The Colorado Springs Gazette final

’74 serves as distant mirror to ’22 election

The two major parties enter Colorado’s 2022 midterm election year in starkly different positions.

The Democrats hold every statewide office on the ballot this year — from governor and U.S. senator to attorney general, secretary of state and state treasurer — and every one of those incumbents is seeking reelection.

Republicans, on the other hand, are enjoying crowded, spirited primaries in many of those races and have yet to field a candidate at all for attorney general, an office the GOP held for all but 10 of the past 32 years.

It’s the first time since the 2006 election that every statewide office on the ballot is held by members of just one party — that year, Republicans held the distinction — but you’d have to look back as far as 1974 to find a year with the same configuration as this year, only with Republican incumbents preparing to face voters.

That’s because Colorado didn’t have a Senate seat up for election in 2006, and most of the statewide Republican incumbents that year were term-limited, so the GOP had some primaries of its own to get past before the N poor vt fe o ml iobm era neal gee cm tie onnt.(TheG OP ●inpc our mt fob lei ont ms ere Gov. Bill Owens and State Treasurer Mike Coffman, both of whom faced term limits, and Secretary of State Gigi Dennis and Attorney General John Suthers, who was appointed to finish Ken

Salazar’s term a year earlier after Salazar was elected to the Senate.)

Another difference is that Democrats held the majority in both chambers of the legislature in 2006 even as Republicans controlled every state executive office, while Republicans had trifecta control of state government in 1974, just as Democrats do this year.

In 1974, the statewide ballot configuration was a near-mirror image of this year’s, reflected across partisan lines.

Before ballots were counted on Nov. 5, 1974, was the last time that Republicans ruled the roost in Colorado state government the way Democrats have since the 2018 election, when the party swept statewide offices and regained control of the state Senate.

Just as Gov. Jared Polis, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, Attorney General Phil Weiser, Secretary of State Jena Griswold and State Treasurer Dave Young, all Democrats, are primed to run for another term this fall, so were their GOP counterparts in 1974 — Gov. John Vanderhoof, U.S. Sen. Peter Dominick, Attorney General John Moore, Secretary of

State Mary Estill Buchanan and State Treasurer Palmer Burch.

There are a few nuanced distinctions between the two election years’ starting lineups, to be sure.

Fully three of the Republican incumbents who were preparing to ask voters to send them back for another term in 1974 had either ascended or been appointed to their offices.

Vanderhoof, elected lieutenant governor four years earlier as Republican Gov. John Love’s running mate, took over the top spot a year earlier when Love resigned as governor following his appointment as director of the Office of Energy Policy — in the Nixon administration, a position he kept for about five months before leaving in the wake of the 1973 oil embargo.

Moore was appointed attorney general in 1972 after the death of his predecessor and boss, Republican Duke Dunbar, who was first elected attorney general 22 years earlier in 1950 and held the office longer than any other Coloradan. Moore, who later served as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado and on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, was Dunbar’s deputy attorney general before his appointment to the office.

Buchanan, likewise, was appointed secretary of state in March 1974 following the death of her predecessor, Republican Andy Anderson, who had held the office since 1962.

The Republicans holding the other two statewide offices on Colorado’s ballot that year, Dominick the senator and Burch the treasurer, were each seeking reelection — Dominick to a third term and Burch to a second.

This time around, all of the Democratic state-level executive officer-holders are seeking second terms after winning their seats in 2018, while Bennet, like Dominick, is running for a third term in the Senate.

None of the Democratic incumbents is facing serious primary challenges this year. In 1974, however, Vanderhoof and Buchanan — who hadn’t held elected office before her appointment — were forced to get past primaries.

Vanderhoof won the GOP nomination for governor over cable executive Bill Daniels by about 20 points, and Buchanan defeated Jeremiah Connelly by a slightly wider margin for the chance to seek a full term as secretary of state.

Republican candidates for the statewide seats are gearing up for primaries this year, the same as Democrats did in 1974.

The June 2022 primary ballot has yet to be set — that won’t happen until late April, after nominating petitions have been verified and party delegates have had their say at state assemblies — but Republicans are almost guaranteed at least a couple of contests.

In the race to challenge Polis, Republican Heidi Ganahl, an at-large member of the University of Colorado Board of Regents, leads the dozen or so declared candidates, with only a handful of her rivals having emerged from the back of the pack. Others who look like they might make the primary ballot: former Parker Mayor Greg Lopez, who finished fourth out of four candidates in the 2018 gubernatorial primary and has been chasing another shot at it since; Peyton real estate agent Danielle Neuschwanger; and veteran and compound medicine pioneer Jason Lopez.

Seven Republican Senate candidates are running for the chance to take on Bennet, including state Rep. Ron Hanks, wealthy entrepreneurs and CEOS Gino Campana and Joe O’dea, 2008 Olympian Eli Bremer, conservative former radio host Deborah Flora, former congressional nominee Peter Yu and university professor Greg Moore.

GOP insiders insist that Weiser will have a Republican candidate for attorney general to contend with before long, though whoever it is has succeeded in staying under the radar.

Republican Lang Sias, a former state lawmaker and 2018 nominee for lieutenant governor, has the race for the treasurer nomination to himself so far.

Three Republicans are running for secretary of state this year: former Jefferson County Clerk and Recorder Pam Anderson, economic development specialist Mike O’donnell and technology buff David Winney.

Their counterparts across the decades, the Colorado Democrats who mounted campaigns against the solid wall of GOP incumbents in 1974, ended up with primaries in every statewide race.

Dick Lamm, a young state lawmaker from Denver, won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination over House Democratic leader Tom Farley of Pueblo. Lamm went on to unseat Vanderhoof by about 7 points, and was reelected twice, setting a record as Colorado’s longest-serving governor in the days before term limits.

Gary Hart, a young Denver attorney home from running George Mcgovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, won the Senate nomination over former state lawmaker Herrick Roth and Arapahoe County District Attorney Marty Miller. A couple months later, Hart denied Dominick a third term by a nearly 18-point margin. He won a second term six years later.

Pueblo state lawmaker JD Macfarlane won the primary for attorney general over lawyer Merle Knous, who later served as a district court judge, and then defeated Moore in the general election by about 10 points. He was reelected four years later.

Prominent antiwar activist Sam Brown won a threeway Democratic primary for treasurer by a wide margin over Tom Kassler and Henry Strauss, then unseated Burch by about 8 points. Brown resigned three years later after President Jimmy Carter appointed him to head ACTION (the domestic version of the Peace Corps).

Only Buchanan survived the Democrats’ near-sweep of statewide offices, defeating Democratic secretary of state nominee Tony Mullen, a former state lawmaker, by about 4 points.

Colorado Republicans this year are almost certainly hoping for something like an echo of the statewide results in 1974, when almost every incumbent went down to the challenger from the opposing party — that year, largely in reaction to President Richard Nixon’s resignation months before the election, bringing the yearslong Watergate scandal to a conclusion.

LOCAL & STATE

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2022-01-24T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-01-24T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://daily.gazette.com/article/281728387899279

The Gazette, Colorado Springs