President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Kamala Harris
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) V. Archuleta
98%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Marshall Dawson
95%
5%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
50%
50%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(D) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Jeff Crank
(D) River Gassen
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
(R) John Fabbricatore
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) B. Pettersen
(R) Sergei Matveyuk
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
70%↑
30%
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
March 27, 2009 07:59 AM UTC
31 Comments
Congrats to the fellow. Now who the eff is Daniel Kagan?
and from what I understand, even prior to Anne’s resignation, he had filed to run in HD3 in 2010. So, he has some credibility behind his run and seems to be a fairly active member of the Party.
Congrats to Kagan.
…that has pictures of 35 of the delegates in compromising positions 🙂
and condolonces to the rest.
The job comes with long periods of thankless work that never makes the papers, in addition to its desirable aspects, so maybe it is Kagan who needs the condolences and the others who need to be congratulated on their good fortune to be spared. 😉
He was an active Democrat before that in other locations.
I am not sure what he actually does for a living, but I know he has spent some time at the capitol in some official capacity (a aide or something).
As already mentioned he was elected from CD1 to go to the National Convention as a Clinton delegate. He showed that he has a knack for campaigning, as he did in the lead-up to the vacancy committee.
He had already been informing the party structure of his intent to run for the seat in 2010, so things happened a little earlier than expected, and he adapted his campaign quite nicely.
was appointed to take Jennifer Veiga’s place when she was appointed to the state Senate in 2003.
Part of HD 3 is in Veiga’s district, true enough, but part of it is also in SD 26, now represented by Linda Newell.
only 5 precincts are in Jennifer Veiga’s SD31.
15 pcts are in SD35 (Joyce Foster)
19 pcts are in SD32 (Chris Romer)
the 22 Arapahoe County pcts are in SD26 (Linda Newell)
He’s capable, progressive, and articulate. Colorado voters will like what they see.
It’s always nice to see the political wonks eat crow–Kagan wasn’t anywhere near the top in votes of people conventional wisdom said was going to win.
Vacancy committees are a wild animal. ANYBODY who thinks they know what is going to happen in a vacancy committee is full of shit. It’s a total crapshoot, which is why we never even tried to gauge how it might turn out.
also affected things to a great extent — with right around two-thirds of the vacancy committee able to make it, no one was sure the characterization of the actual pool of voters.
The NCAA Finals was given partial credit for Josie Heath’s 1992 primary victory. (They also organized the hell out of it, of course.)
Josie lost to Ben Campbell in the 92 primary.
Often what vacancy committees do is not at all connected to what the voting public would do (kinda like having a Governor . . . nevermind). And vacancy committees can be manipulated behind the scenes. Clearly, some times the results are quite good, but not always.
is that its very existence discourages the political tactic of politics by scandal.
In Congress, a large share of Congressional open seats happen when an incumbent’s personal life messes up and creates an open seat that change change the partisan balance of Congress, and incumbents have an incredibly high re-election rate, so there is a big incentive to the opposition to look for personal flaws, and a party to excuse the personal flaws of its own members even when they have clearly screwed up.
In Colorado’s General Assembly, the incentive for the opposition is to ignore personal scandal until the primary is over in an election year, in order to have a weaker candidates running in the general election. The Colorado system disentangles the personal and the political.
Robert’s Rules and variations of it are basically designed to produce predictable results given the membership of a group for legislative yes or no with amendments type matters, as opposed to candidate elections.
In a massively multi-candidate race like this one, where a majority is required to win in the end, you need to know not only people’s first choices, but their second and third choices to make good predictions. The number of people who vote (while fairly large in the Democratic party) is too small for the law of averages to work, so you have to count all the noses to get a good guess, not just a sample. And, in a ten day race with this many candidates, many of the committee members haven’t even formed those choices until they hear everyone speak, so you have to prediction how people who don’t themselves know who their second or third choices are will vote.
Even candidates who have no chance of winning themselves influence the outcome, because similar candidates have a natural tendency (mathematically) to split the vote for each other. At the general election level, partisan primaries mitigate this effect, but it still exists when you have many candidates running in a primary or non-partisan race. The quirkiness of multi-candidate races is the main reason Romer petitioned onto the ballot in his SD when his seat was an open seat, and this also was a factor in the CO-2 Congressional primary.
Doing three rounds of elections produces more stable results than a one round primary, to the extent that there is some kind of partisan continuum that candidates fit on, but when unique personal qualities of candidates are an important seperate dimension of the selection and there is wide agreement on many issues, the process is remains inherently quite quirky even in a multi-round election process. It is easier to predict who is unlikely to win, than who will win.
This vacancy committee race attracted many candidates because there has been a lot of leadership development and activism there (in response to the very long 2008 Presidential primary and general election campaigns), because many people had already considered running due to impending term limits, because no current elected officials in the HD were running (something that tends to happen more often at the HD level than for higher offices), because it is a relatively safe D district, because no one was a clear annointed successor, and because a vaccancy committee race takes far fewer campaign resources to wage than a primary or general election campaign.
Most vacancy committee races have one to three candidates, often with a clear favorite going in. The previous HD 3 vacancy committee, when Jennifer Veiga went to the State Senate, had three candidates. Before that, Jennifer Veiga was the dominant candidate in her own vacancy committee election to the State Senate to replace Doug Linkhart who won his City Council At Large race.
But, Coloradopols did do a poll to see what the political wanks thought and predicted. And the prediction was wrong.
Silverstein did better than I thought and Cassidy and Reid did worse.
In that regard the poll was better than I expected.
It missed Kagan, but not really, he got a respectable number of votes. But I suspect he got a block of Hillary supporters, and they are always under represented in the blog world due to a demographic skew.
I do not understand your hateful na na na attitude–its quite childish.
It’s just that things in politics are not always what they seem, and I wish more bloggers on here would understand that.
if bloggers knew all the things they don’t know?
Or are you suggesting that blog writing would be better if bloggers wrote with less confidence and certainty?
Or are you just saying you always like rooting for the underdog and the unpredictable when you have no dog in the fight?
It could be something else- but DoppleG is right- it feels like na na na-ism.
things that they don’t know!
…are really annoying to those of us that actually do.
You got my point! That’s hillarious.
I was reasonably confident it would come down to Daniel and Aaron, but I thought Aaron had a better chance.
Either choice was a good one in my book, so I am happy for Daniel.
Dan called the final pairing before the second round of ballots were even collected.
Aaron Silverstein had the deck stacked in his favor and still lost. Aaron chose to let Councilman Nevitt talk for him and gave the shortest speech of the candidates. He was totally stunned and seemed very angry when the final results were read.
All the other candidates were grinning ear to ear when they heard Kagan won. Sam Cassidy said that Silverstein came in like a prick and left like a prick. The losing candidates seemed even happier than the supporters of Kagan who had sat through a long evening that didn’t end until after ten pm.
As the evening wore on it seemed more and more observers were coming in. There were more people in the room at 10:15 than at 7:00 when the meeting was called to order. Kudos to the State Party staff and volunteers who counted the votes and printed up new ballots quickly and efficiently.
As the evening wore on copies of e-mail from Aaron’s stint as Jefferson’s County were being passed around. Those e-mails contradicted his claim that he was the candidate who could do the best job organizing a strong party. In fact the job evaluation by Dick Barkey the Jeffco Democratic Party Chair was devastating and showed Aaron to have not done a very good job in 2006 in Jeffco.
My candidate Judith Judd talked about SB 228 the Morse Bill to change the way the State can spend money. Judith said she would work to pass this in the House as soon as she took office. Everyone yawned preferring to talk about high speed rail lines from DIA or some other impractical idea. Clearly this group did not want to talk about real issues that confront the Legislature. Too bad as Judith really had a great grasp of those matters.
Daniel Kagan’s suit cost more than Aaron’s car and his watch more than the homes of some delegates. Kagan is a well connected corporate lawyer. However, his good guy persona and former work as a Public Defender won over a lot of delegates. His close friendship with Jim Lyons will insure that Kagan will be a safe and reliable vote for the Ritter Administration.
I don’t know who to thank maybe my Councilman Chris Nevitt as my street was recently plowed when I arrived home after four hours of politics and eight inches of snow.