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Democrat John Hickenlooper hauls in $1.3 million in 2nd quarter in Colorado’s U.S. Senate race

U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper’s reelection campaign raised just over $1.3 million in the year’s second quarter and finished the period with $2 million in the bank, leaving the first-term Democrat with nearly 80 times as much cash on hand as his Republican challenger reported in this week’s campaign finance filings.

The latest reports show Hickenlooper has brought in nearly $10.3 million since launching his bid for a second, six-year term after ousting a Republican incumbent in 2020. The former two-term governor and two-term Denver mayor maintained his streak as the only Colorado candidate this cycle to report raising more than $1 million per quarter.

More than 80% of Hickenlooper’s donations were for $25 or less, his campaign said.

State Sen. Mark Baisley, R-Woodland Park, the Republican nominee, reported raising just under $80,000 for three-month period and reported starting July with $26,729 on hand. Baisley’s fundraising since he launched his campaign at the beginning of the year totaled just over $110,000.

Although Baisley so far isn’t giving the incumbent a run for his money, a self-funding first-time candidate running on a third-party ticket reported bringing in nearly as much in contributions for the quarter as Hickenlooper.

Baisley
U.S. Senate candidate Mark Baisley speaks to a reporter June 30, during a Colorado primary election watch party at the Phil Long Music Hall in Colorado Springs. (Christian Murdock, The Gazette)

Forward Party nominee Bob Chew, a Navy veteran and the retired founder of a global engineering firm, gave $1.1 million to his own campaign and raised another $20,000 on top of that, bringing his receipts for the period to $1,120,000, augmenting the $150,000 he lent his campaign in the previous quarter. Chew finished June with just over $1 million left to spend.

The most recent reports filed with the Federal Election Commission were due by July 15. They cover campaign contributions and expenditures from June 11-30, supplementing pre-primary reports filed in mid-June, which covered the period from April 1-June 10.

Hickenlooper took a veiled shot at both Baisley and Chew, a former Republican who joined the Forward Party last summer, in a statement released by his campaign.

“The president continues to pocket billions, wage an unwanted war and ignore the cost-of-living emergency that’s pushing the American dream further and further away,” Hickenlooper said. “We cannot let Donald Trump — nor extreme candidates running to rubber-stamp his policies — get away with this.”

Hickenlooper won the Democratic nomination on June 30 — the final day of the fundraising period — in a closer-than-expected primary, defeating state Sen. Julie Gonzales, D-Denver, by 5.6 percentage points. In the same election, his fellow senator, Democrat Michael Bennet, lost a bid for the open gubernatorial nomination to Attorney General Phil Weiser by double digits.

Gonzales reported raising just over $535,000 in the three-month period, bringing her total haul since announcing her candidacy late last year to almost $980,000. She finished the quarter with $143,000 and change in the bank.

According to the FEC filings, Hickenlooper spent more than six times as much as Gonzales in the final three weeks before ballots were due in the primary, echoing the nearly identical spending advantage he maintained over Gonzales across the quarter.

Baisley didn’t face a primary for the GOP nomination, having won a straight shot to the general election ballot at the state Republican Party assembly in April.



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