Littwin: The Democratic race for governor will be a contest of who can better bring the fight to Donald Trump ...Middle East

You shouldn’t be surprised if the most important issue for Democrats in the Colorado governor’s race may not be TABOR or the budget predicament or unions or the housing shortage or Medicaid cuts or whatever other critical issue you can think of that doesn’t directly involve Donald Trump.

Trump, the undisputed champion of governmental havoc-wreaking, is a colossus, of course. As you may know, I don’t mean that in a good way. Not at all.

And neither does Phil Weiser, the Colorado attorney general whose bid for governor has been largely based on his role in helping to bring AG-led lawsuits against Trump on some of his most egregious executive orders, ranging from ending birthright citizenship to rewriting state election law.

In his response to Michael Bennet’s decision to also run for governor, Weiser said that while Bennet has been in Washington as a Colorado senator, he has been “the people’s lawyer” in Colorado. He suggested Bennet was critically needed in the Senate.

But Bennet has other ideas. He says he is running for governor on the basis that he can do more, if in a different way, to oppose Trump from Denver than he can as a three-term senator in Washington.

And so the question becomes who can better fight off Trump’s many depredations from the governor’s office.

For Weiser to have any chance of defeating Bennet in the Democratic primary to succeed term-limited Jared Polis — and they may be the only major candidates in the race — he has to be able to win that argument. The early betting is on Bennet as the heavy favorite. 

A recent Colorado Polling Institute’s survey shows that Bennet, who has been in the Senate since 2009, is far better known in Colorado than Weiser and has a 45% to 31% approval rating. Meanwhile, again according to the poll, 34% of those surveyed said they had not heard of Weiser and another 26% said they had no opinion of him. That’s a lot to overcome.

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So when Bennet made his announcement official on Friday morning, he unsurprisingly said that Colorado “can be an example to the rest of the country in how to fight Trump and drive a stake through Trumpism.”

If states are, in fact, the “laboratories of democracy” — as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote way back in 1932 — then Bennet may be on to something. Resource-rich Colorado, with its well-educated population and with Democrats in basically full control politically, may be a perfect state in which to make that case.

When I talked to Bennet Friday, I asked him how that would work. He has gotten criticism, particularly from some progressives, for saying that Democrats need to pick their battles and can’t waste their time and energy chasing every Trumpian phantasm. I’ve certainly been critical of the fact that Democratic leadership has been, by and large, ineffectual in taking on the Trump Restoration.

But I know from many conversations over the years that Bennet, whatever you think of his tactics, is strongly anti-Trump. You can look, for example, to his viral moments in Senate committee confirmation hearings when he was demanding answers, which weren’t exactly forthcoming, from Trump nominees RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.

But how does that translate back to Colorado?

“I think there are two opportunities” for making Colorado such a laboratory, Bennet told me on Friday afternoon.

One, citing his experience in battling Trump as a senator, Bennet said, “I can help defend our state from Trump’s diabolical cuts in Medicaid and SNAP. Those cuts are already tough on us, which you can see from the budget issues we’re facing. And if there’s a recession caused by Trump’s harmful tariffs, things will get only worse.”

And, two, he said, “We need a positive vision, a vision other than the chaos and dysfunction that Trump provides on a daily basis … I don’t think democracy will survive unless people have the feeling that there is a better way. I think in Colorado we can be a model, and in a different way than in states like California and New York.”

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But it isn’t just the opportunity to be governor that is leading Bennet to give up his seniority in the Senate.

He is furious with his party, as well as Republicans who have shamelessly bowed to Trump at every turn. Bennet was furious that Joe Biden didn’t step aside until it was too late for Kamala Harris to put together a winning campaign. If you’ll remember, Bennet was the first senator who publicly predicted that Biden would be trounced by Trump.

“I blame Trump for a lot of things, but I don’t blame him for being elected,” Bennet said. “If he’s corrupt, at least he’s honest about his corruption, unlike the Democratic Party.”

He added: ”The Democratic Party was repudiated when Trump won in 2024. It was repudiated when Trump won in 2016. We have to turn that around.”

Bennet won’t take on Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer by name, but he might as well. It was reported that Bennet told a Democratic meeting that his party’s leadership had “no strategy, no plan and no message.”

In Washington, where they’re looking at Bennet’s move from a macro level, they see his likely departure from the Senate — he plans to keep his seat while running in the Democratic primary and would stay in the Senate if he lost — as a repudiation of Washington politics.

Writing in Politico a few weeks ago, influential political columnist Jonathan Martin — very much an institutionalist — said that Bennet’s run for governor “is as harsh an indictment I can recall of what was once unironically called the world’s greatest deliberative party.”

Bennet was seemingly made to be a senator, even if he got there in the most unusual way. When Ken Salazar left the Senate in 2009 to be in Barack Obama’s cabinet, then-Gov. Bill Ritter appointed Bennet, the superintendent of Denver Public Schools, to the Senate despite the fact that he had never run for any elective office. The pick seemed out of left field and caused a rift in the Democratic Party. But Bennet has easily been elected three times since.

As Martin pointed out, three other Democratic senators have already announced this year they won’t run again in 2026. He also pointed out that the normal path is from governor to senator — see: John Hickenlooper — and not the other way around. There’s a trend here.

Bennet gave us plenty of notice that he would run for governor. He gave away the game weeks ago, as the Sun first reported at the time, when aides said he was “very, very seriously” thinking about it.

Bennet’s not-so-subtle hint was enough to discourage some prominent Dems — think: Joe Neguse and Jason Crow and Jena Griswold — from thinking too seriously about getting into the race. Neguse and Crow are among the many Democratic leaders, including Hickenlooper and Denver Mayor Mike Johnston and the leadership in both houses of the legislature, who have immediately endorsed Bennet.

The shakeup of Bennet’s move is definitely reminiscent of the time when Ritter appointed Bennet to the Senate. If Bennet wins the governor’s race — and there has been only one Republican governor in Colorado in the last 50 years — he has said he will appoint his replacement. And there is a very deep Democratic bench of prospects for the job, including Reps. Crow and Neguse and Brittany “Don’t (Bleep) With Moms” Pettersen. 

In another time, Bennet also considered leaving the Senate. That was when he ran for president briefly in 2020. He didn’t make it past the New Hampshire primary, which taught him a lesson or two in hubris.

But this is different. This time Bennet is not a long shot. This time, should he succeed Polis — who too often has seemed too ready to normalize Trump — Bennet has the chance to bring the fight home.

Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.

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