![]() ![]() I also had the good luck to hire the best campaign staffer ever, a guy who wasn’t political at all before this, and probably won’t be after. My nephew took a week out from his life and did an amazing job in Durango.Īnd some very dear friends grabbed a clipboard and worked so very hard for me. ![]() My sister took time away from family and was a dynamo in Grand Junction. My son came home from college for a weekend and got signatures. One small silver lining of getting out of this race is that now instead of spending our 20th anniversary volunteering at the Bingo hall in Pueblo (that’s where I was when I got the email from the Secretary of State) we can actually be together at a nice place to eat… a place with tablecloths, maybe with palm trees nearby.Īll of my family was fantastic in ways large and small, and they all meant a great deal. She told me that when she married me she knew things would be interesting, and here we are 20 years later and they are getting more interesting than ever. My wife, Kathy, has been beyond patient and loving. The sun’s still not up, but I’m now starting to feel a wave of gratitude. When I started writing this post at 4:30 a.m., I was feeling pretty low. This dramatically reduced the number of possible signers of my petitions.) Chief among them is the fact that they changed the law so that voters can now declare themselves unaffiliated and still vote in either primary, but they did not change the law to make it so that those same unaffiliated voters can sign petitions for a candidate for either party. (On another day maybe I’ll write a post about changes that are needed to the system of getting on the ballot in Colorado. Perhaps that’s a big part of why the people in recent Colorado history who have successfully challenged the Secretary of State’s office on their petitions went on to lose in their primaries. Instead, I would just be the one guy who had to go to court to get on the ballot. Somehow I wouldn’t look better than the the five campaigns that tried and failed to get enough petitions to turn in. There are now just nine weeks left before voting starts in the primary, and the challenge would essentially eat up at least two of them.Īnd in the game of perceptions, it wouldn’t look great. That price would not only be the money that I would spend on legal fees and court costs (which would be substantial), but it would also come at a price in time. While I do think I would win, the winning would come at a price. The second key fact I had to face head-on is the reality of challenging the ruling on the signatures from the Secretary of State’s office. It’s possible in the sense that anything is possible, but it doesn’t seem likely. There’s a lot to say about what happened there, but the bottom line is that now if I did get on the ballot given the choices now available, my chances of winning with an unconventional campaign go way down. Only one candidate emerged from the assembly.Five candidates tried, but failed, to even get enough signatures to turn in.Then two things happened that I didn’t see coming: If all of them had gotten on the ballot, I think my - admittedly unconventional - campaign would have a chance at winning. The first fact is that when I got into this race there were five or six serious candidates on the Democratic side. I spent some time looking at the history of court challenges when this has happened to others in Colorado, and I think that if I fought this decision, I would almost certainly win.īut getting that notice forced me to step back and look at a couple of key facts: Yesterday I received word that the number of signatures I turned in was short by 123 out of the 1,500 needed. Representative from the Third Congressional District in Colorado. Today I am making the difficult decision to end my campaign to be the U.S. ![]()
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