May 20, 2026 03:45 PM UTC

Colorado's GOP Governor's Race Is The Lede From Hell

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• by: Colorado Pols

News outlets across the state are beginning to crank out their candidate profile pieces for races in the upcoming June 30th primary elections. Sometimes these pieces tediously recount life stories of manifestly uninteresting people, penned by journalists who understand the mechanics of expository writing but do not know how to make said writing worth reading.

That’s not the case with Colorado Public Radio’s Ben Markus, whose primer today on Republican candidates running for governor of Colorado kicks off with what we can only call a lede for the ages:

The first of the three believes the state Capitol is awash in pedophiles. The second says he helped kill a man when he was just 7 years old, though there is no evidence of the crime. The third has been a political insider for much of her adult life, but now says she can fix what is wrong with Colorado. [Pols emphasis]

One of them will be the Republican nominee for Colorado governor…

But none of them will be governor.

Markus’ reporting doesn’t end here, even though probably it could have. Rarely has an entire field of candidates been so succinctly written off. And in this case, that may be the most journalistically honest way to treat them.