Democratic State Sen. Julie Gonzales has launched a Democratic primary campaign for the U.S Senate, hoping to deny Sen. John Hickenlooper a second term and prompting a generational and ideological debate among Colorado Democratic Primary voters.
Gonzales was elected to the state Senate in 2018 and represents parts of Denver. She serves as the Senate Majority Whip and is the chair of the Judiciary Committee.
“Coloradans are really looking for fighters and people who will stand up for their values and for change. At the end of the day, this race is really about power and who makes decisions about your everyday life,” said Gonzales.
She said right now health insurance executives or masked ICE agents and billionaires call the shots on too many aspects of people’s daily lives.
“While those of us who work for a living feel like we have no control and no say,” Gonzales said. “I'm running so that the people who actually build Colorado can take back control and have that control over the most important decisions that we make.”
Gonzales said she made the decision to get into the race after the passage of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” that fulfilled a lot of Republican campaign promises, such as dramatically increasing funding for border security and immigration enforcement, and making tax cuts from the president’s first term permanent. But the impact on state finances was massive and state lawmakers had to return to the Capitol over the summer for a special legislative session to re-balance the state budget.
“That was a huge wake up call for me and I think for a lot of other Coloradans,” Gonzales said.
She said she doesn’t think Hickenlooper is meeting this moment.
“This is a real question to test a new generation of leadership within the Democratic party,” Gonzales said. “Look, Senator Hickenlooper voted for Donald Trump's nominees who have then gone on to wreak havoc on the lives of everyday Coloradans.”
According to an analysis from CBS News, Hickenlooper was among nearly a handful of Senate Democrats to support nearly half of Trump’s cabinet nominees, 10 out of 22. Senator Michael Bennet voted for 8.
She framed it as real questions coming out of the 2024 presidential election about the future of the Democratic Party. She sees two clear possible tracks.
“One, a sort of incrementalist, go along to get along, centrist approach, versus a driven, ‘look, I'll work with anybody without compromising my values’ and that fights for working people instead of a corporate lobby,” Gonzales said.
Hickenlooper is a well known figure in Colorado and at age 73, deep into a long career in politics, having served as Denver mayor, Colorado governor and now as a U.S. senator. Gonzales, 42, is in her second term as a state senator representing a district in west and northwest Denver. Before that, she was a community organizer and Democratic Party activist, working on the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders and the Congressional campaign of Morgan Carroll.
Gonzales said some in the Democratic party establishment didn’t want her to run in a primary race against Hickenlooper.
Instead she said she received suggestions to challenge Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette, which she found sexist.
“Colorado has never elected a woman (senator), and I'm not going to sit around and wait for permission from the boys club and I'm going to step up, stand on my record and stand on my values and ask Coloradans who they think will fight for them best in Washington D.C.,” Gonzales said.
She said she is willing to put up her legislative track record against Hickenlooper’s with the large number of bills she’s passed during her years at the Capitol. She’s worked on immigration issues such as allowing undocumented immigrants to receive public housing benefits and a bipartisan bill that removes the term "illegal alien" from state documents and contracts to replace it with the term "worker without authorization."
Gonzales backed policies to bar landlords from using algorithms to set rents, and was the main sponsor of the Reproductive Rights Health Equity Act that said women in Colorado have the right to have an abortion or to continue a pregnancy, as well as the right to use or refuse contraceptive care. That passed prior to the U.S Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade.
“There were men in the party who said, no, let's just wait and see what happens. And we said ‘oh hell no,’ “ Gonzales recalled. “And we enshrined those abortion protections six weeks before Roe v. Wade fell. I'm proud of that work.”
There are a few other Democrats challenging Hickenlooper in the primary, but none have held elected office before. Karen Breslin, Brashad Hasley and Anthony Zimpher have also filed paperwork to run.
On the Republican side, former GOP state Rep. Janak Joshi, U.S Marine Corps veteran George Markert, and pastor Dathan Jones are running in the primary race.
The primary election is in June.
