They’ll be part of a contingent of local Democratic heavy-hitters — also including Colorado Democratic Party Chair Shad Murib — visiting the Crescent City to bolster Denver’s bid as it competes against four other cities.

Crow said the fact that Denver has done it before means it’s more than prepared to do it again. Denver hosted the Democratic convention in 2008, when a fresh-faced U.S. senator from Illinois named Barack Obama accepted the party’s presidential nomination.

“We know we can do this and do this well,” the congressman from Aurora told The Denver Post in an interview on Thursday. “We have the capacity. We have the infrastructure.”

And Colorado, he said, has the blue credentials to excite the base and put them to work making sure the next occupant of the White House is a Democrat.

“At a time when the Democratic Party is facing a crisis of confidence in so many places, and in so many ways, Colorado is a beacon of how to do it right,” Crow said.

Early last month, the national party announced that Denver to host the Democratic National Convention — joining Atlanta, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia. The nominating convention for the party’s presidential ticket is set for Aug. 7-10, 2028.

The party and potential host cities are working out site visit plans for each in the coming weeks. A decision on which city wins the bid will likely be made this summer.

Johnston and other city representatives have lobbied for the event both formally and informally in recent months. The mayor’s spokesman, Jon Ewing, confirmed Johnston’s appearance in New Orleans this weekend and said the mayor recognizes the manifold benefits of steering the event to the Mile High City.

“Landing the DNC would be an enormous economic boon for Denver, bringing tens of thousands of visitors to Colorado and generating hundreds of millions of dollars in activity for the city and local businesses,” Ewing said.

Murib spoke to The Post by phone from New Orleans, where he’s been since Monday. He will join Crow and Johnston in speaking to the delegates at the spring meeting on Friday evening.

“We’re hoping to show them why Denver is the best place for the 2028 convention,” he said. “We want to emphasize the seamless experience they will have in Denver — from the airport to the hotels to the convention.”

Each of the finalist cities has hosted at least one past Democratic convention — Philadelphia in 2016, Boston in 2004 and Atlanta in 1988. Chicago hosted in 2024, the most recent of its dozen times playing the role.

“We want to show how the convention could be one for the history books again,” Murib said, alluding to the nomination of America’s first Black president 18 years ago.

Murib said three Denver City Council members — President Amanda Sandoval, Chris Hinds and Darrell Watson — will be at the national Democrats’ meeting as well.

Crow, an Army veteran who represents a Colorado district that takes in the eastern and southern suburbs of Denver, is serving as battleground co-chair for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for the 2026 election cycle.

Colorado was among the top states in the nation for Democratic performance in the 2024 election, bucking what was otherwise a red wave that handed control of the White House and Congress to Republicans. Democratic presidential contender Kamala Harris beat now-President Donald Trump in Colorado by a margin of 11 percentage points.

“We’re a model for the country,” Crow said.

He said this week’s gathering of party leaders is a critical moment in the push to get Denver back on the national stage two years from now.

“This is the biggest gathering between now and when the (convention) decision is made,” Crow said.

Murib said the meeting in New Orleans won’t be all serious business, though.

“It’s a little bit of a party — and a pitch,” he said.

Someone dressed in a big blue bear costume — an homage to the 40-foot ursine behemoth who peers into the Colorado Convention Center along 14th Street in downtown Denver — has already been getting a lot of attention from attendees, the party chair said.

“Everyone is getting a picture with the big blue bear wearing Mardi Gras beads,” he said.

More than 100 years later, Colorado voters could be left out of the process of selecting our representative to the upper chamber of Congress.

That����ap not how democracy should work. And the Colorado General Assembly should do something about it.

Colorado will elect a new governor this fall. If that governor turns out to be Sen. Michael Bennet, voters will have no say in who serves them in the Senate. That����ap because Sen. Bennet  says he “will be in the position to pick the replacement.”

No ballots will be cast. Voters likely won’t even know the names being considered for our state’s highest federal office until after the decision has been made. If Bennet is elected governor, that decision will fall to him alone – taking advantage of a flaw in the current system that must be corrected.

Bennet has been routinely pressed on the issue on the campaign trail, and campaign supporters were recently directed to tell anyone who asked: “There will be some really great, young Democrat who is there to vote exactly the same way that Michael votes.”

Voters deserve better. Bennet should either say now who intends to appoint or — to remove even a hint of impropriety — promise to resign his Senate seat should he win the governor’s race and let Gov. Polis make the appointment before leaving office. Then, the legislature should come up with a fix moving forward that puts the decision in the hands of voters — which is already how it works in Colorado for U.S. House vacancies.

It����ap my view that once Sen. Bennet thinks on it a bit — he will agree.

Colorado law gives governors the authority to fill Senate vacancies without any restrictions other than that the appointee satisfy constitutional requirements for the office. Sen. Bennet, whose third full term isn’t up until 2028, has confirmed his intention to make use of that authority upon election — foregoing even the marginally preferable option of allowing current Gov. Polis to appoint a replacement — and retaining his Senate seat should he lose the gubernatorial election.

One of the major problems with the current system is it gives Bennet an unfair advantage over his competition – anyone who would like to be the senator of our state (which is a lot of people) will feel huge pressure to support Bennet for governor.

Although I have no reason to doubt his good intentions, one cannot help but think of the debacle of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was sentenced (and ultimately pardoned by President Trump) on charges of trying to profit from his power to appoint someone to President Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat.

While Bennet����ap decision — should he be elected governor — to select his replacement falls within the legal authority of the governor’s office, the perception of a conflict (in which those considered or, ultimately, appointed must kiss the proverbial ring) is simply too great. Anyone and everyone with a desire to be chosen to serve as senator (which comes with a huge, unearned incumbency advantage in the next election cycle) will feel pressure to play along.

I believe voters, not politicians, should have the final say on who represents them in Washington, D.C. A special election was held when Rep. Ken Buck vacated his Congressional District 4 seat in 2024, and the state legislature needs to give voters the right to pick their senator back.

Following the Blagojevich saga, several states passed laws either removing the power of appointment from governors entirely or allowing brief placeholder appointments until voters could fill the vacancy through a special election. Methods vary, and details like election timelines and whether custodial appointees are eligible to run must be considered before passing such laws in Colorado. Polling shows the commonsense point you would expect: A clear majority of Coloradans want to vote to pick their senator, not have them appointed.

As a starting point, I would suggest a special election be held to fill the vacancy as soon as practical, and a placeholder appointed – either by the governor or the legislature – only to ensure Coloradans are represented in the Senate until voters quickly select the replacement to fill the remainder of the term.

While some might decry the cost of holding a special election, I assert that a democracy that’s in the hands of voters – not politicians – is worth it. At least 15 other states have proven that by already establishing such a system, several in response to the Blagojevich mess. But let����ap get serious: It does not take being a criminal to want to use this absolute power without creating in the appointee some sense of obligation or without having them commit to policy positions they would not otherwise.

The infringement upon the democratic process that vacancy appointments impose must be recognized and addressed without any further delay. Bennet’s gubernatorial run has brought this issue to the forefront, but it����ap hardly an isolated incident. We’ve seen a plethora of vacancies in our state legislature (so much that in the last few years as many as one in three lawmakers arrived via appointment) and it’s not out of the realm of possibility that U.S. Senate vacancies could surge as well.

Bennet was appointed to his own Senate seat in 2009, going on to be democratically reelected three times. For democracy’s sake, I hope he’s one of the last appointments.

Kent Thiry has co-chaired multiple successful Colorado citizen ballot initiatives including the 2016 efforts to restore the state’s presidential primary election (Proposition 107) and to open Colorado’s primary elections to unaffiliated voters (Proposition 108), and 2018 efforts to ban political gerrymandering and create independent commissions to draw Colorado’s congressional and legislative voter maps (Amendments Y and Z, respectively). He is the former chair and chief executive officer of DaVita.

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Richard Kantwill was sentenced to two years in prison and three years of supervised release, and has been ordered to pay a fine of $10,000, according to a news release from the Colorado Secretary of State.

Kantwill sent the threat to Griswold on Feb. 9, 2024, which referred to Griswold as the “number 1 target” and referenced targeted violence against her, according to the release.

The threat was sent the day after the U.S. Supreme Court����ap hearing of Donald J. Trump v. Norma Anderson, according to the release. The case concerned whether or not Trump should be disqualified from the 2024 Colorado Presidential Primary because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Griswold was a defendant in the case.

Griswold has received over 2,300 violent threats and death threats since September 2023, according to the release. At least three other individuals have been convicted of, or pleaded guilty to, threatening Griswold, including a Colorado man.

Nancy Pallozzi last week. It lists several concerns with Williams’ leadership, including the party breaking neutrality during this year’s Colorado presidential primary when it backed former President Donald Trump. The petition, which attracted backing from several GOP officeholders, also cites Williams’ history of “continually encouraging division instead of unifying the party.”

In an interview earlier this week, she said an anti-LGTBQ+ email and social media post encouraging people to burn Pride flags was the final straw.

She sought the county party’s endorsement of the push Thursday night — but was instead censured for going outside the party structure.

Pallozzi circulated the petition as an individual leader within the party, and not on behalf of the Jefferson County Republicans, she said this week, though she publicized the effort on the party’s Facebook account, under its letterhead, in calling on Williams to resign.

The formal reprimand states that Pallozzi’s actions “have not been in the best interest of the Jeffco Party, its candidates, its supporters or its members,” according circulated by the state party. In addition, it specifies that her actions are “null and void” — and demands she turns over all materials and records of communication on the matter, including media outlets she spoke to and contacts with other county chairs.

The censure also bars Pallozzi from further communication on the matter.

“This action concerns only the matter of the Chair acting without authority and is not to be construed as an endorsement of or opposition to statements or actions of any other party,” a statement from the Jefferson County executive committee reads.

Pallozzi did not return a message Friday about the censure. She said earlier that she had enough support from other members of the state central committee to force a vote on the leadership of Williams, who was elected chair early last year. It’s not clear if that will still happen.

The move had garnered public support from several prominent Republicans in the state, including state lawmakers and and .

The Denver Republican Party’s executive committee on Wednesday unanimously voted to call for Williams’ resignation or removal as state chair.

“This was not about Nancy Pallozzi,” Pallozzi said in an interview before the meeting where she was censured. “This was about protecting the Republicans in the state, and that this is not what Republicans stand for. We are not about hate, and we are not about burning Pride flags, or any flags for that matter — and that tweet was just horrible.”

In addition to outrage over Williams’ remarks about LGBTQ+ Pride supporters, whom he called “Nazis” in a recent debate, he has also faced backlash for using party resources to attack his primary opponent in the open 5th Congressional District race.

He’s facing Jeff Crank for the Republican nomination in the heavily conservative, El Paso County-based district in the June 25 primary election.

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Huerfano County Republican leadership in southern Colorado this week “immediately resign his position,” while state lawmaker and congressional candidate Richard Holtorf said the same.

In an Eastern Plains stronghold, Yuma County Republicans the state party for endorsing certain GOP candidates as a move that “undermines the electoral process within our party.” The endorsees include U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert in her run for the 4th Congressional District, after she secured the top line at the assembly.

Still others expressed alarm after party officials ejected a Colorado Sun political reporter from the party assembly in Pueblo on Saturday because of Williams’ belief that the reporter’s coverage of Republicans had been “very unfair.” He that he would’ve prohibited The Denver Post and 9News from covering the assembly, too.

In the face of all the criticism, the party under Williams has doubled down.

On its official account on the social media platform X, the state GOP went after Republican officeholders and candidates who criticized Williams, 4th District congressional candidate Deborah Flora a “dishonest, say-anything” politician after the party’s removal of the reporter from the venue. State Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer, a prominent figure from Brighton, caught fire from the party on the same issue.

“What����ap disgusting is your shameless boot licking of the corrupted fake news media that pushes propaganda for Democrats,” read the state party’s to Kirkmeyer’s X post.

Kirkmeyer, who holds a powerful post on the Joint Budget Committee, said in an interview that Williams was being a “bully.”

“You shouldn’t be trying to intimidate people,” she said. “We’re supposed to be trying to include people in our party, not trying to push them out.”

Former state GOP chair Dick Wadhams said the turmoil at the top of the party — and the internecine warfare within — was “unprecedented.”

He placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of Williams, who took the helm of the state GOP in March 2023 for a two-year term. Wadhams called Williams, a former state lawmaker who’s now running for Colorado’s open 5th Congressional District seat, “amoral and corrupt.”

“He’s only concerned about one thing — and that’s his personal ambitions,” Wadhams said. “We’ve never seen this before. I can’t believe it. We have a cesspool in the leadership of the Colorado Republican Party.”

Williams didn’t respond to several questions sent to him by The Post this week.

But state Rep. Matt Soper, a Delta Republican, thinks Williams “has done a pretty good job as state party chair.”

“He’s raised money,” Soper told The Post. “He has definitely been the thorn in the side of Democrats, which is what a state party chair has to do.”

Party fundraising has lagged at times under Williams, and this year Colorado Democrats have crowed that their fundraising in January and February dwarfed that of the GOP by at least a factor of two.

The intraparty criticism of Williams comes at a time when the Republican Party has for years lagged in state elections up and down the ballot, resulting in today’s Democratic dominance in Colorado. Democrats hold the governor’s office and wide majorities in the state legislature while occupying most seats in the state’s congressional delegation.

Soper served with Williams in the House, where Williams “was probably one of our most skilled bomb-throwers,” he said. That willingness to frustrate, insult and tweak is Williams’ “great strength,” in Soper’s view.

Williams’ weakness, though, “is himself” and his tendency to “march forward until he gets the answer he wants.”

“I guess from Dave Williams’ perspective, pushing out certain members within the party is OK because you’re kind of cleaning house,” Soper said. “I feel like when we’re this far in the minority, that����ap challenging to do. My whole plea to the state party is (that) I need help — I need more Republicans down here in the trenches fighting for us. At the end of the day, I don’t really care how we do it.”

Soper, too, came in for the party’s scorn earlier this week, after his disagreement with barring the reporter from the assembly on X. The party’s account replied: “The fake news media won’t like you more if you suck up to them, Matt.”

Campaign finance complaint filed

For Kelly Maher, a longtime Colorado Republican strategist, the objections go beyond Williams’ conduct at the Pueblo assembly last weekend, where some in the party also took issue with policy and platform votes that went Williams’ way.

Last week, Maher filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission against Williams, alleging he improperly used state party monies to help his congressional campaign.

Specifically, she claimed that Williams spent more than $16,000 in state party funds in February to produce and mail a flyer to voters in El Paso County targeting a primary opponent in the 5th District race, Jeff Crank. Maher’s complaint called the mailer a “poorly veiled” attack on then-presidential contender Nikki Haley but noted that the piece mostly targeted Crank and a political action committee that had endorsed him — a move she said violated federal campaign finance laws.

“He will burn the Republican Party to the ground in his singular goal of getting to Congress,” Maher said in an interview. “He cannot accomplish his goals without cannibalizing everyone else.”

Four years ago, Colorado’s unaffiliated voters — by far the largest chunk of the electorate — backed President Joe Biden by 25 percentage points over then-President Donald Trump, according to an exit poll taken at the time.

That gulf means Republicans can ill-afford to be training their ire on each other, said Kristi Burton Brown, Williams’ predecessor as GOP chair.

“When we are attacking our own conservatives, the goal of growing the party is really hard to achieve,” she said.

Burton Brown also said the endorsement of GOP candidates during the primary season — Trump received his own blessing from the state party back in January, ahead of the Iowa caucuses and Colorado’s March 15 presidential primary — is potentially counterproductive.

“It’s supposed to be a neutral body that opens up election pathways for Republicans,” she said of the state party. “Anytime the party picks and chooses candidates in a race, it gives voters the appearance of backroom deals.”

Holtorf, the state representative from Akron who is running for former U.S. Rep. Ken Buck’s seat, lashed Williams for the party’s endorsement of Boebert this week in the crowded GOP primary race and called for him to step down.

Holtorf made the June 25 primary ballot on Wednesday after state election officials deemed that he had gathered enough signatures in the district, as did another Republican contender, state Rep. Mike Lynch. Boebert and Flora had qualified for the primary ballot via petition last month, and other contenders could make the ballot, too.

“My vision of the Republican Party is (that) it����ap the Republican Party of the Reagan era,” Holtorf said. “It����ap a big tent. The purity test … that����ap being promoted by the papacy of the Republican Party under Dave Williams’ leadership is not the direction we need to go. We need to rebuild our party. We need to welcome everybody back.”

“Becoming Republican again”

Williams has also run into criticism from fellow Republicans for his desire to close GOP primaries to all but affiliated party voters, a stance Wadhams calls “dumbfounding.”

The state party sued Secretary of State Jena Griswold last summer in federal court, seeking to invalidate a ballot measure passed by voters in 2016 that opened up Colorado’s political primaries to unaffiliated voters. A judge rejected the party’s claim in February. The party’s central committee has failed to clear the high threshold needed to opt out of primaries — despite continuing pressure from Williams and others in the party, .

Senate Minority Leader Paul Lundeen, a Monument Republican, said his job is to counter the Democratic surge in Colorado by supporting Republicans in swing districts and conservative districts.

“I’m trying to attract as many people to the Republican brand as possible,” Lundeen said. “That includes conservatives and unaffiliated. (Williams is) gonna do what he’s gonna do.”

And Williams doing what he does is exactly what Rep. Scott Bottoms, a Colorado Springs Republican, wants to continue seeing.

“For quite a few years, we have just been getting more and more liberal and more and more middle of the road — more of an establishment mentality — and it was hurting us,” said Bottoms, a freshman lawmaker who’s among the most conservative in the Capitol. “Just because they have an ‘R’ after their name doesn’t mean they’re Republicans. We’re starting to see those (voter) rolls turned back around to where people are becoming Republican again.”

When he first ran for office two years ago, Bottoms said, he was told to tone down his anti-abortion beliefs. He praised Williams for embracing his position on the issue from the party chair position.

But Wadhams, the former party chair, said the anemic turnout at the Republican assembly in Pueblo — just 2,100 or so delegates out of 3,500 invited showed up, he said — was a flashing red light that new leadership was needed.

There is no way to build a “winning coalition” by alienating people, Wadhams said, especially from within the party.

“It is a hollowing out of the party,” he said. “The Democrats have a stranglehold on the state like they haven’t had since the 1930s.”

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Since 2020, a small but growing number of county canvass boards have had Republican members refuse to sign off on vote tallies, according to state records. Those objections haven’t jeopardized the actual certification of elections, and Colorado’s system has additional processes in place to stop rogue canvass boards from preventing the finalizing of results.

But it serves as an ill omen of potential efforts to sow distrust in voting heading into this year’s primary and general elections, several state and county election officials said in interviews with The Denver Post.

The canvass, completed after each election by a bipartisan county board of the local Republican and Democratic party chairs, largely serves as a check that there weren’t more ballots counted than cast. Following the state’s March 5 presidential primaries, Republican board members in Boulder, El Paso and Jefferson counties along the Front Range refused to sign off on the canvass.

Last fall, after the state’s general election, Republican members in those counties — along with Larimer, home of Fort Collins, and La Plata, home of Durango — likewise declined to sign off on the canvass, according to records from the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office.

Officials said the cited reasons, including a distrust of signature verification processes or the chain of custody for certain types of ballots, were specious and fell outside the canvass boards’ purview.

Colorado’s top election official expressed concern that the complaints could serve as fodder for claims that damage some voters’ trust in election integrity.

“If there’s a reasonable reason for a canvass board not to sign off, we absolutely want to know that,” said Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat. “But trying to spread disinformation through our election itself, without basis, is disappointing.”

While Boulder County’s Republican party has a decade-long history of declining to sign off on the results, such protest votes have become a new — though suddenly routine, since the 2020 election — event in El Paso and Jefferson counties.

These new stands have followed widespread, baseless accusations of election fraud spread by former President Donald Trump, who’s likely to be Republicans’ nominee again in this year’s presidential election.

After the November election, the Colorado Republican Party by former state Rep. Ron Hanks, now a congressional candidate, discouraging county canvass boards from certifying the election.

Matt Crane, the executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association and a former Republican clerk of Arapahoe County, called the reasons that have been cited by dissenting canvass members “complete fabricated garbage.”

“We’re grateful it’s not more counties, but it’s concerning anytime people want to play political games or score cheap political points with our elections,” Crane said.

Part of “election deniers’ playbook”?

The practice appears to be part of a growing “,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy institute at New York University’s School of Law.

Local canvass boards in New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and North Carolina voted in 2022 not to certify their local elections, . All of those elections were eventually certified, sometimes under court order.

Colorado specifies limited duties for canvass boards: to certify the official abstract of votes, by reconciling the number of ballots counted with the number cast, and the number of ballots cast with the number of people who voted; to observe post-election audits; and to conduct recounts, if necessary.

The election code specifies it is not the board’s role to determine voter intent or eligibility or to request new reports. Those duties are typically reserved for election judges.

Boulder County’s Republican Party has repeatedly rejected the canvass since , with members typically citing concerns with a “” signature verification process. Former Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a Republican, had to certify the canvass in 2014, when a majority of conservative board members refused to certify the canvass there.

One of the more recent canvass board dissenters in Colorado, Candice Stutzriem in El Paso County,  about undocumented immigrants voting in elections.

In an interview with The Post, Stutzriem said she has a good relationship with Steve Schleiker, the county’s clerk and a fellow Republican. But she views the canvass board’s job as adversarial, in order to keep elections honest, and she decried that “the role of the canvass board member has been dumbed down” to just “matching numbers.”

She voiced concerns about ballot and signature verification, even if she’s watched the bipartisan election judges and says she trusts them.

“It’s validation. We’re unable to validate those ballots,” she said. “But it passes. It’s the system that we have because of all-mail-in voting and it’s how it’s done.”

Stutzriem said her decision not to certify the March presidential primary was “based entirely on the actions” of Griswold and the secretary’s statements about Trump in the recent 14th Amendment lawsuit by voters seeking to bar him from the ballot. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled Trump was ineligible under the insurrection clause in December, but the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the challenge last month.

Trump handily won the state’s Republican presidential primary, but Stutzriem suggested it would have been more decisive without Griswold’s comments in support of the challenge.

Despite her concerns, Stutzriem still votes, though she says she does so in person rather than by mail.

Schleiker, who was elected El Paso County’s clerk and recorder in 2022, noted that Stutzriem signed off on individual components related to certification, but not the whole canvass.

“A group of individuals are trying to make a political statement where this is not the place to make a political statement,” Schleiker said in an interview. “This is not the process to make a political statement.”

He and other clerks called these types of protests an insult to the community members they depend upon to run the elections.

In Jefferson County, Republican canvass board member Nancy Pallozzi, who voted against the presidential primaries’ certification, didn’t return a request for comment.

She was complimentary to the election workers and staff in the clerk’s office in her final report — while still refusing to sign off on the vote tallies. She cited concerns with signature verification and the chain of custody for undeliverable mail ballots.

Worries about erosion of trust by voters

Jefferson County Clerk Amanda Gonzalez, a Democrat, said she tried to address what concerns she could from those raised by Pallozzi, even if they fell outside the canvass board’s scope.

Pallozzi even acknowledged the clerk’s effort in her report following the presidential primary. But she didn’t see the chain of custody for undeliverable ballots, which she wrote was her “sole reason” for not signing off.

Those are ballots that were never cast and never voted on — and thus not part of the canvass process, Gonzalez said.

“The potential harm in these kinds of things is it sends the signal that the chair, or the party she represents, doesn’t trust our elections, even though her objections aren’t grounded in her responsibilities,” Gonzalez said.

If people don’t trust the process, they may not vote, Gonzalez said. But she’s confident most people do trust the election process, she said, as evidenced by the dozens of Republican election workers her office relies on to run the elections as part of bipartisan teams.

The clerks and other election officials said they’d continue to encourage people to learn more about their local elections and to sign up to help run them, in the hopes of dispelling persistent myths about the process.

Crane, from the clerks’ association, argued that the right to vote, which Americans have fought and even died for, should be above the partisan fray. He promised a “very aggressive” public education campaign ahead of the state’s June primary for non-presidential races and the November general election.

“The same people who think Jena Griswold is too political in her role — and that she should just call balls and strikes fairly — these are the same people who refuse to sign off on the canvass process because of some grievance they have,” Crane said. “At the end of the day, they’re no different and no better than the things they’re criticizing.”

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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have officially secured the requisite numbers of delegates to be considered their parties’ presumptive nominees.

It was a foreseeable outcome. Biden faced token opposition in the Democratic primary. Several high-profile Republicans ran against Trump but didn’t come close to knocking him off course in his third straight Republican bid.

Here is a look at what that means, what����ap changed, and what still needs to happen before Biden and Trump can drop “presumptive” and just be their parties’ official standard-bearers:

The Associated Press only uses the “presumptive nominee” designation once a candidate has captured the number of delegates needed to win a majority vote at the national party convention this summer. For Republicans, that number this year is 1.215. On the Democratic side of things, it����ap 1,968.

The marker essentially ends the presidential primary season, though both Biden and Trump have been largely focusing their energies on each other for months already.

Sort of.

Generally, the national Democratic and Republican parties start coordinating directly with their presumptive nominees once their status is clear, although there have been some exceptions.

Last week, the Republican National Committee ushered in new leadership handpicked by Trump, in the form of a new chairman, co-chair and party chief of staff. Trump’s installed leaders then moved to fire dozens of RNC staff.

After Trump won both the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary — but still faced GOP opponents — an RNC member who is a longtime Trump ally floated a resolution that would have allowed the party to consider him its “presumptive nominee” and allowed some of that coordination earlier.

Trump actually spoke out against the measure — although he said it likely would have succeeded — which was ultimately withdrawn.

As for the Democratic National Committee, Biden is the de facto leader of the party, although any official leadership changes have to go through structured channels. During the 2020 campaign, the DNC shuffled its leadership and entered into a joint fundraising agreement with Biden in April, even though the candidate didn’t clinch the Democratic nomination until June.

A presidential candidate doesn’t officially become the Republican or Democratic nominee until winning the vote on the floor of the nominating convention, which takes place this summer. Delegates’ casting of votes is mostly a ceremonial procedure, but it hasn’t always been this way.

Decades ago, presidential candidates might have run in primaries and caucuses, but the eventual nominees weren’t known until delegates and party bosses hashed things out themselves at the conventions.

___

Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP.

The Associated Press called the Colorado races for both candidates less than an hour after polls closed. As of 6:07 p.m. Wednesday, Trump led the Republican primary field with 63% of votes to nearly 34% for his last remaining challenger, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, in .

In the Democratic primary, Biden led with about 83% of votes, followed by 8.9% — or more than 50,000 votes — for the “noncommitted delegate” option and 3.1% for U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota. The uncommitted share increased as later-cast ballots were counted in counties including Denver, which released its final unofficial results late Wednesday afternoon. Some of that option’s support has been driven by for voters to protest Biden’s support for Israel during the Israel-Hamas war.

Colorado is one of 15 states — including the nation’s two most populous, California and Texas — that held primary contests on Super Tuesday.

The primary capped what has been an unusually quiet campaign season in the Centennial State, with a singular visit to metro Denver by Haley late last month marking the only visit by a major candidate this year. Voters received mail ballots in mid-February.

The Republican contest took place just a day after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Trump, the New York real estate tycoon who served a single term as president, could not be removed from the ballot in Colorado. The 9-0 ruling reversed a December decision by Colorado’s high court finding that Trump was ineligible to run for president because his actions around the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, amounted to insurrection under the 14th Amendment.

At stake in Colorado’s primaries are 37 delegates to the Republican National Convention and 72 delegates to the Democratic National Convention. The state’s primary results Tuesday showed lingering support for several candidates who dropped out earlier in the campaign, including Democrat Marianne Williamson and Republican Ron DeSantis, who garnered vote shares in the low single digits.

The state’s primaries for other races, including state legislative seats and Congress, are set for June 25.

Before Tuesday, Trump had coasted through eight states, notching victories in each — including Haley’s home state, South Carolina. Haley on Sunday won her first primary contest against Trump, in Washington, D.C.

Despite Trump’s dominance on Colorado’s GOP ballot Tuesday, Haley was on track to win seven counties in the state — all of them with a politically left tilt. Counties preferring Haley included Pitkin, Boulder, Denver and San Miguel.

Biden has had a solid showing during the Democratic nominating process thus far, though more than 100,000 Michigan voters on Feb. 27 broke from near-unanimous support for the incumbent on the Democratic primary ballot.

More than 13% of primary voters in Michigan chose “uncommitted.” Many of those votes were driven by opposition to American support for Israel in that country’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Israel acted in response to Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, which killed about 1,200 people and resulted in the taking of 250 hostages.

A similar protest-vote campaign was launched in Colorado late last week ahead of Tuesday’s primary, which unlike Colorado Democrats’ 2020 primary included the noncommitted delegate option.

Like the candidates, that option must clear a 15% threshold statewide or within congressional districts to qualify for a portion of delegates to the Democratic convention. Any uncommitted delegates selected would not be able to participate in the first round of voting but would be able to take part in a second round if Biden were to fail to secure a majority.

This year is the second presidential election cycle in which unaffiliated voters in Colorado could participate in the major-party primary of their choosing.

Not on either ballot was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who initially had signaled he would run as a Democrat but is now an independent. He over the weekend as he tries to qualify for the November ballot.

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The elections are a crucial moment for President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who are the overwhelming front-runners for the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations, respectively. As the day with the most delegates up for stake, strong performances by Biden and Trump would move them much closer to becoming their party’s nominee.

The contest will unfold from Alaska and California to Virginia and Vermont. And while most of the attention will be on the presidential contest, there are other important elections on Tuesday.

Some things to watch:

So far, the Republican presidential primary has been a snoozer.

The former president has dominated the race and his last major rival in the race, his onetime U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, is struggling to keep up. She lost the Feb. 27 primary in Michigan by more than 40 percentage points. She even lost her home state of South Carolina, where she was twice elected governor, by more than 20 percentage points.

As the race pivots to Super Tuesday, the vast map seems tailor-made for Trump to roll up an insurmountable lead on Haley. His team has been turning up the pressure on Haley to drop out, and another big win could be a major point in their favor.

Haley’s banked a considerable amount of campaign money and says she wants to stay in the race until the Republican National Convention in July in case delegates there have second thoughts about formally nominating Trump amidst his legal woes. But she’s seen some of her financial support waver recently — the organization Americans For Prosperity, backed by the Koch brothers, announced it’d stop spending on her behalf after South Carolina.

She may not be able to afford another sweeping loss.

Amid Trump’s commanding wins this primary season have been a notable warning sign for November: He’s performed poorly with college-educated primary voters.

In the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, APVoteCast found that college graduates picked Haley over Trump. Roughly two-thirds of voters in both states who went to graduate school after college voted for the former South Carolina governor.

In South Carolina, Trump won the suburbs but not by the same magnitude as his dominance in small towns and rural areas, essentially splitting the vote with Haley.

One of the biggest questions on Tuesday is whether Trump can start repairing that rupture. Weakness with college graduates and in the suburbs where they cluster is what doomed Trump in his 2020 loss to Biden.

As sleepy as the Republican presidential primary has been, the Democratic one has been even quieter. Biden has many political problems dragging him down in public opinion polls, but not, so far, at primary polling stations.

The one speed bump came in Michigan, where an organized attempt to vote “uncommitted” in the primary there to protest Biden’s support of Israel during the war in Gaza garnered 13% of the vote, a slightly higher share than that option got in the last primary under a Democratic president.

There are no similar organized anti-Biden efforts on the Super Tuesday calendar, just the president����ap two longshot primary opponents who’ve yet to crack low single digits against him, U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota and self-help author Marianne Williamson, who revived her campaign after receiving a surprise 3% of the Michigan primary vote.

There’s far more than the presidential primaries on the ballot Tuesday. One of the most consequential contests is the California primary for the U.S. Senate seat left open by the death of Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

The seat����ap temporary occupant, Laphonza Butler, isn’t running for a full term. Rather than having the winners of party primaries face off in November, California throws every candidate into a single primary and has the top two vote-getters make it to the general election.

Democrats have a lock on statewide races in the overwhelmingly blue state, and for months the speculation was that two prominent U.S. House members from that party, Reps. Katie Porter and Adam Schiff, would battle it out until Election Day. But that����ap changed since former Dodgers great Steve Garvey threw his hat in the ring.

Garvey, 75, is both a Republican and a novice at politics. Schiff has been airing ads slamming him — or, more accurately, promoting him — as most likely to carry out Trump’s wishes. The idea is to unite the state’s outnumbered conservatives behind Garvey so he and Schiff finish in the top two, denying Porter a spot in November. Schiff would then be the overwhelming favorite for the seat.

The current primary setup was passed by voters in 2010, partly to stop partisans from engaging in primary shenanigans. Among other things, the Senate primary will be a test of whether, in the end, motivated politicians can game any system.

Voters in San Francisco and Los Angeles will once more grapple with questions of criminal justice and public order.

In Los Angeles County, District Attorney George Gascon faces 11 challengers in a primary amid criticism of his progressive approach that includes not seeking cash bail for misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies and not prosecuting juveniles as adults. His opponents have blamed him for a rise in property crimes in some parts of the county, including a brazen smash-and-grab spree at luxury stores.

Gascon has weathered criticism before, including two failed recall efforts, one of which was in his first 100 days of taking office. The primary will determine who he faces in November and whether there are signs that Los Angeles’ liberal voters are changing their minds.

In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed is pushing one ballot measure to expand police powers to use tactics like drones and surveillance cameras, and another testing single adults on welfare for drugs. The two initiatives come as the city has been wracked by homelessness and drug use, and Breed faces a cranky electorate in her own reelection in November.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton last year survived an impeachment led by his own party. Now he wants payback, and Trump is helping him. The primary will be a test of how Republican voters are willing to regulate their own leaders.

The impeachment stemmed from Paxton’s legal woes. He faces an April trial on felony security fraud charges, and an additional federal corruption probe over the allegations that he used his office to favor a campaign donor that was the foundation of the impeachment charges.

Paxton is targeting more than 30 Republican state lawmakers in the primary, including House Speaker Dale Phelan. Paxton is also trying to remove three Republican judges on the state’s conservative appeals court who voted to limit the attorney general’s powers.

Paxton has been a staunch supporter of Trump, including the former president����ap attempts to overturn his own 2020 election loss, and Trump is helping Paxton in his primary campaign. The Texas purge will be a test of what Republican voters value the most in their elected officials.

Most of the country picked its governors in the 2022 off-year elections, but North Carolina is gearing up for an intense race this fall. The major-party front-runners for the seat being vacated by term-limited Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper both will need to demonstrate an ability to unite their parties in the primary.

Attorney General Josh Stein has Cooper’s endorsement. Stein’s main competitor is a former state Supreme Court associate justice, Mike Morgan, who is Black. Watch whether Stein’s able to hold onto a significant share of the primary’s Black voters, which is essential for any Democrat who wants to be competitive in November.

The Republican front-runner is Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who is Black, has been a divisive figure for some for criticizing vocally the teaching of LGBTQ+ issues during sex education and for comments at a church that Christians are “called to be led by men.” His opponents, state Treasurer Dale Folwell and trial attorney Bill Graham, say Robinson is too polarizing to win in November.

Robinson received Trump’s support last year, but it����ap worth watching whether he shows the same weaknesses as the former president among college-educated, suburban voters. Biden’s reelection campaign is targeting North Carolina because it thinks those voters can help him beat Trump there.

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The Republican hopeful characterized herself as the best chance to do that during her afternoon campaign stop in Centennial, ahead of the state’s March 5 primary.

“We can either go with more of the same or we can go with something new,” Haley said. “More of the same is not just Joe Biden. More of the same is also Donald Trump.”

Undeterred by her losses in other states’ primary elections so far — including in her home state, where she served as governor for six years — Haley has repeatedly said she’s not giving up in her fight against Trump, the former president and 2024’s Republican frontrunner. Tuesday’s stop, one of several planned by Haley this week in states with Super Tuesday primaries, is the first campaign event in Colorado by a major presidential candidate so far this year.

In Colorado, where the state GOP endorsed Trump before the primary, going against its own bylaws, Haley hopes to appeal to unaffiliated voters looking for a change. Her backers express hope that if enough of them cast their votes for Haley, she may have a shot at winning the state’s delegates.

“You all know family, friends — and you’d be surprised how a lot of them are just general election voters,” Haley said. “In a general election, you’re given a choice. In a primary, you make your choice. This is the time for Colorado to make the choice.”

Christy Jo, a Republican voter from Centennial, said she was registered as unaffiliated until the last election. She was excited to learn more about Haley because she’s not a Trump supporter, she said.

“I like that she has the courage to speak up,” Jo said.

Another unaffiliated voter, Linda Wood of Castle Rock, mentioned Haley’s straightforwardness and her refusal to back down from Trump as reasons she’s backing her. Though Wood worries Haley won’t pull off the nomination based on primary results so far, she likes that Haley, 52, is young and “has a good head on her shoulders.”

“I’d just like to see her bring the country together,” Wood said.

Haley told attendees she was concerned that no Republican running for statewide office in Colorado had received more than 45% of the vote since Trump was elected president in 2016. She spoke about the influx of migrants in Colorado, saying she would implement a national e-verify system to ensure employers were hiring only residents with legal authorization.

“Let’s deport. Let’s defund sanctuary cities once and for all,” she said to cheers.

Haley spent much of her speech differentiating herself from Trump, saying she would make it a priority to tackle the country’s $34 trillion in debt — was Trump’s doing, she said.

“The younger generation will tell you they’re worried about this debt and what it����ap going to leave in their life,” she said. “They’re worried about if they’re ever going to find a job, if they’re going to make ends meet. They don’t know how they’re ever going to afford a home. They’re worried about wars breaking out. And then we want to know why there’s so much anxiety, stress and depression.”

Haley also said that she intended to crack down on fraud in COVID-19 pandemic funding programs and said she would veto any spending bill to take the country back to “pre-COVID levels.”

She spoke about national security concerns, including what she characterized as Trump emboldening Russian President Vladimir Putin.

For Caitlin Snydacker, an unaffiliated voter from Highlands Ranch, what really stood out is also why she’s backing Haley: Her pledge to bring the country together, despite political differences.

Snydacker, who voted for Biden in 2020, said the last time she voted for a Republican was when she was 18. But she plans to vote for Haley, she said, in part over concerns about Biden’s age and about how America will be viewed on the world stage if Trump wins again. She brought her 9-year-old son Sammy on Tuesday because they’d been following the Republican primary process together and watching the debates.

“I feel passionately about Nikki Haley being our hope,” Snydacker said after the rally, even if she doesn’t agree with all of Haley’s positions, including . “I really identify with her (plan to) make America normal again.”

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