Midterm elections carry a heavy weight this year, as Democrats look to pad their numbers in Congress and fight back against President Donald Trump’s lawlessness.
U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper wants Colorado voters to give him another six years in office to continue this fight. His opponent in the June primary — Colorado state Sen. Julie Gonzales — says she is sick of “do-nothing Democrats” who haven’t advanced the progressive agenda or blocked the worst of Trump’s impulses.
The question before voters is whether John Hickenlooper is the best man for the job or is Colorado in need of the change Julie Gonzales promises as the state’s first woman in Senate. While The Denver Post Editorial Board is not formally endorsing in this race, we interviewed both candidates as a service to readers trying to decide which Democrat to advance to November. Here is what they told us about their approach to the office.
“I want to make sure we win; we beat the Republicans and take control of the House and the Senate, and that means 100% focused on those elections and fighting Trump at every single step we can,” Hickenlooper said, saying that Trump is eligible for impeachment and removal from the White House, but it’ll never happen. “(We are) beginning to work on a lot of the stuff he has destroyed. When we build it back, and we will build it back, we’ve got to build it back better than it was before.”
Hickenlooper said building back better will take statesmanship — getting senators on board with changes to healthcare, taxes and other reforms. Our current senator has worked hard to build relationships in the Senate that he says have been crucial for getting legislation passed, like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act.
When asked what she’d do differently than Hickenlooper, Gonzales was clear that Hickenlooper and other incumbents have been sitting on the sidelines rather than using procedural processes to block this administration’s destructive agenda.
“It’s become too easy right now to just retreat to our corners and say nothing and then, you know, throw stones at the other side come election time,” Gonzales said, noting that shutting down the federal government over abuses of power was absolutely the right call in 2025. “I actually spoke to furloughed workers during the most recent shutdown when (Sen. Minority Leader Chuck) Schumer caved. They were livid because their perspective was, ‘I’m sorry, we were just starting to get somewhere. Why are we going to fold right now so that we can go on … Thanksgiving?'”
The contrast between their approaches is clear — Hickenlooper has built relationships and trust, including with key moderate Republicans, that he says will benefit Coloradans in the next 6 years. Gonzales wants to use power and pressure to first prevent the worst from the remaining two years of Trump’s administration and then to quickly bring about lasting reform.
Hickenlooper is a moderate candidate who wants to make changes within the system, while Gonzales is a progressive candidate who wants drastic overhauls of systems.
For example, Gonzales wants to abolish the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She says we need to implement a wealth tax on billionaires.
Hickenlooper said he’d support a graduated wealth tax on those making more than $1 million in taxable income a year, but said a smarter approach is to get Republicans on board with eliminating tax breaks for wealthy individuals and corporations.
Gonzales wants Medicare for all — a single-payer system that mimics European models of health care. She would abolish private health insurance.
Hickenlooper supports what he calls “radical transparency” legislation that would force health insurance companies to disclose exactly what they are spending, where for health care.
“Once an employer signs a contract with a United Healthcare or a Cigna, everything goes opaque. They can’t see what any hospital is paying. The American Medical Association says that the health care spending right now is about $5.3 trillion and that about a quarter of it is waste, duplication, inefficiency and some fraud,” Hickenlooper said. “We could capture that with this transparency bill.”
Gonzales has made no secret of her criticism of Hickenlooper’s current financial entanglements. She wanted us to ask Hickenlooper about a recent financial filing that disclosed Hickenlooper, who sits on an important transportation committee, had recently purchased about $150,000 in Uber stocks.
Hickenlooper, who has been in the Senate for six years now, told us that he and his wife have decided to move their money into a qualified blind trust.
We love it when and a healthy primary goad an incumbent politician into doing the right thing.
Here’s the complex backstory and why itap important.
As the mayor of Denver – way back in 2007 — Hickenlooper famously sold his interest in a large restaurant group where he had made his fortune to avoid conflicts of interest.
“I put everything I owned into a blind trust, and itap been in that same blind trust all that time. I’ve never asked or been told what has been bought or what has been sold,” said Hickenlooper, who signed onto a bill to ban congressional stock trades.
But the Select Committee on Ethics recommends that senators with substantial investments use a “qualified blind trust,” a stricter designation that only a handful of senators have attained for their investments. Hickenlooper said he will have to sell stocks, pay capital gains taxes and move his money to a new management company.
“I’m ready to do that because you have got to have public trust. And itap frustrating because you’ve done everything right, and now they raise the bar,” he said.
Every U.S. senator – 100 men and women entrusted by voters with immense global power — should follow Hickenlooper’s lead and put their money in qualified blind trusts or stop investing in the stock market altogether.
Gonzales said if she were put in office, she would fight to ban members of Congress from making any stock trades personally, and Hickenlooper said he also supports a ban.
Corruption in Washington, D.C., is a serious issue, and we are glad that both candidates in this race are willing to step up and fight against the abuse of power.
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