Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) encountered a setback in his election campaign last night, with his Democratic primary challenger Andrew Romanoff winning the states party’s caucuses.
Romanoff, a former state House Speaker who has been running an anti-Washington campaign, took 51% of the vote over Bennet, who was appointed to office in January 2009, with 42%. This makes it likely that Romanoff will beat Bennet at the state party convention, and thus have the top ballot position in the primary.
However, this is not necessarily the end for Bennet. He cleared the 30% threshold needed to guarantee a position on the ballot itself, without which he would have had to obtain ballot access through a petition drive. And the caucus/convention results do not necessarily dictate the primary outcome — in the 2004 open-seat Senate race, both parties’ convention winners handily lost the actual primary elections for their respective nominations.
