Representative Jennifer Bacon has something many elected officials would benefit from: a developed worldview, a theory of the case that guides her actions in office. It’s a worldview that developed some time between her childhood in south Florida and her arrival to the state House of Representatives in January 2021. Maybe it developed during her time at Tulane, when a Black dean told her that her grandfather didn’t take the train from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago just for her to flunk out of college; or when, years after taking that dean’s words to heart, she was told she should straighten her hair before taking the Virginia bar exam. Maybe the last few pieces of it fell into place when she won a seat on the Denver school board in 2017, and earned a front row seat to what systemic inequality really looks like.
Whenever Bacon’s theory of the case ultimately took shape, she arrived in the House in 2021 knowing who she was, and what she had come there to do. “My job is to be a community partner, to open doors for neighbors, or else kick them in,” she told me when we spoke last Friday. Representing Montbello and far northeast Denver, she’s now Assistant Majority Leader of the state House of Representatives.
I first met Bacon nine years ago when she was running for a seat on the Denver Public Schools board. In a characteristically nasty DPS race, she maintained her cool, and she won. I was impressed. It seems like a lifetime ago now: before Covid-19, before January 6, before the George Floyd protests, before the increased weaponization of ICE. Now, after too many weeks in which decades happened, Bacon looks out on a radically changed political landscape and knows what role she plays in it.
“I am community- and values-driven. I’ve never wavered from that. I’ve been unapologetic about that, and there’s nobody that holds it against me,” she said, adding, “…anymore,” with a laugh.
“In my first couple of years, I was targeted for that, I was judged for it. But now, and I honestly believe it’s because I’ve been able to be consistent and have never backed down from that, I might actually be respected for it,” she told me. “I go into every community looking like this,” she said, indicating her braids.
In the state Capitol, a milieu in which honesty is at a premium and you never really know how someone is going to vote until their name appears on the tally board in red or green, an authentic and consistent colleague can be a valuable ally. In recent years, as the large House Democratic caucus has often found itself aimless and riven by intra-party disputes, Bacon has not been afraid to give voice to what she thinks is being done wrong.
“I have found myself being a leader around frustration with the status quo,” she told me. “Our voters are really over the status quo. I think the primaries were some sort of scream for that.” On June 30, after millions of dollars in spending by competing factions, three incumbent Democrats were decisively defeated by primary challengers.
That’s one of the topics which brought us together for a conversation last week – not the recent primary elections themselves, but what message the voters sent in them, and how the House Democratic caucus can lick its wounds, mend its fences, and come together to heed that message.
“It’s just not enough to be anti-something. It’s never enough to be anti-something,” Bacon told me. “We need to stand for something.” She thinks the caucus has lacked direction in recent years, and thinks that clear goals are part of the path back to unity. “We have to articulate an actual agenda, and we have to deliver.”
After years of de facto House primacy in the legislature, power in the building has noticeably shifted to the state Senate over the last several years. Democrats control both chambers, but conflicts within the near-supermajority Democratic House caucus – which led to acrimonious, multimillion-dollar primary races in both 2024 and 2026 – have hampered the chamber’s ability to set or lead the legislative agenda.
“Democrats are going through this nationally, frankly,” after years of hanging the party’s identity on opposition to Trump, Bacon said. But she sees Colorado-specific factors in the caucus’s recent dysfunction as well. “We really have not figured out how to operate since we turned the state blue. It’s been an opaque machine, and I think a lot of people are frustrated with that,” she said, referring to how grasstops and party leadership often function.
During Colorado’s “purple state” era, which is generally regarded to have ended around 2020, Democratic Party unity was built around the need to beat Republicans in competitive races. Now that Republicans hold barely one-third of the House’s seats, the rationale for unity has weakened, leaving a rift between those committed to the purple state playbook and those eager to rewrite it for a new era.
“My hope is that we can remember why we’re Democrats,” she told me, saying she believes there are still important issues that the caucus’s factions can unite on. “There are things every Democrat knows immediately that we believe in. Immigration, reproductive rights. Start there. We believe science is real, we believe in climate change. Because guess what? Colorado has an upper and lower basin problem right now,” she said, referencing the multi-state Colorado River Compact recently taken over by the federal government.
There’s another reason a future agenda has been on Bacon’s mind: right now, she’s one of just two names being considered as the next Speaker of the House, and the first new Speaker since Rep. Julie McCluskie took the gavel four years ago. Rep. Andrew Boesenecker of Fort Collins is the other candidate. Bacon would be the first Black woman to hold the gavel in state history.
If elected Speaker, caucus unity is far from Bacon’s only priority: she hopes to deliver for the same community she has represented for years, and for communities across the state. “We have to figure out healthcare, we have to figure out rent. Nobody can afford to live.” she told me. Fixing the problems inside the building can make the body more effective, she believes, but the focus should always be on the people who sent them there. “We have to remember that we live in a bubble,” she told me, referring to the legislature. “You know what people care about? That they can’t afford shit.”
“We have this window to right the ship, to get back to our voters’ sentiments, back to a recognition of who the Democratic base is,” she said.
“At the end of the day, Democrats are still the right people to help this state get out of our problems, to move through our problems. We are our own best assets – and we’re going to be reminded of that when whoever comes in to replace Scott Bottoms, if we don’t win that race, says that the earth is flat, right?”
The stakes are real. Bacon is no stranger to them. “This President is coming for my body, my family, and my history,” she said. “This is not a bumper sticker. Democrats have to deliver, and Democrats will deliver.”
“That’s what we need to focus on,” she told me. “We cannot be distracted by our own issues.” If Bacon is elected Speaker, that’s what she intends to do. “For the first time in a long time, we will articulate an agenda, we will articulate our values, and we will take power back from the lobby. We will take back the power we have lost to an opaque structure – and our communities will know what we are doing.”
