I mentioned Monday that when I first heard that Sen. John Hickenlooper was facing a serious challenge in Tuesday’s primary my immediate reflex was concern, before warming to the idea. By the time the returns started coming in, I was hoping Julie Gonzales would defeat him or at least give him a much tighter scare. As I noted last night, while votes were still being counted, getting 43% of the vote against a sitting senator who has been a major presence in the state’s politics for a quarter century is nothing to sneeze at. That signals an extraordinary level of discontent. Still, the actual margin was fairly comfortable. He almost got to 60%.
I hope we see more close calls or more Democratic senators defeated in primaries, though hopefully in cases where the states are blue enough and the challengers strong enough to hold the seats. There are no seats to spare. There’s no margin for losing a couple seats to make a point. But there are also plenty of senators from pure blue states that could be won by almost anyone who’s not truly feral. We just spoke yesterday again about the necessity of Supreme Court reform. And the John Hickenloopers of the Senate are not cut out for that. They won’t get it done. They must either be replaced or convinced by primary close calls to rethink how they approach their jobs.
To be clear, Hickenlooper isn’t the worst. I’m sure he’s a nice guy. I’m sure he’s an able leader in other moments. But he’s representative of the get-along-go-along mentality of the Senate Democratic caucus, which is doing the doing the equivalent of debating a new fire alarm system, perhaps even some new fire retardant insulation eve, while the house is literally on fire. You’ll need to end a few of their careers to jolt the remainder into reconsidering their approach.
