November 18, 2025 10:48 AM UTC

Danielle Jurinsky Will Go Gently Into that Good Night After All

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• by: Colorado Pols

As we noted last week, soon-to-be-former Aurora City Council member Danielle Jurinsky was casting around for her next elected office after a surprising defeat in her re-election campaign.

With more time to ponder her political future, Jurinsky has apparently decided against running for an open seat on the Douglas County Board of Commissioners in District 1, where incumbent Abe Laydon is term limited.

Jurinsky seemed to have quickly pivoted from her Aurora loss, telling people in Douglas County that she had already changed her voter registration and found a house in District 1. It wasn’t clear, however, that Jurinsky would have met the legal requirements to run for that office because she didn’t live in the district for at least a year prior to the November 2026 election.

This argument is moot, however, because Jurinsky made it known in calls to DougCo elected officials today that she had decided against running in what would have been a contested Republican Primary against former State Sen. Jim Smallwood.

Jurinsky raised a ton of money for her Aurora re-election campaign ($258,000, which was more than $200k beyond what the two progressive candidates who defeated her on the ballot had raised) and had been lobbied by some Republicans to run for [snicker] Governor of Colorado in 2026, so she’s probably not gone for good from Colorado politics. But Jurinsky will need to find a different issue for her personal bullhorn after her fantastical claims of gangs overtaking Aurora turned out to be nonsense.

As Karen Brulliard of The Washington Post reported last week:

The squalid apartment complex that President Donald Trump held up as evidence that Venezuelan gangsters had taken over this city has been vacant for months, surrounded these days by fencing and barbed wire.

And now the conservative city council member who cited violence at the complex to fuel allegations of a migrant “invasion” here has lost her seat, along with two other right-wing colleagues who echoed those talking points.

The ouster of those members flipped Aurora’s nonpartisan council to a progressive majority, in one of the more remarkable upsets in last week’s wave of Democratic gains in high-profile and downballot races across the nation.

Jurinsky made a name for herself in right-wing political circles by embarrassing her own city in 2024, and it cost her bigly one year later. Her decision not to run for a DougCo Commissioner seat is perhaps the best news that Colorado Republicans have heard in weeks.