February 27, 2025 09:23 AM UTC

Crisanta Duran Announces Campaign for Attorney General

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• by: Colorado Pols

Former Colorado State House Speaker Crisanta Duran has decided to seek the Democratic nomination for Attorney General in 2026. But as The Colorado Sun reports, she’s going to need to make a lot of new introductions:

Duran hasn’t been in the political spotlight in Colorado for several years. She served as speaker from 2017 to early 2019 and then ran in 2020 to unseat Democratic U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette in Denver. Duran ended her insurgent, albeit lackluster, campaign long before the primary.

After dropping her congressional bid, Duran worked in a national capacity on former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s unsuccessful 2020 presidential bid.

As for her legal experience, Duran is a 2005 graduate of the University of Colorado Law School. She worked as a lawyer for the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 union, where her father was the longtime president.

Duran has always been one of those politicians who really wants to be elected to something, though she has had trouble finding that “something” since being term-limited in the State House in 2018.

The last time Duran sought public office was when she challenged longtime incumbent Congresswoman Diana DeGette (D-Denver) in 2019. Her campaign was an under-funded mess; despite the spotlight of having just served two terms as House Speaker, Duran reported an embarrassingly-low $70,000 in her first fundraising quarter. She hung around for a few months longer, though the writing was on the wall long before she formally dropped out of the race in October of that year.

Duran moved out of Colorado for a few years and returned in time to poke around at the edges of making a run for Congress in CO-07 in 2022; she ultimately realized that there was no path toward defeating then-State Sen. Brittany Pettersen, who went on to win the Democratic nomination and an easy General Election victory. Last summer, Duran announced a “listening tour” of Colorado as a way of signaling that she was looking at running for a thing in 2026. If anyone was “listening” on her tour, they weren’t talking about it; she failed to generate any buzz, which was no surprise given that she didn’t have an official role to do anything about whatever she was hearing.

We’ve listed Duran on The Big Line, but we don’t expect her to make much of an impact on the race for Attorney General. Boulder County DA Michael Dougherty is the clear favorite at this point; if Secretary of State Jena Griswold decides to seek the Democratic nomination for AG, Duran’s 2026 prospects will get even bleaker.