A year ago, Senator Michael Bennet looked like a lock to become Colorado’s next governor, with piles of campaign money, big-name supporters and a 30-percentage-point lead for the Democratic nomination.
That all changed in the 12 months leading to Tuesday’s Democratic primary, when President Trump took a battering ram to the Democratic state. Mr. Trump cut off federal money, dismantled a leading climate research center, removed the U.S. Space Command headquarters and vetoed a water pipeline for drought-stricken farmers.
Now, the Democratic race for governor has turned into a referendum on who will fight back, in pointed contrast to the accommodations of Colorado’s retiring Democratic governor, Jared Polis. And many Democrats are rallying behind Mr. Bennet’s rival, Phil Weiser, who is running as a scrappy counterpuncher who has sued the president 66 times as Colorado’s attorney general.
Mr. Bennet’s lead has evaporated, and Tuesday’s primary has turned into a dogfight that both campaigns say is now a tossup. The race will reveal a lot about which kind of leader Democrats frustrated with the political establishment want after two terms of Trumpism: a staid problem-solver or a revved-up fighter.
Despite growing voter disenchantment with Democrats, who have overseen spiraling housing prices, a rampant rise in homelessness and an economy that is now shedding jobs, whoever becomes the Democratic nominee is heavily favored to win.
Colorado has not elected a Republican governor in more than 20 years, and the Republicans vying to become governor include a state legislator who has warned of a pedophile ring in the State Capitol, and a pastor who claims he was forced to murder a man at age 7.
Perhaps most significantly, Mr. Trump is deeply unpopular in the state. Judy Cunningham, 78, a retired teacher, expressed a common refrain one afternoon when Mr. Weiser knocked on her door in the Denver suburb of Arvada and asked what was most important to her.
“Stop Trump,” she said. “Good Lord, all he wants is money!”
Voters were angry with high gas prices and the war in Iran, and said they were fed up with the administration’s actions against Colorado. Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education took aim at the school district in Arvada, accusing it of allowing male athletes on girls’ sports teams. The district, which is state’s second-largest, said the male names on the rosters actually belonged to managers, trainers and mascots, not athletes.
Melissa Cook, 49, an oncology nurse who was plucking weeds in her front yard, told Mr. Weiser she had voted Republican in the last election.
“Not happening this time,” she said. “Trump’s second term is nothing like his first. I’m just sick of his” actions. (She used a more pungent word than “actions.”)
But other voters say they want their next governor to be more than a foil to the Trump administration, such as Luke Miller, 22, a graduate student in Denver who supports Mr. Bennet.
“I was 11 when Trump got elected — I’m tired of the supercombative, us-versus-them politics,” he said. “It’s not solving our problems.”
Housing and health care costs have risen so sharply that people say they can no longer afford to live in Colorado. Businesses are fleeing a state that prided itself as a laid-back magnet for start-ups and young families, where you could run a brewpub during the week and ski on the weekends.
The state’s job growth was stagnant over the past year, fewer people are moving in, and while much of Denver is bustling, some parts of the city’s pandemic-hollowed downtown still feel like a half-empty shell.
“We have not come back,” Mr. Bennet said in an interview last week. “People are hanging on by their fingernails.”
But some voters say they are having a hard time distinguishing between Mr. Bennet’s and Mr. Weiser’s plans to fix it.
Both men want to build more housing and cut red tape for businesses, and both have also upset some left-wing voters by refusing to endorse a pro-unionization bill.
They both criticized Mr. Polis for his decision to free from prison, under pressure from the president, the convicted election denier Tina Peters, and both said they would have signed a number of Democratic-passed bills that Mr. Polis had vetoed.
Mr. Bennet says he is offering more progressive ideas on health care and housing, such as a state-run insurance option and a cap on emissions that contribute to climate change. He has been endorsed by an array of unions and business groups, as well as his fellow Colorado senator and former governor, John Hickenlooper.
Mr. Hickenlooper is facing his own primary challenge from State Senator Julie Gonzales, who is arguing that Colorado needs a younger, more progressive senator who supports Medicare for all and bans on fracking and oil and gas drilling on federal lands. Along the same lines, Denver’s 15-term House Democrat, Diana DeGette, is facing a serious threat from a young democratic socialist, Melat Kiros, cut from the activist mold of progressive candidates who won primaries in New York City on Tuesday.
Like Ms. Kiros, Mr. Weiser has found enthusiastic support from grass-roots progressives by running as an upstart with a governing policy that reads more like a battle plan. He has vowed to fight against funding cuts from Washington, defend L.G.B.T.Q. rights and fight any move by Mr. Trump to deploy the military in Colorado.
“People feel they’re not listened to,” Mr. Weiser said. “We need to know we’ve got a fighter.”
He has also stressed his support for public schools and pointed out that Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire who supports charter schools, has contributed more than $3 million to a pro-Bennet super PAC. His campaign ads cast the real matchup as “Weiser versus Trump,” and present a running count of the lawsuits he has filed as attorney general.
Mr. Bennet has suggested those legal challenges are political stunts to win votes and criticized Mr. Weiser for not confronting the administration over family separation of immigrants during Mr. Trump’s first term.
“We’re not going to sue our way to a better economy,” Mr. Bennet said in an interview last weekend in the military city of Colorado Springs, after meeting veterans to discuss mental-health care and improving benefits.
In turn, Mr. Weiser criticized Mr. Bennet for voting to confirm eight of Mr. Trump’s second-term cabinet nominees, including the agriculture secretary whose agency tried to cut food stamps to Colorado.
Mr. Bennet said he was ready to leave Washington after 17 years to confront the affordability crisis facing the state. He acknowledged that his mother, who lives in Washington, did want him to stay on as a senator.
Mr. Weiser turned the sentiment into a slogan: Weiser for governor, Bennet for Senate.
