Republican Victor Marx won Colorado’s Republican gubernatorial nomination on Thursday after maintaining a razor-thin lead over state Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer for more than a week as county clerks finished reporting final, unofficial vote totals.

Marx, a missionary leader and first-time candidate, will face Democratic nominee Attorney General Phil Weiser in November for the office held by term-limited Democratic Gov. Jared Polis.

Weiser defeated U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet in their party’s primary by a nearly 14-point margin, while Marx prevailed over Kirkmeyer by just over 2,500 votes, or roughly 1/2 of 1 percentage point.

After nearly nine days, considering the Republican primary too close to call, the Associated Press declared Marx the winner at 4:08 p.m. Thursday, after the last of Colorado’s 64 counties posted updated vote results.

Marx led with 208,085 votes to Kirkmeyer’s 205,570, for a difference of 2,515, or about 0.48% of the 521,938 votes tallied. State Rep. Scott Bottoms trailed with 108,283 votes.

Marx’s lead over Kirkmeyer appeared to fall well outside the margin that would trigger an automatic recount.

Although Marx maintained a roughly 2,000-vote lead over Kirkmeyer for more than a week, both candidates said they planned to wait to declare the race was over until potentially thousands of additional votes had been counted, including “cured” ballots and ballots cast by military and overseas voters.

“We are optimistic about where the race stands, but we are also respecting the process and not taking anything for granted until the counties complete their work,” Marx’s campaign manager, Buddy Jericho, told Colorado Politics on Monday.

“The race is not over,” Kirkmeyer said Tuesday in a statement. “There are still ballots left to count, including overseas ballots and ballots that can still be cured. Every legal vote deserves to be counted before the people of Colorado know the final outcome.”

The three-way primary pitted Marx, a first-time candidate and self-described “high-risk” missionary from Colorado Springs, against Kirkmeyer, who has held state and Weld County offices for nearly three decades, and Bottoms, an Assemblies of God pastor and state lawmaker from El Paso County serving his second term.

Colorado voters last elected a Republican governor in 2002, when Bill Owens won his second term, becoming the only Republican to hold the office in the last 50 years.

Marx’s two primary opponents said earlier that they plan to withhold their endorsements, with Bottoms characterizing his fellow Christian ministry leader a liar and a “con man,” and Kirkmeyer calling Marx unfit for office.

“It could be the extinction of the Republican Party,” Kirkmeyer said last month at a debate sponsored by 9News and Colorado Politics, asserting that if Marx led the GOP ticket in the general election, it could drag down the party’s candidates up and down the ballot.

“He’s unfit. By his own words, he says he’s unfit,” she added. “He talks about homicidal and suicidal tendencies. It makes me worried to be in a room with him.”

At the June 2 debate — the only time Marx shared a debate stage with his two primary opponents — Marx responded to Bottoms, “You’re mean,” and told Kirkmeyer, “Kinda mean, too, Barb.” He added: “Just because somebody doesn’t believe the truth, it doesn’t make it a lie.”

In Colorado, voters have until eight days after the election to cure their ballots if they forgot to sign the ballot envelope, if the ballot signature doesn’t match signatures on file, or if they are first-time mail-in voters who forgot to include a copy of their ID.

The Marx and Kirkmeyer campaigns both said they mobilized volunteers to encourage voters whose ballots had been rejected to cure them. Similar efforts by Colorado candidates in recent years have swung the results in extremely close elections, though it’s been rare.

The deadline to cure ballots was 11:59 p.m. Wednesday night, according to state law. Military and overseas ballots postmarked by 7 p.m. on Election Day had to be received by the same deadline.

An automatic recount is triggered under Colorado law when the margin between the two top finishers is 0.5% or less of the leading candidate’s vote total. In the Republican gubernatorial race, the difference between Marx’s and Kirkmeyer’s totals would have to shrink to 1,040 or fewer votes to trigger a recount as of 4 p.m. Thursday.

Candidates or political organizations can request a recount no matter the margin, if they pay for it.