February 02, 2026 12:58 PM UTC

Senate Fundraising: Disastrous Start for Julie Gonzales

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: For more context on Senate fundraising numbers, here’s a look at fundraising numbers for Democratic Senate candidates around the country:

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Fundraising numbers for the fourth quarter of 2025 are now available, giving us our first chance to compare the numbers for incumbent Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Denver) and State Sen. Julie Gonzales (D-Denver). We can also look at numbers from Republican candidate Janak Joshi, but Colorado is not a state that should be competitive for the GOP in 2026 (more on this in a moment).

Hickenlooper is the only Colorado candidate — in any race — to have raised at least one million dollars in every quarter of 2025, allowing him to close out the year with $3.9 million in the bank. This isn’t a surprise given Hickenlooper’s long political career in Colorado — including serving as Denver Mayor and Governor — but it reinforces something we’ve been writing in this space for months: Beating Hickenlooper in 2026 is incredibly unlikely.

Gonzales launched her challenge in early December with a fairly bland narrative for why she should replace Hickenlooper as the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. Gonzales had been thinking about running against Hickenlooper for months; we figured waiting until six months before the Primary Election made a difficult task even harder unless Gonzales had already built out a serious network of supporters and donors.

She did not.

As you can see from the chart at right, Gonzales’ fourth quarter fundraising numbers would be unimpressive for a congressional candidate, let alone someone running for a statewide office. Supporters of Gonzales will point out that she only had a few weeks to raise money in the final quarter of 2025, but as we mentioned above, that was a constraint she placed on herself. There’s also plenty of precedent for upstart candidates to raise big money in their first foray into a federal campaign. In Michigan, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed raised $1.8 million in just 75 days after launching his campaign for U.S. Senate in April. Here in Colorado, Democrat Jessica Killin — a virtual unknown candidate when she started running against Republican Rep. Jeff Crank in CO-05 — raised more than $1 million in her first fundraising quarter despite running in a district that has never before elected a Democrat to Congress.

To paraphrase House Speaker Julie McCluskie from her opening day speech at the State Capitol earlier this month, “the math just isn’t mathing” for Gonzales…or for Democrats in general.

The absolute best-case scenario for Gonzales is that she manages to defeat Hickenlooper with a grassroots campaign centered around turning out Democrats through the caucus and assembly process. If she were to somehow end up winning the June Primary election, she would likely start the General Election phase of her campaign with nothing but lint in her campaign pockets. Sure, national money would pour in to make sure that Democrats held on to a Senate seat in Colorado, but at what expense? Any amount of national money redirected to Colorado is money that is not being spent in states such as Alaska where Democrats have a chance to pick up a new Senate seat.

You can love Gonzales as a candidate and embrace her political perspective, but after such a weak initial fundraising report, no amount of squinting can put her Hickenlooper challenge into realistic focus.

Democrats have a real opportunity in 2026 to wrest total federal control away from Republicans. If Gonzales wanted to take a detour on that road to oust an incumbent Democrat, she needed to prove that she has what it takes to be a serious statewide candidate. She did not. Period.

This doesn’t mean that Julie Gonzales is done as a statewide candidate…just not in 2026.