DENVER — Ballots were still being counted in Denver’s 2023 municipal election on Wednesday afternoon, but two candidates — Mike Johnston and Kelly Brough — remain positioned to meet in a runoff contest for mayor.
In unofficial results released at 2 p.m. Wednesday, Johnston was leading all candidates with 29,636 votes, about 24.7% of ballots tabulated so far. Brough maintained her second place standing with 26,104 votes, or 21.7%. Tailing those two were Lisa Calderón with 19,098 votes, or 15.9%, Andy Rougeot with 15,082 votes, or 12.6%, and State Rep. Leslie Herod with 11,728 votes, or 9.8%.
One candidate needed to claim more than 50% of the vote to win the office outright. Instead, the top two vote-getters will move on to a runoff election which will be decided in a second round of voting that concludes on June 6.
With more than 50,000 ballots yet to be counted, whoever claims that second spot in the end will set the ideological boundaries of the runoff race.
Both Johnston and Brough are viewed as moderates in the mayor’s race in deep-blue Denver. Johnston is a former state senator and past failed gubernatorial and Senate candidate, while Brough is a former head of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce who argued against progressive policies like paid family leave in that role.
Calderón, meanwhile, has run a campaign well to the left of them, vowing to stop sweeps of homeless encampments while the other two contenders say they would continue them.
Johnston’s share of the vote total has remained largely consistent since the first batch of results was released Tuesday evening, all but assuring him a runoff spot. But the margin between Brough and Calderón has shrunk as new results have come out.
Calderón’s slice of the vote share has slowly ticked with each update, rising from 14.4% at 7 p.m. Tuesday to 15.9% as of 3 p.m. Wednesday. Brough’s share has shrunk from 23.1% to 21.7%, an indication that more of the ballots turned in later favored the more progressive candidate — in fact, in the most recent batch of ballot tabulations, Calderón took 22.6% of the 11,855 votes added to the mayor’s race, the second-highest share behind Johnston (who took 24.1%). Brough took just 16.9%.
Still, a Denver Post analysis shows that to catch up, Calderón would need to outpace Brough by even more than that in the remaining ballots.
A gulf of 7,006 votes still separated the two Wednesday afternoon. Calderón said in a statement earlier in the day that she was confident her progressive base would carry her into the runoff in the final results.
“We knew from the beginning that our people, progressives, young folks, and people of color, would vote in the final few days of the election. Despite the media prematurely counting us out, our race is still very much at play,” she said.
Rougeot, meanwhile, decided the more than 11,000 votes between himself and the second runoff spot was too large a gap. The Army veteran and registered Republican, who ran on strictly enforcing the city’s camping ban and growing the police force by 400, conceded on Twitter Wednesday.
“As the race moves to a runoff, I hope the two remaining candidates will uphold their promise to reduce crime and homelessness across our city and to make it a safer city for everyone that lives here,” he wrote.
State Sen. Chris Hansen was in sixth place as of Wednesday afternoon and longtime City Councilwoman Debbie Ortega was in seventh.
The next batch of results was scheduled to be released at 5 p.m. Wednesday.
While Brough emphasized that she would be waiting for every vote before celebrating a win, she said Tuesday night said she was “thrilled and frankly honored to have so many people supporting us and our vision for the city.”
She believes that her experience working as chief of staff to then-Mayor John Hickenlooper and running the city’s human resources department convinced many voters she is ready to lead. Her personal struggles, including losing her husband to suicide after he struggled with addiction, leaving her as a single mother to two daughters, also resonated with the Denverites she talked to, she felt.
“Truthfully my goal was just making sure people know me,” she said, adding that if she does make the runoff she plans to keep meeting with people in their homes and at coffee shops as she did in the first phase of her campaign.
Johnston on Wednesday talked about ways his campaign could attract voters who backed other candidates to his camp to win a majority in June.
“You have 14 candidates who built really great coalitions of support who are now looking for a new candidate, and we’re working really hard to get support from all those people and those neighborhoods and those groups,” he said.
He felt that his focus on providing detailed plans to tackle the city’s biggest problems, especially its housing shortage, helped him claim the top spot in unofficial results.
“I think Denverites really resonated with our sense of optimism and hope and change,” he said.
Many voters held onto their ballots until Election Day.
Ballots first went out to voters the week of March 13. As of Monday night, just 21.6% of active voters in Denver had returned them, according to data from the Elections Division of the Office of the Denver Clerk and Recorder.
Last month, elections division spokesman Lucille Wenegieme theorized that Denver voters were struggling to make up their minds with 16 active mayoral candidates appearing on the ballot.
Seventeen would-be mayors qualified. Only one of those people, Kwame Spearman, dropped out before Election Day. Votes cast for Spearman will not be counted toward the election’s outcome.
Public polling was sparse during the campaign cycle. The numbers that were released ahead of Tuesday depicted a wide-open contest. That left observers guessing going into the final days.
“It’s anybody’s race — it’s going to be whoever gets out the vote” among those top contenders, said Jeff Fard, a Five Points community activist, also known as Brother Jeff, said last week.
The dominant issues of the campaign cycle were increasing homelessness and the rising crime rates that Denver experienced in recent years along with many other big cities across the country.
In a poll commissioned by a group of Denver business leaders in February, 96% of the 405 respondents said they considered homelessness a major problem in the city. Thirty-three percent of those polled gave Denver an “F” on its efforts to reduce homelessness.
Among the leading candidates, Calderón and Herod were the only two who said they would stop the controversial practice of sweeping homeless encampments that began under outgoing Mayor Michael Hancock.
Calderón, who crafted her homelessness policy with input from unhoused people and advocates, said in a Denver Post candidate questionnaire that she would replace sweeps with “24/7 crisis intervention responders” to address encampments.
Herod’s approach as mayor would also focus on increasing street outreach and expanding substance use treatment and harm reduction efforts, she said.
Brough campaigned on expanding homeless shelter capacity and temporarily expanding options for sanctioned campsites like Denver’s existing Safe Outdoor Spaces program where couples can stay together and people can keep their pets with them unlike in traditional group shelters.
Opponents criticized Brough for being evasive in her stance about what she would do when people refuse shelter or drug treatment services offered by the city. She eventually said in multiple interviews that arrests would be a “last resort” for people who violate the camping ban.
“If people refuse services and supports, I will use the legal authority to intervene to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the individual and the broader community,” Brough wrote in her response to The Denver Post question asking if the sweeps should continue.
Johnston also focused on standing up new short-term housing options quickly to provide space for unhoused people outside the existing shelter network. His plan calls for building 10 to 20 “micro-communities” with tiny homes and on-site services that combined could house all of the 1,400 people counted as being unsheltered in the city’s 2022 point-in-term homelessness count. He faced questions from opponents including Trinidad Rodriguez on just where those micro communities would go.
Johnston, too, committed to enforcing the camping ban.
Candidates’ messaging on the city’s public safety concerns and what should be done about them also ran the gamut. Many in the race suggested a multi-faceted approach that focused both on creating more economic opportunity in the city to head off crime before it happens and expanding and diversifying Denver’s police force to meet the needs of a community that has grown substantially over the last decade.
The polar opposite approaches were best embodied by two candidates.
Rougeot, an Army veteran and former small business owner, hammered on his plan to hire 400 more police officers in the city throughout the campaign, claiming he could overcome the recruiting challenges that have plagued the department under Hancock by empowering officers.
Terrance Roberts, a former member of the Bloods street gang who spent time in prison before becoming a prominent anti-gang activist in his Park Hill neighborhood, focused on the need for a stronger social safety net and positive outlets for young people.
A big reason the mayoral ticket was so long in 2023 was the launch of Denver’s Fair Election Fund program, which provided participating candidates with public matching money in return for promising to abide by lower campaign donation limits.
Thirteen mayoral candidates participated in the fund (including the no-longer-running Spearman). The matching payments pumped roughly $3.5 million combined into those campaigns.
The top three fundraisers in the race — Brough at $1.4 million, Johnston at $1.3 million and Herod at $932,000 — also had the biggest Fair Election Fund payouts helping to drive those totals. Brough received $750,000 (the cap on what a mayoral candidate could draw from the fund), Johnston claimed $613,539 and Herod $587,057.
Candidates who make the runoff in their races get a lump sum payment from the fund for that stage, 25% of what they collected in the first round.
Johnston has by far the largest independent expenditure committee backing him, with more than $2.2 million in spending recorded as of Election Day. The committee backing Brough meanwhile has spent just shy of a million dollars. Those committees aren’t allowed to coordinate with candidates but are also not subject to campaign finance limits.
Early results Tuesday indicate the advertising paid for with that dark money is likely to remain a fixture in Denver for another two months.
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