Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., speaks as Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears before the Senate Finance Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein) via Associated Press
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State Attorney General Phil Weiser won the Democratic nomination for governor of Colorado, upsetting Sen. Michael Bennet in the latest example of Democratic voters rebelling against the party’s establishment.
CNN and NBC News both projected Weiser’s victory as he led Bennet 55% to 45% shortly before 10 p.m. Eastern, with about 77% of the vote counted.
The triumph makes Weiser a strong frontrunner to win the governorship in November in a state which has become reliably Democratic at the presidential level.
Bennet, a former schools chief in Denver who made an ill-fated bid for the presidency in 2020, was seen as the frontrunner at the start of the race, at one point uncorking a 31-point lead in polling last summer.
But Weiser was able to keep pace with the senator’s fundraising and contrasted Bennet’s record of voting eight times for Trump’s cabinet nominees with his own record of suing the administration more than 60 times over immigration, environmental and other policies.
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It became clear an upset was possible in the final weeks, when Bennet loaned his own campaign $1 million and a pro-Weiser super PAC released a poll showing him with a substantial lead.
While the race was not particularly ideological — both Weiser and Bennet are broadly mainstream liberals — Bennet’s loss is likely to be seen as further evidence the party’s rank-and-file are rising against its leadership following Trump’s 2024 election victory.
If Weiser wins, he’ll replace outgoing Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat whose libertarian leanings often led him to take a softer line towards the Trump administration on some issues. He spoke fondly of parts of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA movement, and commuted the sentence of Tina Peters, an elections official-turned-conspiracy theorist whose freedom became a personal cause of Trump’s.
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