is the founder of a company called CAI that does some sort of engineering work, which apparently made him wealthy enough to light a huge pile of money on fire. There is absolutely zero chance that Chew can win a U.S. Senate race as a candidate for the Forward Party. Even if Chew were running as a Republican candidate, he would be the longest of shots to win in November.

While $2 million is certainly a lot of money in the abstract, it is a relative pittance for a statewide race — particularly for someone beginning a campaign in March with no name ID whatsoever. Chew could spend 10 times that amount and still not come close to beating incumbent Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Denver), who is the likely Democratic nominee.

Smoke ’em if you got ’em, apparently.