Glenn has tough road to November ballot
HIGHLANDS RANCH -A Democrat political tracker – an opposition party henchman trying to catch political faux pas on camera – crashed a small neighborhood meet-and-greet for Darryl Glenn earlier this month. The man stood obtrusively in the middle of the living room with a small camera recording Glenn’s conversations.
The man was asked to leave – and did so without incident. But the fact he was dispatched to a small event for Glenn represents a recent and seismic shift in Colorado’s Republican U.S. Senate primary race.
In April 2015, top officials within the Colorado Democratic Party didn’t know who Darryl Glenn was or that the El Paso County commissioner had declared his candidacy that January. Glenn was dismissed by the media, which reported Republicans had been unsuccessful at soliciting a big-name candidate to challenge incumbent Democrat Michael Bennet.
Now the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is filing open-records requests for Glenn’s voting record and email correspondence for his time on the El Paso County commission, as well as seeking his correspondence with the Colorado Department of Public Safety.
“I think those are indications that they are taking him more seriously,” said Steve House, chairman of the Colorado GOP.
House pointed to Glenn’s endorsement by the Senate Conservatives Fund as “a strong indication that he’s getting traction.”
The SCF is a tea party-affiliated political action committee that spent millions on races in 2014 and is expected to do the same in 2016. It has raised $30,000 for Glenn, according to the fund’s website.
Glenn’s campaign volunteers laughed about the attention during the meet-and-greet.
“We love that,” Glenn said. “We have a real campaign. I’ve been working on my battle plan for four years.”
That battle plan is simple: travel the state meeting as many people as possible in hopes of earning their votes.
Glenn, a Colorado Springs native who attended Doherty High School and the Air Force Academy. He spent more than 20 years in Air Force acquisitions and logistics, got a law degree from the New England School of Law and served on the Colorado Springs City Council before being elected commissioner.
Simply put, Glenn has always been a leader, said Jeff Whaley, chairman of Glenn’s Douglass County campaign and a friend of Glenn’s since they were 13.
“Darryl was involved in running student council and all of those kinds of things. He was a leader amongst all of our peers, a captain on the football team,” Whaley said. “He’s been that guy our whole lives.”
And though Glenn jokes that all he needs is a tank of gas to win the election, the path won’t be easy.
The Senate Conservative Fund money will help, but Glenn does not have the cash of opponents Jack Graham and Robert Blaha, who each loaned their campaigns $1 million.
Glenn raised about $28,000 and loaned his campaign another $17,000. Bennet has a war chest of $7.6 million even after more than a month of buying TV ads.
So Glenn may be on Bennet’s radar, but he’s still an underdog in the five-man primary that also includes former Colorado State University athletic director Graham, Colorado Springs businessman Blaha, former Aurora City Councilman Ryan Frazier and former state Rep. Jon Keyser .
Glenn was also an underdog going into the Colorado state assembly in April when nine other candidates were trying to get on the primary ballot through the state’s complicated caucus process.
Glenn cleared the field in eight minutes.
His speech electrified the crowd and he took 70 percent of the vote from thousands of delegates from across the state. It takes 30 percent of the vote to get on the ballot.
No one else made the cut.
Glenn’s four remaining opponents skipped the caucus process and petitioned onto the ballot. For three of those candidates, it’s been a messy process wrought with court cases and, in one instance, criminal allegations against a petition gatherer.
Glenn’s route has kept him out of that fray.
“I never considered petitioning,” Glenn said. “If you go to the assembly then you don’t have these issues and you don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on attorneys. If you can’t stand up in front of the core base of the Republican Party and get 30 percent of the vote you shouldn’t be running for this office.”
Glenn’s ground game is well-organized and robust.
The Highlands Ranch event was hosted by Roger Edwards, a Missouri native who had never attended a Colorado state assembly before this year. After Glenn’s speech, Edwards was motivated to offer his help.
“He just laid right into the bullet points,” Edwards said of Glenn’s speech, noting all the other candidates “gave their pedigree.”
Edwards’ wife, Pam, recalled his enthusiasm after the assembly.
“He came home and he said, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’ve met this man, you’re never going to believe’ and that’s all I heard for days and days and days,” she said.
The first bullet point in Glenn’s speech was thanking his mother for life.
“I am going to be a strong defender of the rights of the unborn,” he said, gaining immediate applause. The speech jumped from foreign policy to domestic policy. He criticized President Barack Obama for picking sides in the racially charged argument over police shootings that was sparked when a white policeman shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
But Glenn also re-purposed a quote from Obama’s famous speech on race relations, changing a few words to make it his own.
“It is not about white America, black America or brown America. It is about the United States of America,” Glenn said. “I have something to say and I hope the news is picking this up: All lives matter.”
The speech motivated Ron Cihak to leave his email address with Glenn’s campaign staff. And when he got an email inviting him to Edwards’ house to meet Glenn, Cihak jumped at the opportunity.
“I was just so inspired,” Cihak said. “I see a guy that can beat Michael Bennet. I see a guy that has every skill set Michael Bennet doesn’t have, and I want to help him win.”
At the meeting, Glenn talked extensively about the need to downsize the military through a base realignment and closure process. For a sitting El Paso County commissioner in an area with five major military installations, that’s a bold statement of fiscal conservative principles.
“When you think about what’s happening today in the military, you have the Pentagon that’s really pushing for a base realignment and closure, and that scares a lot of people and it’s become very political,” Glenn said. “Politicians do not want to talk about that because they are like ‘I’m worried about my base in my backyard.'”
But Glenn broached the subject himself.
“If anybody has more to lose it would be me,” he said. “Here’s the reality. We’ve got a $19 trillion deficit and it’s growing. We have a growing military threat that’s out there right now, and what we’re doing is we’re hollowing out the force. We’re cutting the defense budget.”
Glenn said the way to counter that is to cut smart and efficiently by downsizing bases.
So what could hurt Glenn in the campaign moving forward?
He was divorced in March.
“I tell people everybody goes through difficult challenges in life and this is something that was very thoughtful, deliberative and prayed on,” Glenn said. “I felt that it was in the best interests of everyone.”
Peg Littleton, one of his caucus opponents who failed to make the cut and colleague on the El Paso County commission, said she doesn’t think Glenn’s character can be challenged.
“Darryl is honest. He has integrity,” she said. “He is not afraid of standing up for what he believes. He is not owned by anybody or easily manipulated.”
But Littleton said Glenn will struggle to raise money and she discounted the importance of his win at the assembly.
“About 45 percent (of the delegates) were new and had never participated politically before, and they literally were going to make their minds up by listening to an eight-minute speech,” she said.
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Contact Megan Schrader: 286-0644
Twitter @CapitolSchrader
Darryl Glenn
U.S. Senate Republican candidate Darryl Glenn meets with supporters Friday, May 27, 2016, at a home in Peyton. Glenn left for a bus tour of Western Colorado the next morning. (The Gazette, Christian Murdock)
U.S. Senate Republican candidate Darryl Glenn meets with supporters Friday, May 27, 2016, at a home in Peyton. Glenn left for a bus tour of Western Colorado the next morning. (The Gazette, Christian Murdock)