As each round of results came in at the conservatives’ election night watch part in Aurora, the volume of the crowd grew louder. Soon, City Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky took to the mic to call it: Mayor Mike Coffman had won reelection, emerging victorious with most of the other Aurora conservatives on the ballot.

The celebration was a repeat of 2021, when conservatives took back effective control of the officially nonpartisan City Council from progressives in the left-leaning city — a development Councilman Juan Marcano had called a “gut punch.”

But this time, Marcano was among the progressive losses, defeated in his mayoral challenge of Coffman.

He and other candidates who had hoped to reassert Aurora’s progressive voice were left struggling to account for why conservatives widened their council margin in the Nov. 7 election. The council will have just three Democrats on the 11-member body, outnumbered by eight, including Coffman, who are either Republicans or largely aligned with that group.

Elected officials and political observers have varying theories about what led voters in the state’s third-largest city — also its most ethnically and racially diverse one — city to elect right-leaning candidates to represent them. They range from a pro-Republican skew in outside spending and differences in campaign strategy and messaging to low voter turnout, along with speculation about voters’ lack of awareness of candidates’ party affiliations.

Councilwoman Alison Coombs, a Democrat in a ward-based seat who ran in the at-large race, was the only progressive triumph in the races on the ballot, winning the most votes citywide among the at-large candidates. She was shocked by the rest of the results, she said, including the loss of Marcano, with whom she’d regularly campaigned.

Marcano, who was vying to become the city’s first Latino mayor, lost with 40.6% of the vote to Coffman’s 52.6% in a three-way race.

“It is excellent that people want me there,” Coombs said. “But I fear that (voters) maybe don’t understand that me being there, in an extreme minority, means that many of the things that I have fought for and continued to fight for are going to be extremely difficult — if not impossible — to achieve with the other folks that they chose to elect.”

Overall, one seat changed control across the partisan divide, with Marcano’s council seat won by former Republican state House candidate Stephanie Hancock. Current at-large Councilwoman Angela Lawson won in Coombs’ Ward V, swapping seats with her, while Françoise Bergan won reelection in Ward VI and Curtis Gardner was reelected to the other at-large seat.

Coffman was less puzzled by the results.

He said on election night that his messaging helped him win by speaking directly to voters’ top concerns.

“The first issue was crime, (that) was a top concern,” Coffman said. “Second issue was homelessness. And the third issue is housing affordability. … But when it came to crime, I really think that there was a lot of anxiety out there, a lot of fear.”

And he made that his platform, promising to be tough on crime, reduce unsheltered homelessness and work on housing issues. His campaign shared internal polling from September that showed 58% of voters in the survey identified crime and public safety as a top priority.

While Marcano did talk about addressing crime and public safety, his approach was different — he planned to address the root causes of the issues, rather than focusing on criminal penalties.

Marcano said he was disappointed by turnout among Democratic-leaning voters, arguing a conservative skew in an off-year election makes the results unrepresentative. He’s advocated for making local elections partisan, with candidates’ party affiliations displayed on the ballot, and moving them to even-numbered years, when Democratic voters often turn out in higher numbers.

On his yard signs, Marcano printed “Democrat” below his name, a rare move for a municipal candidate in metro Denver.

“The very, very motivated conservative electorate here shows up, the rest of the city doesn’t — and they’re the ones that get to decide what happens locally for the rest of us,” he said.

He suggested the state’s Proposition HH ballot measure drove more Republican and right-leaning unaffiliated voters to the ballot box, too.

Getting “past the blind tribalism of partisan politics”

But conservative Councilman Dustin Zvonek, who wasn’t up for election this year, disagrees with the idea that local races should be openly partisan.

“I’ve long believed that when it comes to local elections — particularly because we’re nonpartisan — that it gives voters the opportunity to get past the blind tribalism of partisan politics and really dive into what the candidates are running on what their platforms are,” he said.

Zvonek said people who vote in municipal elections likely know more about the candidates and their platforms than in presidential elections, when many strictly vote along party lines. And that’s why he thinks conservative candidates are winning in Aurora — a pushback against what he views as failed Democratic policies.

Coffman also pointed to some of the candidates’ past affiliations with the Democratic Socialists of America as a potential a factor in progressives’ losses. Recent polling conducted by Keating Research for One Main Street Colorado, a political nonprofit that advocates for labor and business interests, found 27% of Aurora respondents had a favorable view of the DSA, compared with 43% who viewed it unfavorably and 30% who were unfamiliar.

Both Coombs and Marcano withdrew from the DSA last month over their disagreement with the content of a Denver DSA statement, titled “Denver DSA Stands with Palestine.” But even if those affiliations affected voters’ views, Coombs, who’s been credited for building a large coalition of supporters, still won her election.

Decisions made on the Aurora council’s dais have become increasingly polarized in recent years, and party leanings have had a significant effect on how its members view Aurora’s problems and, ultimately, vote on them.

Statewide political interests have noticed and gotten involved in Aurora’s races.

“We truly believe the next frontier of Colorado politics is local,” said Shad Murib, chairman of the Colorado Democratic Party.

The party launched a campaign this year to target 100,000 Democratic voters across the state who don’t normally turn out for odd-year elections, hoping to persuade them to vote in nonpartisan races. While there were some successes, Murib said, it was clear the party needed to do more work in cities such as Aurora to “combat the last sort of dying breath of Republican corporate stronghold.”

The Colorado GOP also previously indicated that it would focus on local elections this cycle, but the party chair did not return a request for comment.

Heavy outside spending in races

Outside spending by GOP-aligned groups in Aurora’s elections underlined the fight for control of the council.

Independent expenditure committees — super PACs that can spend unlimited amounts of money — dropped nearly $1.1 million this year, according to the last available campaign finance data, largely fueled by contributions from dark-money groups that don’t disclose their donors. The vast majority of that spending was by groups that back Republicans.

Conservation Colorado, an environmental group that endorsed Democratic candidates in Aurora, including Marcano, said in a post-election statement that it spent more than it ever had before on local races in Colorado. But “progressive groups were outspent by the opposition by an 8:1 ratio,” the group said, “and did not secure a pro-conservation majority on the Aurora City Council.”

Coombs said she worries that many people didn’t really see how the council operated in the past few years, regardless of ideological opinions or personal relationships. In Aurora’s system, the mayor sits on the council and only votes when there is a tie, but the city’s operations are run by a city manager, despite a failed effort backed by Coffman this year to expand the mayor’s power.

“If people had observed Mayor Coffman’s utter failure to lead our council and inability to create coalitions on even the simplest issues, I don’t think they would have put him back in that position,” Coombs said. “And so that’s also concerning and disappointing — that folks perhaps were not aware, or maybe didn’t find it important, that we have a mayor that does not know how to do his job.”

In an October interview, Coffman disputed the notion that he didn’t work well among the council members to build consensus. He said he brings forward issues that he believes are important, regardless of potential disagreement.

But he also said he planned to do a better job when building policy in his second term as he continues the work he started in addressing homelessness and crime.

“The challenges are daunting in the city, but (solutions are) absolutely achievable,” Coffman said. I think this city has so much promise.”

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