Early, unofficial Colorado election results Tuesday night showed progressive, union-backed and Democratic-affiliated candidates leading in many of the highest-profile races at the local level.
Colorado holds coordinated elections in odd-numbered years to elect candidates for certain school boards, municipal offices and other local races. More than 1.2 million ballots had been cast statewide in Tuesday’s election, according to data from the secretary of state’s office.
In Denver — where voters appeared set to approve a $1 billion bond package backed by Mayor Mike Johnston and keep a ban on the sale of flavored tobacco products — candidates backed by teachers unions led races for all four seats up for election on the Denver Public Schools board.
If those results hold, it would represent a major defeat for Denver Families Action, a group with roots in the pro-charter “school reform” movement that reported spending $1 million to influence DPS races this year.
Aurora City Council
Though elections in Colorado’s third-largest city are officially nonpartisan, slates of Republican-affiliated candidates led by Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman, a former GOP member of Congress, have solidified their grip on city politics in recent years. Backed by conservative dark money groups, conservatives had hoped to expand their City Council majority in 2025 — but early results showed Democratic-affiliated candidates leading in races for all five council seats up for election.
As of about 10:30 p.m., with more than 100,000 votes cast citywide, Rob Andrews and Alli Jackson led in the race for two at-large council seats. Both Andrews, president of the nonprofit job-training service CommunityWorks, and Jackson, a social worker, were endorsed by a long list of progressive groups and Democratic elected officials.
The two Democratic-affiliated candidates led their Republican-affiliated opponents, Danielle Jurinsky and Amsalu Kassaw, by a few thousand votes. Jurinsky, first elected to her seat in 2021, gained national notoriety last year when her exaggerated claims of a “complete gang takeover” of Aurora helped draw President Donald Trump to the city for a high-profile 2024 campaign stop. Kassaw is an Ethiopian immigrant who works for The GEO Group, a private prison company that operates the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Aurora.
Douglas County School Board
In Douglas County, a suburban battleground south of Denver where school board politics have been fractious in recent years, early results showed candidates supported by Democrats poised to sweep all four Board of Education seats up for election this year, ending four years of conservative control.
All four candidates that made up the Community’s Voice, Community’s Choice slate — which emphasized its candidates’ education experience and promised to make the district “accountable to the people, not politics” — led their GOP-endorsed opponents with more than 108,000 ballots counted.
This is a developing story.
This article originally appeared in Colorado Newsline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
