Denver Elections Late Results

With about 90% of the votes counted in Denver, Denver Referendum H (Cultural Facilities) is moving towards passage, making a clean sweep of the Denver ballot issues, and Jimenez is pulling away from Curcio in the District 5 school district race in what remains a close race with about 8,000 ballots still to be counted.

At least three municipalities in Colorado had anti-union payroll deduction limitation measures on the ballot this election cycle, all labeled Referendum 200. The measure failed in Englewood, a small first ring suburb of Denver; passed in Centennial, a newly incorporated South surbuban city in Arapahoe County (with almost no employees due to outsourcing and no unions to the best of my knowledge); and passed in Greeley, the county seat of Weld County, to the North of Denver in the I-25 corridor, which is rapidly turning into a middle middle class bedroom community for people who work from Denver to Boulder to Longmont to Fort Collins along the Front Range.

Castle Pines North was incorporated with overwhelming support from voters, after a deal was reached with the neighboring subdivision, Castle Pines Village which had wanted a piece of the Castle Pines North retail tax base, to split sales tax revenues. It will have about 9,500 residents.

The slate of candidates backed by City Auditor Dennis Gallagher and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, John McBride, Laurence Botnick and Raymond Gutierrez, have all lost their races. McBride came in second place in the three candidate at large race, about ten percentage points behind incubment Theresa Pena. Botnick also came in second place in a three candidate race, about 42 percentage points behind incubment Bruce Hoyt. Gutierrez can in third place in a four candidate race, about ten percentage points behind the neck and neck first and second place candidates, and eleven percentage points ahead of the fourth place candidate who dropped out of the race weeks ago, but still got about 11% of the vote.

McBride's campaign was hampered by newspaper reports of a number of minor brushes with the law. Gutierrez was hampered by the fact that he is twenty-one years old, didn't graduate from high school (although he was a class president in school), and works as a grocery clerk. Neither of the candidates facing Bruce Hoyt in District 1 had obvious deficiencies, but voters in the Southeast Denver District, which is more affluent and predominantly white than other director districst in DPS, are probably the most satisfied with the agenda of the current school board at the Denver Public Schools of any part of the city.

Nationally, Democrats made gains in Kentucky, where a corruption plagued incumbent Republican Governor ran anyway, and in Virginia, where Democrats secured a majority in the state senate.