( – promoted by Colorado Pols)
Last night, the SD31 vacancy committee met and nearly all of them showed up!!! 164 out of 183 members were present.
There ended up being 10 candidates including a last minute floor nomination who simply wanted a venue to talk about his pet beef.
The voting was done in 3 rounds. The first round eliminated all but the top 4. The second round narrowed the field to two and the third round was the run-off between those two.
After the first round the top four vote getters were:
Ann Ragsdale 56
Pat Steadman 44
Alex Sanchez 31 (I think?)
Jill Conrad 10
Jill announced after that she was dropping out after that so only 3 names were on the 2nd ballot. Those results were:
Steadman in 1st
Ragsdale in 2nd
Sanchez in 3rd
Sorry I did not write down the numbers, I figured someone else would have posted this thread by now.
The final vote between Pat & Ann came was 93 for Pat and 63 for Ann (we lost 8 people during the process).
The meeting itself went exceptionally smoothly, thanks in large part to the planning of the District Chair, Ed Hall, who coordinated with Denver, Adams and the State parties to pull off a very well executed election.
by the vacancy committee. And by most accounts, Steadman is a really fine choice and will make a great senator.
Don’t live in the district but am a big fan of Pat. He’ll be a great Senator for the district and the state.
Steadman 63
Ragsdale 53
Sanchez 44
Conrad endorsed Sanchez after the first round; Sanchez endorsed Steadman after the second round.
Looks like essentially a Denver/Adams split?
The district is split 60-40 with Adams County having the larger part.
But, it is fair to say that Ragsdale support came disproportionately from Adams County. She and Hicks were the only candidates from Adams County in the race, so this is not surprising.
It appeared that Sanchez also had considerable support from Adams County, but much of the Sanchez vote went to Steadman in the third round.
what happened in the first round. After that, not so much.
As I understood it, by landmass/area, Adams County is the larger part of the district, but Denver County has more inhabitants and more precinct committee people they contributed to the vacancy committee.
oh-willike says the split is Adams 60, Denver 40, and the state Dem secretary told me the same thing when Veiga announced she was quitting. The roster of the vacancy committee isn’t a secret document, you can call state party headquarters and they’ll tell you how many are Adco and how many Denver.
You do realize, SD 31 covers only a portion of Denver and only a portion of Adams County — we’re not comparing all of Denver to all of Adams County, just the makeup of SD 31.
Being a pointy headed academic, I sorted the vacancy committee list by county.
There were 183 members with 79 (43 %) from Adams and 104 (57%) from Denver.
Tom Russell
Pat becomes first openly gay man to serve in State Senate and word is out that the Governor has signed S.B. 88!
Sssshhh!
Yes, Ritter signed SB 88, but it was quietly on Monday and it took John Ingold at the Post to stumble across the deed.
It is good news that Ritter signed it, but you’d think he would have at least let Ferrandino know about it.
that would require him to talk directly with a legislator, rather than relayed through the Denver Post via a passive aggressive remark to a reporter.
Good one! And on the nose.
they also announced it on NPR so I don’t think it’s quite a state secret. But yeah, you’re right–not much fanfare.
It’s my hope that Steadman will live up to his potential to be a great legislator.
I thought Jill would be in the final two or at least the final three. It is almost unimaginable that she got only ten votes.
Ann Ragsdale still commands tremendous loyalty on her home turf in Adams but was unable to gather any support in Denver.
would have won if she commanded all the adams delegates – but Steadman picked up many of them in later rounds. Ragsdale was uninspiring.
From what I understand the people who say that Denver has more delegates (thanks Tom) are dead on. However the people who say that Adams has more population are also correct. The vacancy committee is made up of part officials (read: precinct captains, county officers, etc). Each county makes its own rules to this effect. Denver’s rules put more people in official positions, and thus they have more people on the vacancy committee… it’s a weird little rules thing.
Rep. Ragsdale did pull most of the votes from Adams (though not all), and she did have some support from Denver (though not much). She would have needed ~25 votes from Denver in addition to almost all of Adams to win. Obviously, she didn’t do that.
Overall, I thought it was a great night. The candidates and committee members handled themselves well. With people like Ann, Alex, Jill the new Senator and others, it was a pretty awesome embarrassment of riches.
Denver tends towards smaller precincts in terms of the number of active voters (the statutory measure of how big a precinct is or can be). This means there are more of them and therefore more precinct committeepeople (PCP’s).
I forget what Adams’ average vcoter per precinct is, but Denver attempts to keep it between 800 and 1000. The law allows us to go up to 1500 and even higher (2000 I think) with City Council (in other counties: County Commissioner) approval.