The race for the 59th House District is still too close to call. This morning, early unofficial returns from the Colorado Secretary of State’s office show that the margin had shrunk to 292 votes, with Republican J. Paul Brown maintaining a razor-thin lead over his opponent Democrat Mike McLachlan.
With just 33,576 votes in, McLachlan had captured 16,642 votes – 49.57 percent – while Brown had 16,934 – 50.43 percent. About 1,000 votes have yet to be counted in Gunninson County. The Gunnison Clerk and Recorders Office this morning said it expected to post its full results at 2 p.m.; in the afternoon, the office revised its promise, and said it hoped to have full results out by the end of business day.
Around 9 p.m. Tuesday, Brown said, “We’re doing fine. We thought it would be tight. We’ll have to see what happens.”
McLachlan, too, was preparing for a long night.
“We’re not surprised by the closeness of it. We’re still hoping all the precincts will come in and I’ll win. That’s the plan,” he said.
The election, which has cost well over a $1 million, was the most expensive house race in the state. The flood of cash signifies how badly the Republican and Democratic parties – bent on building a majority – coveted the seat. But the money also marks the outsized symbolism the race took on to outside groups in the wake of McLachlan’s votes for gun control.
The contest was always expected to be bracingly competitive.
In 2012, Durango lawyer McLachlan defeated Brown, an Ignacio rancher, by just 917 votes – the narrowest margin in the state that year – after the district was redrawn to be more congenial to Democrats.
In La Plata County this year – a critical bastion of Democratic support – McLachlan ran up 11,809 votes, or a 52.8 percent lead over Brown, who got 10,547 votes, or 47.2 percent, according to final unofficial numbers.
While Brown, a former La Plata County commissioner, got top billing as the incumbent in the 2012 campaign, with opponents savaging him as a right-wing extremist, this year, McLachlan’s record in the Colorado legislature took center stage.
On the campaign trail, Brown highlighted water, transportation and regulations as critical areas in which he hoped to focus, singling out water storage and the state’s underfunded roads and highways.
McLachlan repeatedly said education was his top priority, though he said with rising revenues, funding should not be the sole concern.
“The most important element of education is the parent involvement,” McLachlan said.
McLachlan also said he hoped to work on water storage, saying it was crucial that Colorado store more water on the Eastern Slope.
Throughout the campaign, gun groups have portrayed McLachlan, a former Marine who served as Colorado’s solicitor general from 1999 to 2000, as a gun-hating traitor who’s willing to shred the Constitution to advance the nefarious political agenda of Denver Democrats.
After McLachlan’s 2013 vote for gun control legislation in the wake of deadly shootings in Colorado and Connecticut, he became one of four Democrats targeted for recall. Though McLachlan was the only legislator to survive the onslaught – the recall attempt in Durango quickly collapsed – the gun lobby did not relent.
While McLachlan’s support for gun control endeared him to the Democratic base, which saw his votes as acts of rare political bravery in the face of an implacable national gun lobby, McLachlan’s political scalp also became a trophy that gun lovers desperately wanted to claim.
Indeed, far from dismaying the gun lobby, the fact that McLachlan escaped a recall attempt unscathed seemed to energize his political enemies in this election. Laura Carno, registered agent for Freedom Team, a super PAC that ran blitzkrieg TV spots attacking McLachlan on CNN and ESPN during Monday Night Football, said she was asked to get involved in the race in the aftermath of the recall.
Two weeks ago, the NRA’s super PAC spent $32,000 on a mailer for Brown.
Beyond guns, McLachlan and Brown differed on many issues, including schools.
While both men put themselves forward as champions of K-12 education, their visions of government’s role in education had little in common.
In candidate forums, Brown said the federal government has “way too much influence in our schools.”
He criticized Common Core, saying, “it’s a top-down program mandated by federal government, and maybe even by the United Nations,” he said.
McLachlan, meanwhile, openly derided the idea that the United Nations is trying to co-opt local school boards as a ridiculous manifestation of right-wing paranoia. At one candidate forum, he said, “Whenever I heard my opponent say something is part of a U.N. conspiracy or an imposition by the federal government, it breaks my heart. I’ve been to the United Nations, and (Durango School District) 9-R is not on their map.”
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
