When Michael Bennet announced a little more than a year ago that he would run for governor and face AG Phil Weiser in the Democratic primary, I wrote a column saying that the race would come down to which candidate could convince voters that he would better protect Colorado from Donald Trump’s many depredations.
I won’t take too much credit for that foresight. As I wrote, Trump is a colossus — in all the wrong ways — who dominates every political conversation, for better or (mostly) for worse.
So, of course, the ability and willingness to fight Trump would be at the center of any Democratic primary race. If you’re not fighting Trump hard enough, you’ve basically disqualified yourself in the eyes of many voters. We’ve seen Weiser making that very charge against Bennet, saying he was too accommodating to Trump.
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SUBSCRIBEAnd as we know, Trump has declared war against Colorado among other blue states like Minnesota, California, New York and Illinois. And so the ability to take on Trump — the current governor, as we know, has not exactly been a model of resistance — becomes even more critical.
What I didn’t know, though, was that fighting Trump would basically become the only issue that has stuck in the Bennet-Weiser race. There are plenty of other issues — the housing crisis, affordability crisis, childcare, education, social media, teen mental health, immigration, medical care, etc. — and both candidates have serious plans to address these issues.
But I don’t see many voters arguing about which candidate is better on, say, affordability. According to the polls I see, a lot of voters have trouble believing anyone is going to solve the affordability crisis.
I mean, if you look at the TV ads from each campaign, they’re all about being a fighter, like it’s — dating myself here — another round of Ali vs. Frazier, only nastier. (Bennet’s ads so far are courtesy of his supporting PAC, funded largely by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bennet says his campaign’s ads will go up shortly. Weiser, meanwhile, has been a fundraising behemoth, setting record after record.)
It’s not surprising that the race has turned nasty. Most intraparty races get nasty as they near the end, and the end is nearly upon us. Mail ballots are going out — Trump having failed to stop mail-in voting, so far anyway — for the June 30 primary.
The focus of Weiser’s campaign is that Fightin’ Phil has brought 64 lawsuits against the second Trump administration. A large focus of Bennet’s campaign against Weiser is that, by the senator’s count, Weiser has only brought four of those lawsuits directly himself and that he’s misleading voters by claiming for himself the other 60 that he has joined.
Weiser says he has led or co-led in 16 of the lawsuits and that Bennet needs to get his numbers straight. And so on.
But now in recent forums, Bennet has hit harder, pointing out that Weiser has joined in more than 80% of AG lawsuits in Trump’s current term while he joined in fewer than 30% in Trump’s first term.
Bennet accuses Weiser of opportunism, saying the reason he has joined so many more lawsuits is because he’s running for governor. Weiser calls it an attack on his character and insists charges he has made against Bennet — for example, saying he has been too accommodating to Trump — are based only on Bennet’s voting record, particularly on his votes for eight of Trump’s nominations for his cabinet.
Of course, Weiser doesn’t have a voting record. He has his lawsuits. And I don’t know many Democrats who would say that Weiser hasn’t been an effective attorney general.
But in maybe the only major gaffe in the campaign, Weiser responded to Bennet’s charge of opportunism by saying he would “take the first Trump administration in a heartbeat” over the second — because, he said, there were guardrails in the first Trump administration, which have disappeared in the second.
I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds here. While Trump 2 is obviously worse than Trump 1, Trump 1 was an unmitigated disaster, whatever the guardrails. Immigrant kids in cages, separated from their parents. The January 6 insurrection. The end of Roe v. Wade. The racist, anti-Semitic, good-people-on-both-sides Charlottesville march. The Muslim ban. That’s just for starters.
As Bennet told me, “I don’t think there’s a Democrat anywhere who could get away with saying that. Trump 1 was the most lawless administration in American history (before Trump 2). Who were the guardrails in Trump 1? Steve Bannon? Stephen Miller? Rudy Giuliani?”
I talked to both candidates on Monday at length about the charges both are making and how each one defends himself.
Let’s call it Mike Littwin’s Briefly Told Virtual Gubernatorial Forum, in which we can compare and contrast.
Weiser says he can defend his record on which lawsuits he filed against Trump, saying that his standard during both administrations is the same — “Is the action illegal and does it harm Colorado?” His campaign adds that Weiser was only in office for the last two years of Trump 1 and that therefore Bennet’s numbers are skewed.
And Bennet’s campaign counters — you expected this right? — that they counted the percentage of lawsuits Weiser joined not for the entirety of Trump 1, but for only the two years Weiser was AG.
Can someone help me with the math?
Weiser defends himself against being an opportunist, noting that he and other Democratic attorneys general had read Project 2025 and were prepared to take on Trump in his second term, knowing what was coming. And that they have responded in force.
Another big issue in the race has been the fact that Bennet voted for eight of Trump’s cabinet nominees and still defends his vote for Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, whom Weiser has successfully sued twice, along with other Democratic AGs, when she cut SNAP benefits.
”He is still defending his vote for Rollins,” Weiser said. “I don’t know how you can give her a pass.”
Weiser said that Bennet was either too “credulous” when he voted for her and other Trump appointees and or that he didn’t vet them properly.
”It’s the senator’s job to effectively vet the nominees and, when necessary, to withhold consent,” Weiser said. “There’s no evidence I’ve seen that he did the necessary vetting. He was more accommodating than he should have been.”
Bennet has apologized for two of his votes, but says he won’t apologize for his vote for Rollins or for the Interior secretary.
”I’m not hiding from my vote,” Bennet said. “I made a hard decision on what was most important to Colorado. I made that vote because Colorado desperately needs funding in fire season.”
He said that last year he was the person who hosted weekly meetings between Western Democratic governors and Rollins and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. He credited his votes with keeping a relationship that works for Colorado. The meetings will begin again soon.
”What (Weiser) is saying is not even remotely what I’m doing,” Bennet said. “I have voted against 95% of Trump nominees. I led the fight in the Senate against RFK Jr., against Pete Hegseth, against Tulsi Gabbard.
”I didn’t vote for Rollins because I thought she wouldn’t cancel SNAP payments. She was Trump’s secretary of agriculture, so of course she did. When she did, though, I went to the (Senate) floor and called her record a disgrace.”
More math discrepancies. I think we see a trend.
Weiser charges that Bennet “doesn’t show up” for some of the Colorado events and that Weiser knows Colorado inside out. Bennet notes that he has been representing Colorado for 17 years in the Senate and that he’s comfortable in every district, including the red ones, and that people know him.
That’s a subtle shot, I guess, about the polls showing that Weiser still has a name recognition problem.
There’s more. Weiser says that a Bennet PAC ad implying that he approved of the Charlottesville rally because he didn’t bring a lawsuit is “outrageous.” Bennet says that he highlights Weiser’s comment that he would go back to Trump’s first administration “in a minute,” because “he said it. I didn’t say it. He did.” Weiser says we need to put that quote in context.
It’s not clear how voters are taking all this in. There hasn’t been much polling in the race. But at Colorado SunFest last week, political analysts discussed recent polling from the Colorado Polling Institute. There isn’t a lot for either candidate to brag about.
In this anti-incumbent era, Bennet’s favorables are 50-49, lower than in the previous poll but better than Jared Polis’ number and basically even with John Hickenlooper’s.
The numbers for Weiser are less about favorability — he’s at 26% favorable to 23% unfavorable — than the stunning fact that 20% said they had no opinion of him and, worse, 31% had still never heard of him.
Which is more worrying — soft favorables for Bennet at a time when incumbents tend not to be popular or polls showing that a third of Coloradans didn’t know who Weiser is?
I wish there’d been a head-to-head poll, but alas. If you look at the betting markets, for what they’re worth, Bennet is a 2-1 favorite.
And yet there is one set of numbers in the poll that is good for both candidates and even better for the voters — 72% of those polled said that it mattered to them and their families who the next governor would be, with 37% saying it mattered a great deal.
We’ve got nearly two months for the candidates to continue to make their case. I’m 100% hoping that voters are listening.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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