April 10, 2026 10:07 AM UTC

Hickenlooper Reminds Everybody Who's In Charge Here

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Ernest Luning reports for the Colorado Springs Gazette, despite the sugar high among a subset of Democratic party activists, incumbent Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper is the frontrunner in the June 30th primary against state Sen. Julie Gonzales for one simple arithmetic reason.

Or you might call it four million reasons:

U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper’s campaign raised nearly $1.4 million in the first quarter of 2026 and plans to report more than $4 million on hand heading into Colorado’s June primary, the first-term Democrat’s campaign said Thursday.

That brings Hickenlooper’s total receipts to about $9 million since the former two-term governor took office in 2021. He’s the only statewide candidate in Colorado to have raised over $1 million in each quarter since the beginning of 2025, and more than 80% of donations this quarter were for $25 or less, his campaign said.

Hickenlooper is facing a primary against state Sen. Julie Gonzales, D-Denver, who reported raising nearly $180,000 in the final quarter of 2025. She has yet to file a fundraising report for the three-month period that ended on March 31.

Leading up to the Democratic state assembly in which Sen. Hickenlooper did not compete having made the primary ballot via petition, Gonzales received the endorsement of several Democratic activist groups including Indivisible and the Sunrise Movement. It remains to be seen whether those endorsements translate into hard support, but the gap between Gonzales and Hickenlooper so far has been so large that it’s just not reasonable to take her campaign seriously in terms of competitiveness. Hickenlooper will have the ability to saturate media and roll out field campaign resources that will simply overwhelm Gonzales’ best efforts.

The arguments against these experience-based observations tend to be emotional rather than factual. It’s entirely possible that Gonzales will improve on her 2025 Q4 fundraising performance after these endorsements, but unless she can raise at least a sizable fraction of Hickenlooper’s haul, she simply won’t be able to reach as many primary voters with her message. Combine that with the influence of unaffiliated voters who will see Hickenlooper’s name dozens of times before they ever hear about Julie Gonzales, and this is how the Democratic U.S. Senate primary moves from longshot to lock.

The only thing we can add is that as we’ve said before, Hickenlooper is just not the ideal target for the current push by some younger Democrats to purge what they call the “gerontocracy” from their positions of power. The motivation to primary Hickenlooper has as much to do with settling old local intra-Democratic scores as it does any meaningful policy differences. Hickenlooper has built an enduring political brand in this state, with deeper support among diverse stakeholders than his detractors have ever understood.

With all of this in mind, we love surprises, so if you disagree with our analysis we as always welcome your sincere labor to prove us wrong! This is especially true in Democratic primaries, where we regularly have the thankless job of applying the fundamentals.

But the fundamentals apply. They always will.