Colorado candidates and committees reported $64 million in receipts for the 2026 election cycle through the first quarter of this year — $48.4 million federal, $15.1 million state. That’s the biggest Q1 total of any recent Colorado cycle, and the composition of it tells a consistent story across every level of the ballot. This is the first of three articles HCA is publishing today on what the Q1 numbers show, with additional data companions and an investigative piece to follow this week.
Federal: $10 million added, fewer candidates spending it. Our federal analysis, [Colorado for Sale, Q1: $10 Million Added in Three Months], runs through the $48.4 million federal number and who’s responsible for it. Eileen Laubacher, Gabe Evans, Manny Rutinel, Jason Crow, and Shannon Bird account for more than half of Q1 growth in the federal field — and they added that money as primary opponents around them were leaving the race. Hickenlooper still leads the state in total fundraising. Boebert is now the only Colorado federal candidate of either party running a majority-small-donor online fundraising operation.
State: the Republican Party raised $1,243. Our state-level analysis, [Vegas Rules, Colorado Politics: the Republican Party Raised $1,243], leads with the state’s most extreme partisan gap in Colorado campaign finance: the Colorado Republican Committee’s Q1 receipts of $1,243 against the Colorado Democratic Party’s $278,386. Seven Republicans qualified for statewide primary ballots at the April 11 state assembly without registering TRACER fundraising committees — on the AG, Secretary of State, and State Treasurer races alone. The Colorado Democratic Party publishes a current list of qualified primary candidates on its website. The Colorado Republican Party does not publish a comparable list.
The cross-cutting finding: field consolidation via assembly. What ties the federal and state stories together is what the April 11 state assemblies did to both fields. The Republican state assembly narrowed dozens of filed candidates into two-and-three-person primary ballots across Governor, Senate, Attorney General, Secretary of State, and Treasurer. Democratic assemblies concentrated primaries in CO-04, CO-03, CO-05, and a few of the statewide constitutional offices. The donors who might have scattered across broader fields stayed in and concentrated behind the survivors — a pattern visible on both sides of the aisle. A roundup article following these two, What the $64 Million Tells Us, walks through the three patterns we see cutting across the data.
What’s coming this week. The Federal Data Companion publishes Tuesday with the underlying FEC-sourced tables and per-candidate breakdowns that support today’s federal article. The State Data Companion follows later in the week with TRACER equivalents. Both are reference documents — searchable records of who raised what from where, not narrative pieces. Readers who want to check our work or run their own analysis on a specific candidate or district will find those companions useful.
A next article, on a slightly longer timeline, will examine an accountability gap HCA has identified in Colorado’s independent-expenditure reporting system. Through the first quarter, 98.5 percent of IE dollars registered with TRACER — $8.59 million across 115 committees — cannot be traced to specific beneficiary candidates using the data Colorado publishes in bulk form. The field exists on per-committee PDF filings but not in aggregate exports. That piece is in reporting with source interviews and ships later this week on a 48-to-72-hour cycle.
Today’s package is Federal, State, Roundup. Read them in that order if you want the full picture; read State first if the $1,243 hook pulled you in.
Colorado for Sale, Q1: $10 Million Added in Three Months and Vegas Rules, Colorado Politics: the Republican Party Raised $1,243 publish today alongside this preview. The Roundup follows.
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