July 15, 2025 08:45 AM UTC

Hickenlooper Keeping Colorado Off 2026 Senate Map

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Ernest Luning reports for the Colorado Springs Gazette’s political blog, incumbent Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper added another $1.5 million to his campaign war chest in the second quarter of 2025, checking the boxes necessary to remain the prohibitive favorite for re-election to his seat next year:

The quarter’s haul pushes the former two-term governor’s total fundraising since his election to the Senate in 2020 past $4.7 million. Hickenlooper raised just over $1 million in the year’s first quarter…

National election forecasters rate Colorado’s U.S. Senate seat as solidly in the Democrats’ corner in 2026, in part because Republicans haven’t won a major statewide race in more than a decade.

“Republicans recently passed their reckless and wildly unpopular budget bill that flies in the face of our Colorado values,” Hickenlooper said in a statement. “Coloradans are fired up. We’re proud to have their support and to fight alongside them.”

In what’s increasingly shaping to be a wave election year for Democrats, national Republicans are not going to be looking to Colorado for any hope of a pickup in either chamber, and that’s a principal reason why only a couple of non-serious Republicans have announced runs against Sen. Hickenlooper next year. We keep hearing about the possibility of a primary challenge from the disaffected left in this race, but so far nobody has opted to take on that equally hopeless and politically thankless quest either.

Barring anything unforeseeable, this is what a cruise to a second term looks like.