Sometimes, I like writing just to chronicle. Between the fall of 2023 and June 25, 2024, I was not only managing the campaign of Tina Mueh for House District 10, but also following closely four other Boulder-area Democratic primary election campaigns. It was a significant and exciting time in my life, so I wanted to share parts of my experience.

A Morning Coffee Surprise

I still think Tina Mueh will get interviewed on TV again someday, despite not winning this election.

Tina contacted me in the late summer of 2023 to have coffee, and I really didn’t know why. I learned she wanted to run for the HD10 seat in the upcoming primary election, which wasn’t a big surprise because she ran for HD10 in the August 2022 vacancy committee and finished second only by a handful of votes. What was more surprising was that she wanted me to work on the campaign, although I did understand that my overall qualifications for such a job were pretty good! I had to ponder for a few minutes, but accepted. I have always felt Tina was a high-quality person, worthy of a position of responsibility, and I already knew from past experience that she was someone I could work with well.

This will not be new news to anyone who’s worked on a campaign, but we quickly set out to do the basic structural things you need to get going. This included filing with the Secretary of State, getting a bank account, sending a press release announcing the campaign, building a web site, starting a blast email contact list, creating literature, and planning for fundraising. We decided to accept the voluntary campaign finance limit of $102,500 for the entire campaign, which I still think was probably plenty given that the top spender in the Boulder Mayor’s race spent just more than $30,000 on a citywide race. It was a lot of work off the bat, but we checked the boxes as we went along and established a legitimate campaign.

The Challenges Ahead

Rep. Junie Joseph would prove to be more than a worthy opponent!

I had no illusions that this campaign was going to be easy. We were going up against Rep. Junie Joseph, who at the bare minimum had received 17,000-ish votes in her 2019 City Council race, plus served four years on Council and more than a year in the state legislature. We weren’t exactly starting from complete scratch – Tina ran for HD10 in the 2022 vacancy committee race, she had lived in Boulder for decades and knew lots of locals, and she’s got an admirable record of public service and volunteerism. But I think anyone who’s worked in politics would recognize that Junie had greater current name recognition and already had campaign infrastructure in place. We knew we had our work cut out for us.

There was also the dimension of race. Junie is a Haitian immigrant and a person of color, while Tina and I are both white. More on this later, but very shortly after Tina announced she was running, a writer had similar guest opinions published in both the Daily Camera and Boulder Weekly containing numerous falsehoods and mischaracterizations. In short, the pieces claimed that the Boulder County Democratic Party (BCDP) chose Tina to run against Junie, which was completely false, and said that BCDP should endorse Junie, though I’m assuming the writer didn’t know that BCDP bylaws prohibit the party from endorsing primary candidates.

The writer was welcome to his opinion, but that doesn’t mean falsehoods should be published in established media uncritically. We almost instantly sent a rebuttal to the Camera to try clearing the record, but it was never published – plus the editorialist never even sent a reply acknowledging the submission. I personally believe Junie’s name recognition and campaign infrastructure were more important factors in this campaign than race, but at this point I started to wonder if the local media was going to give us a fair shake.

Got To Get On the Ballot

Here’s Tina filling out paperwork after qualifying for the primary ballot at the Boulder County Democratic Party’s County Assembly.

Obviously, you can’t win if you don’t appear on the ballot. We decided to start our quest by petitioning, and we needed to get at least 1,000 valid petition signatures over the course of about 65 days to qualify. This honestly took more work than I expected from Tina, myself, volunteers, and a paid petitioning firm to get the job finished. I personally knocked on hundreds of doors – with mostly pleasant interactions but a few rejections – and built most of the turf maps our volunteers used to canvass their neighborhoods. In this way I really got to know the district, including streets and neighborhoods I had never heard of despite living here for decades.

Tina and I kept track of how many raw signatures we had at any given time, and I checked them to make sure signers were registered Democrats who lived in HD10. Then, just before turning them in to the Secretary of State, a group of us went through hundreds of newer signatures to make sure they could be valid. We turned in about 1,700 raw signatures with confidence, but I was still elated when the Secretary of State’s office announced nearly 1,300 of them were valid.

We also decided to go through the BCDP’s caucus and assembly process. To me, it’s important for candidates to face the party faithful directly, especially because they are the people who are most likely to be truly active in local politics. Candidates who don’t petition need at least 30% of Assembly delegates to qualify for the ballot. Those who qualified by petition still need to get at least 10% of delegates if they choose to participate in Assembly. We learned shortly before Assembly that our petition was sufficient, so it was an easy decision to participate in Assembly since we only needed the 10%, and we ultimately got about 37% out of just more than 100 delegates. We didn’t win Assembly, but this didn’t bother me much at the time because I’ve personally seen lots of races where a candidate wins a small-turnout assembly but loses in the primary. We had basically qualified for the ballot in two different ways, which was a good feeling.

Other Campaigns in the Primary Class of 2024

Tina and Rep. Judy Amabile crossed paths often during the primary.

I spent a fair amount of time during our campaign with staff or candidates running for a few other offices. This included: Rep. Judy Amabile vs. Jovita Schiffer in Senate District 18; Charles Johnson vs. Elliott Hood for the CU Board of Regents; Kathy Gebhardt vs. Marisol Rodriguez for the State Board of (K-12) Education; and Lesley Smith vs. Max Woodfin in House District 49. Before the BCDP Assembly, we all went to regular meetings of the party’s “Perm Org” committee to review and discuss rules and procedures for the Assembly, and this was sort of a party-machinery geeky process that wasn’t scintillating but was educational.

At any given time, Tina and/or I would cross paths with members of other campaigns at house parties, campaign forums, or even just out on the street while canvassing or petitioning. I will remember this campaign mostly for what Tina and I went through, but I also developed cordial relationships with members of most of the other campaigns and very much appreciated meeting some new people. That included Junie’s campaign manager, David Ensign, who pulled me aside the day after the election on Boulder’s Bike To Work Day, and we had a really nice conversation. We both had jobs to do, and once the election was over it was on to the next chapter, so why not be cordial?

Mad Scramble to Get the Word Out

Every time I saw this purplish color online, I knew someone could at bare minimum learn that Tina was running for office!

Again, people who have campaigned before won’t learn a lot from this paragraph. Campaigning is very basically a competition to contact and hopefully persuade as many people as possible, hopefully in advance of Election Day. This takes money, so we spent a fair amount of time at fundraising events, calling potential donors, and trying to earn money through digital contacts. Ultimately, we took in more than $70,000, and while Junie received significantly more, we had enough money to do quite a bit of advertising.

In short, we distributed tens of thousands of pieces of literature through the mail or by foot via “lit drops.” We purchased media advertising through Boulder Reporting Lab, Boulder Weekly, and the Daily Camera. Our digital advertising campaigns earned hundreds of thousands of impressions and views. Tina’s daughter Mary produced a 30-second video ad, which got us many hours of viewership on streaming platforms. Tina visited countless households in all parts of our district by going door-to-door, and we did text messaging down the stretch. Media outlets and interest groups sent out candidate questionnaires, and outlets including Boulder Reporting Lab, Boulder Weekly, Colorado Newsline, and Colorado Politics published the answers. This paragraph is super-abbreviated, but I feel we got the word out.

Dark Money Dimensions

I can’t say spending gobs of money on mailers like this was completely ineffective, but lots of people thought they were badly misleading.

People often criticize “dark money” in politics, myself included, but for better or worse it’s a reality and not necessarily an evil monolith. In this Boulder-area primary election cycle, the most notable use of dark money happened in the State Board of Education race in Congressional District 2, in support of Marisol Rodriguez or against Kathy Gebhardt, to the tune of nearly a million dollars. In a nutshell, some of this support was because Rodriguez was seen as likely to be more friendly to charter school interests than Gebhardt.

The money supporting Rodriguez was used partially to send out lots of full-sized mailers to voters in CD2 – a multi-county district, not just Boulder. Some of the mailers were quite disappointing to me, as they went after Gebhardt for voting about eight years ago to approve a new school in Erie while she was on the Boulder Valley School District Board. They insinuated that Gebhardt was insensitive to student health and safety due to possibilities of fracking not far from the school, even though the Board voted 5-2 to approve the new school and the oil and gas company involved in negotiations with BVSD agreed to concessions about how they’d operate in the general vicinity of the school. I said on social media that these types of mailers are among the reasons why people hate politics, and nothing has changed my mind since the election.

Money doesn’t always triumph, and Gebhardt won by a reasonably large margin. This was largely because Gebhardt has a gigantic professional and volunteer record in support of public education, and Rodriguez just couldn’t match Gebhardt’s resume or name recognition. I had never heard of Rodriguez when she entered the race relatively late in the cycle, and just never got the fever as to why I should support her for this position.

This stack of mailers I received is basically how campaigns used a million dollars or so. Most of them were quickly thrown in the recycling bin.

There was some “dark” money in the HD10 race, but nowhere close to as much spending as in the State Board contest. The left-wing organization Working Families Party did spend tens of thousands of dollars on mailers, phone calls, and digital ads in support of Joseph and Schiffer. The WFP mailers for Joseph and Schiffer were pretty tame, nowhere near as over-the-top as what they sent out in the 2023 Boulder Mayor’s race to try creating mental links between former Republican Bob Yates and the deadly and destructive January 6 insurrection in Washington DC. But the money did go toward name recognition down the stretch, and WFP spending for Junie alone equaled a significant percentage of our entire campaign.

In fairness, we took in large contributions from the Boulder Valley Education Association small donor committee and a few other sources, which made sense because Tina is a long-time local educator. As I said earlier, outside money is a reality, but I don’t honestly think it was the primary factor in any of this year’s Boulder-area primary results (although the State Board money was especially newsworthy).

Race in the Race

I worked on a campaign against Rep. Joseph, but I’ll vote for Vice President Kamala Harris, who is also Black. I want the best representation and leadership in government, no matter the person’s race. Others might vote based on race and that’s their prerogative.

I feel I need to emphasize here that I’m speaking for myself in this section, and not in the tiniest on behalf of Tina. On my 2024 Democratic primary ballot, there were four campaigns in which one of the candidates was a person of color and the other was white. Of the four campaigns, Junie was the only candidate of color to win. I have no doubt that race was a factor in the HD10 primary, but the fact that the other three candidates of color lost suggests to me that it couldn’t have been the single most important issue.

But the issue did come up in traditional and social media. The Weekly published a guest opinion from a person questioning the moral propriety of running a primary against an incumbent of color, though to the Weekly’s credit they also published several letters criticizing this viewpoint. One prominent local white elected official got three pieces published in the Camera not really calling out candidates by name, but trying to influence potential voters to support non-white candidates in general. The Camera even ran one of them on the literal day before the BCDP County Assembly, leaving no time for anyone to counter some fairly serious-looking but in my opinion cherrypicked allegations. I really wasn’t happy with how this piece once again sort of tarred the BCDP despite that the vast, vast majority of party members operated perfectly honorably during the caucus-assembly process.

I won’t sugarcoat this – I was quite disappointed by the Camera’s editorial page during the primary cycle, partially because of what they chose to run but also because they didn’t run certain things we had legitimate reasons to expect seeing in the paper for equal space, and even worse they didn’t get back to us with reasons why they refused our input. In fairness, the Camera did publish most of our supporters’ letters, and the advertising staff worked diligently with us (though they should have because we spent a fair amount of money on ads).

I really only had one unpleasant personal encounter regarding race during the primary cycle, plus I listened in on one candidate interview in which some of the anti-whiteness frankly felt sort of creepy, being a white person running a white person’s campaign. But all things considered, my experience was really better than par for the course I envisioned.

Still, I just don’t believe we are automatically supposed to vote against white candidates if a person of color is running, regardless of all the other factors that can go into important political decisions. I really hate putting it this way because it will sound like the old “some of my best friends are…” canard, but I’ve voted for candidates of every major racial category, and that’s going back decades. I’ll do it again in November – I’ll easily vote for Junie, Kamala, Joe Neguse, and Marta Loachamin. This will probably be my sixth vote for Neguse, the son of Eritrean immigrants, though I might be losing count.

Meanwhile, the other three candidates of color in contested races on my primary ballot were defeated. I thought Kathy Gebhardt was a far superior candidate to Marisol Rodriguez, and while I appreciated listening to Jovita Schiffer as a speaker, Rep. Judy Amabile had vastly greater relevant experience and won by a wide margin. I found Charles Johnson to be a compelling candidate for Regent and so did lots of voters, given his reasonably close loss to Elliott Hood.

It’s not really that pleasant to me to lump all of the candidates of color together, and the same goes for the white people. They’re all individuals with different talents and attributes. In my opinion, it shouldn’t have been up to Boulder to supply the legislative bodies with people of color anyway – HD10 is about 75% white according to the Colorado Independent Redistricting Commission, and SD18’s about 77% white – plus the legislature is actually at nearly 25% people of color as it stands today. It’s a diverse body with Latinos, Blacks, LGBTQ and Jewish caucuses, a Palestinian Muslim, more than 50% women, and a transgender Representative.

But I understand if people want to vote based on race or diversity. There are all kinds of single-issue or limited-issue voters, and who am I to say one person’s issue(s) are better or worse than the others’? And again, I just can’t say race was the only reason we lost in HD10.

Primary Highlights Outside of Boulder

Sean Camacho won his primary in Colorado House District 6, but it might not have been such a decisive victory had incumbent Rep. Elisabeth Epps not staged a demonstration in the House Gallery.

One of the reasons I felt good about running this HD10 campaign is because Junie became the Representative by winning a low-turnout vacancy committee election. She received 34 votes, and that election was only open to Democrats from HD10 who attended the 2022 County Assembly. Meanwhile, a primary election is open to Democrats and Unaffiliated voters throughout the district, and about 13,400 people ultimately voted in 2024. It was a better test of how the district felt, and in this case the vacancy committee winner prevailed.

But that wasn’t the case in every other election statewide. Rep. Tim Hernandez and Rep. Julia Marvin, both fairly recent vacancy committee winners, both lost their primaries to the person they beat in the vacancy committee. Rep. Marvin was actually put in office on a 9-7 vacancy committee vote over Jacque Phillips, but Phillips tried again in June and won this time with about 55% of the vote! Also, a few WFP-supported progressives or far-leftists were defeated in primaries, including incumbent Rep. Elisabeth Epps and candidate Bryan Lindstrom. There might have been some concern among statewide voters that the legislature was swinging too far leftward, but only Reps. Epps and Hernandez were far-left incumbent election casualties this year, and they both generated their own controversy with their protest actions regarding Gaza, which might have been more damaging to their campaigns than where they stood on the left-right political spectrum.

Rep. Epps in particular staged a protest from the House gallery during a legislative special session, shouting down at a Jewish representative who was on the House floor and hijacking debate over a simple bill to provide food payments to underprivileged students. If you’re going to protest, of course it has to get noticed to be effective, but in this case it might have been the prime factor that cost her a seat in the House.

Some of the other recent vacancy committee winners ran unopposed in primaries. It was pointed out during the 2024 legislative session that up to 29 of 100 seats were filled by vacancy committee, and many people opined that this is less-than-small “d” democratic because such small numbers of voters fill these seats. Also, winning a vacancy committee does make the candidate an incumbent who builds a voting or sponsorship record to run on, no matter the circumstances, and that’s why Rep. Bob Marshall filed a resolution in 2024 to not allow vacancy committee winners to run for re-election in the next cycle. It didn’t pass and won’t be on the 2024 ballot, and I probably wouldn’t have favored the resolution either, but instead of trying to change the rules I think Tina did the right and honorable thing in 2024 by simply challenging the vacancy committee winner in a primary.

Well, We Lost, Darn It

I had hopes of maybe pulling this race out on Election Night, but from the earliest batch of returns, it looked obvious that we weren’t winning. The final results were about 59% to 41% in Junie’s favor. While it was a solid defeat, I still take pride in that we put up respectable numbers in the face of incumbency, name recognition, and an established base of support.

Several people I respect for their political knowledge told me right after the results came out that we did well despite the circumstances. That helped a little, but I still can’t help wondering what else we could have done, which I guess is a little futile now – though lingering thoughts will linger.

I never wanted this HD10 primary campaign to be anti-Junie, even though you can’t have a competitive campaign without contrasts, and I had some criticisms about some of her past decisions and some of her messaging. I firmly believe to this day that Tina was a highly qualified candidate with personal attributes and experience I really wanted to see in my state representative, so I considered myself pro-Tina and not really anti-anybody.

Hats off to Junie and I hope she accomplishes great things during her next two years, but I feel House District 10 lost an opportunity to have a high-quality individual in Tina Mueh working on our behalf.