Phil Weiser vs Victor Marx vs Greg Lopez: The Colorado Governor's Race, as Seen From Douglas County

Nobody serious thinks Victor Marx is going to be governor. Cook, Sabato's Crystal Ball, Inside Elections, Fox News and Silver Bulletin all rate the race Solid or Safe Democratic, and Colorado has not elected a Republican governor since 2002. So why read about it? Because the statewide result and the Douglas County result are two different questions, and the second one is wide open.

The three candidates, briefly

[Phil Weiser](/news/who-is-phil-weiser-governor-2026-douglas-county) is the two-term attorney general, a former dean of the University of Colorado Law School and a former clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He beat U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet in the June primary, 57 to 43 statewide and 53.25 to 46.75 in Douglas County, running as the more progressive of the two. His relationship with Douglas County's government is mostly adversarial: the commissioners, the sheriff and the district attorney have all sued the state over immigration laws with Weiser's office on the other side.

[Victor Marx](/news/who-is-victor-marx-governor-2026-douglas-county) is a first-time candidate, a Marine veteran and the founder of All Things Possible Ministries. He won the Republican primary with 39.9 percent, about 2,500 votes ahead of state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer; in Douglas County he finished second to her, 37.56 percent to 42.69. Both of his rivals declined to sign his post-primary unity compact. On October 2 a state hearing officer fined him and his committee $57,647.16 for 200 contributions over the legal limit and 10 illegal cash contributions, more than the state had asked; details here.

[Greg Lopez](/news/who-is-greg-lopez-governor-2026-douglas-county) is the one with the local address. He was mayor of Parker in the 1990s, won the 2024 special election for the congressional seat covering most of this county, left the Republican Party in December, and petitioned onto the ballot with 11,948 valid signatures. His slogan is "People Over Politics."

Why Douglas County is the place to watch

Three numbers.

1,290. That is how many votes Ganahl carried this county by in 2022, while losing the state by nearly 20 points. There was no third candidate of any consequence on that ballot. A Republican who runs even slightly behind Ganahl here loses the county.

39.9. That is Marx's share of his own party's primary statewide. Six in ten Republican primary voters picked someone else, and in Douglas County it was worse: Kirkmeyer beat him here, 42.69 percent to 37.56, with Scott Bottoms at 19.45. The two someone-elses have not come around.

11.8. That is the margin, in points, by which this county's voters chose Greg Lopez in the June 2024 special congressional election, the best showing by any Republican here in recent cycles. Five months later the same county gave Lauren Boebert a 0.57-point win. Douglas County voters have already demonstrated that they distinguish between kinds of Republicans. Now the kind they liked is on the ballot against the kind they did not nominate.

Add the registration picture (unaffiliated voters are a 50.6 percent majority here, and Republican registration has shrunk since 2016 while the voter rolls grew by more than a third) and you get a county where Marx has almost no margin to give and a familiar local name is positioned to take some.

The precedent nobody in the GOP wants to discuss

This has happened before. In 2010 the Republican nominee for governor, Dan Maes, collapsed after former congressman Tom Tancredo entered the race on a third-party line. Maes finished with 11.1 percent statewide. In Douglas County he got 11.05 percent; Tancredo carried the county with 48 percent and John Hickenlooper took 40.

We are not predicting a rerun. Tancredo in 2010 was a bigger political figure than Lopez is now, and Maes's campaign imploded in ways Marx's has not. But 2010 proves the mechanism: when conservative-leaning voters here are offered a familiar alternative to a nominee they have doubts about, they take it in very large numbers. Lopez does not need 36 percent to change the outcome in this county. At the 2022 margin, he needs about two points of the vote, two-thirds of it from the Republican column.

The money, through September 16

The state's September 21 reports, covering the cycle through September 16, per TRACER:

• Phil Weiser: $8,218,146 raised, $7,320,203 spent, $897,943 on hand.
• Victor Marx: $3,920,983 raised, $3,699,008 spent, $242,844 on hand.
• Greg Lopez: $110,002 in contributions plus $65,160 in loans, $163,876 spent, $11,286 on hand. Lopez has accepted the state's voluntary spending limits.

Weiser has outraised Marx about two to one and has nearly four times the cash for the final six weeks. Both have spent most of what they raised, much of it in the primary.

What we do not know

A lot. There is no public poll of the three-way race; the prediction-market and model numbers floating around are not polls, and we will not quote them as if they were. Unaffiliated candidacies usually fade as Election Day gets close and voters come home to a party. Lopez's September report shows $11,286 on hand, so whether he can afford to be seen in the final weeks is a real question. And Weiser has his own problem here: he ran to Bennet's left, and the Douglas County voter who splits a ticket is not looking for a progressive. A county can be winnable for a Democrat and still not be won by this one.

Our read

Statewide this is over, barring something strange. In Douglas County we would put it this way: Marx is more likely than not to finish behind the Democrat here, which no Republican nominee for governor has done since Maes in 2010, and the reason will be the third name on the ballot as much as the second. If Lopez fades into low single digits and Marx holds the county anyway, the old math is sturdier than we think, and we will say so on November 4.

*Money updated September 29 from TRACER.* We will update this page with polling as it arrives. More: every race on your ballot, whether Douglas County could actually vote blue, and the full ballot guide.