Denver elected a new mayor on Tuesday, handing the keys to city hall to Mike Johnston, who takes over next month from three-term Mayor Michael Hancock.

The 48-year-old former state senator, school principal and philanthropic CEO defeated Kelly Brough, a former Metro Denver Chamber of Commerce CEO and chief of staff to former Mayor John Hickenlooper, by about 9 percentage points in the runoff, according to incomplete, unofficial results. The two moderate Democrats emerged from a 16-candidate first round of voting in April.

Here are five takeaways from the race and Johnston’s win.

Money talks

It wasn’t a close call. The two candidates who raised the most money got the most votes in the first round, and the candidate who lapped the competition won the runoff.

The correlation is somewhat ironic, since the city’s generous public financing system made its debut in this year’s municipal election.

The voter-approved Fair Election Fund distributed some $8 million to candidates up and down the ballot, providing a nine-to-one match for every donation of $50 while limiting contributions candidates could accept and banning political action committees and corporations from donating to candidates who took part in the program.

Meant to level the playing field and encourage candidates who aren’t well-heeled to run for office, the program appears instead to have encouraged the flow of vast sums into independent expenditure committees that supported candidates but weren’t bound by fundraising restrictions.

Johnston and Brough led the crowded first-round field of mayoral candidates in funds raised, with Brough hauling in more than $1.4 million for the general election in donations and matching funds, and Johnston nearly keeping pace, with almost $1.3 million from donors and city taxpayers.

That compares to just over $930,000 total from donations and matching funds for state Rep. Leslie Herod, who finished in fifth place in April, and $909,000 raised by self-funder Andy Rougeot, the lone Republican in the race, who loaned his campaign $850,000 and chipped in the balance. He finished in fourth place in the initial round.

The exception to the rule was Lisa Calderon, who raised almost $275,000 from donors and matching funds, putting her in seventh place among mayoral candidates for available funds, but finished in third place in the April voting. Calderon, whose candidacy was affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, had the same finish four years ago when she first ran for mayor.

Another seven candidates drew public matching funds for their mayoral campaigns, including one who dropped out before votes were counted and several who barely broke into low single digits on election night.

Seth Masket, a University of Denver political science professor and keen political observer, gave the public financing program a mixed grade.

“In some ways, it’s an interesting test of the campaign finance law in a sense it really did empower a lot of people to run for office, but the people who did well in the runoff are the people who would’ve done well under the old system,” he told Colorado Politics.

But campaign finance issues don’t sway voters

The big bucks that poured into the Super PACs supporting Johnston and Brough after the runoff was set, however, dwarfed the sums raised and spent in the general election.

In total, Advancing Denver, the group behind Johnston, spent just under $5 million, and A Better Denver, Brough’s backers, spent $1.4 million.

Brough went on the attack in a campaign ad and in a press conference on the steps of city hall, charging Johnston’s wealthy, out-of-state supporters with trying to “buy this race,” including former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who between them paid for about half of the Johnston-supporting group’s reported spending. 

Johnston’s Super PAC countered that Brough’s independent expenditure supporters were real estate interests, developers and even some prominent Republicans, though most of them donated far less than Johnston’s most benevolent supporters.

For all the attempts to whip voters into a frenzy over campaign finance Democratic strategist Steve Welchert said that Brough’s attacks might have fallen flat.

“Voters talk about campaign finance. Voters never, ever vote on campaign finance,” Welchert said last week in a panel discussion about the mayoral race sponsored by Colorado Politics and The Denver Gazette. “Nobody ever cares where the money came from. All they know is the last ad they saw, the last mailer they read — that’s all they’re  going to respond to.” 

Denver is bluer than blue

Hours before polls closed in Denver, Yemi Mobolade was sworn in to run the state’s second-largest city following the political independent’s stunning win a month ago in Colorado Springs’ nonpartisan mayoral election.

Mobolade, a small business owner, former pastor and Nigerian immigrant, defeated former Republican Secretary of State Wayne Williams to become the city’s first-ever elected mayor who wasn’t a registered Republican — notable because Colorado Springs was known for decades as the state’s Republican counterweight to heavily Democratic Denver.

Numerous factors played into Mobolade’s upset — including a divided local GOP and some moves Williams made on city council that enraged some deep-pocketed, local developers — but there’s no question it marked a shift in the once-reliably red city.

Not so its neighbor to the north, which stands as home to the most Democratic-leaning electorate in Colorado and underlined that status in the municipal election.

In the 2020 presidential election, for instance, Joe Biden carried Denver by the widest margin in the state, with just shy of 80% of the vote — a couple points ahead of the Democratic nominee’s share of the vote in Boulder County.

It’s been 60 years since Denver elected a Republican mayor, and that doesn’t look to be repeated any time soon.

This year, in particular, Denver voters expressed a preference for mainstream Democrats, giving thumbs down to nearly all of the further-left-leaning candidates who identified as Democratic Socialists.

In addition to Calderon’s showing in the mayoral general election, DSA-aligned city council candidates Candi CdeBaca, an outspoken incumbent, fell by a wide margin to challenger Darrell Watson in the runoff, and incumbent Chris Hinds comfortably fended off Shannon Hoffman’s challenge from the left. Just one DSA candidate, former RTD Director Shontel Lewis, was still in the running when election officials paused the vote count late Tuesday, effectively tied with Brad Revare.

Both Johnston and Brough are Democrats, though Johnston’s Super PAC appears to have effectively used the Denver Republican Party’s endorsement of Brough against her in targeted advertising.

Colorado’s political glass ceiling remains intact

Denver has never elected a woman as mayor, and Colorado is one of only a handful of states to have never elected a woman to the two top statewide offices, governor or U.S. senator.

That ignominious record remains untouched after Tuesday’s election. 

Brough was only the third woman to make to a runoff for Denver mayor, following Councilwoman Mary DeGroot’s loss to incumbent Mayor Wellington Webb in 1995 and city planner Jamie Giellis’ loss to Hancock four years ago.

While her campaign leaned into the historic possibility in its TV ads — “They all know that this time, the most qualified man for the job is a woman,” Brough says in one ad as she acknowledges prominent supporters, adding, “That’s me.” — but focused on her executive experience and background in most of her messaging.

For a state with a rich history of electing women, including seating the first women ever elected to a parliamentary body in the world and routinely ranking among legislatures with the largest share of women lawmakers, Colorado’s seeming inability to elect a woman to any of its arguably three most powerful political positions remains a conundrum.

The next chance to break the curse is in 2026, when the governor’s seat opens up — Democratic Gov. Jared Polis will be term-limited — and Hickenoper will be up for reelection in the U.S. Senate.

Third time’s a charm for Johnston

Johnston has been a rising star since he burst onto the state’s political scene in early 2009 by narrowly winning an appointment to the state Senate. The northeast Denver state Senate seat had opened up when then-Senate President Peter Groff won an appointment in the Obama administration, but Johnston — at the time known in some circles as an education reformer and advisor to President Obama’s campaign — hadn’t been on anybody’s radar until the vacancy committee meeting.

Once in the legislature, Johnston made a splash — and some enemies — by championing thorny legislation, including a teacher accountability bill that irked one of the Democratic Party’s key constituencies, public school teachers and their unions.

After facing term limits in the legislature, Johnston mounted unsuccessful campaigns for governor in 2018 and the U.S. Senate in 2020, each time falling short of the Democratic nomination.

In the gubernatorial primary, he finished in third place — statewide and in Denver — behind former State Treasurer Cary Kennedy and then-U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, whose massive self-funding helped propel him to a solid win in the primary before defeating Republican nominee Walker Stapleton in the general election. Polis won a second term last fall.

Johnston was one of nearly a dozen Democrats vying for the chance to take on U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner, when the Republican was seen as one of the most vulnerable incumbents on the map ahead of the 2020 election. Although he led the field in fundraising, Johnston suspended his campaign about a week after Hickenlooper ended his short-lived presidential run and jumped into the primary, saying he didn’t want to increase Gardner’s chances of winning reelection by running the “expensive and negative” campaign required to win the nomination.

Other Democrats running in the same lane as Hickenlooper and Johnston soon followed suit, with several noting that their fundraising effectively dried up once the popular, former two-term governor got in.

Hickenlooper went on to win the primary and unseat Gardner, scoring the Democrats’ only pickup in the Senate that year until the party took both seats in the Georgia runoff.

Bad timing in both cases, Democratic strategists insisted, though even the most adept politicians can only endure so many missed opportunities. 

Johnston took some heat in the mayoral race for his previous, short-circuited runs, while insiders maintained that this was his last chance at making it across the finish line before having to reconsider whether he was destined for higher office.

His convincing win on Tuesday answered that question.