In this ongoing series, Boulder Reporting Lab columnists Brian Keegan and Bob Yates discuss local issues, exploring where they agree, where they differ and what’s at stake for Boulder.
With Boulder’s 2026 election settled, Brian Keegan, a CU professor, and Bob Yates, a former Boulder City Councilmember, debate what the results mean for the city. Keegan argues that endorsements and campaign strategy helped determine the winners and that the shift to even-year elections is changing Boulder politics. Yates sees the defeat of the $400 million bond measure as a wake-up call for city leaders and urges the new council to listen more closely to voters. Both weigh in on what comes next.
Brian: Bob, we had two conversations about the 2026 election: one in September on County Question 200 and another in October on Measure 2K. It’s November, and the voters have spoken. How did we do with our predictions?
Bob: Brian, you boldly posted your pre-election predictions on Nextdoor and Reddit. With a few minor exceptions, you got it right. My predictions were close, but not quite as accurate as yours. How did you form your predictions?
Brian: I didn’t have any special magic ball for my predictions, but I looked at endorsements, candidates’ campaign strategies and what we know about Boulder voters. I think the results show why those factors matter.
Endorsements, in particular, tell us quite a bit about a candidate’s prospects. First, earning them is a grueling process. Ryan Schuchard shared that he completed 52 questionnaires, forums and interviews this election cycle. But being a councilmember is a demanding (now part-time) job that requires time, an appetite for digesting complex information and a willingness to engage with diverse groups. Candidates who are unprepared for or simply ignore the importance of the endorsement process during the campaign may be signaling that they aren’t ready for the job.
Second, endorsements are important signals to voters in a city with officially nonpartisan council races. The incumbents standing for reelection were all competent, hardworking and widely respected. Candidates like Aaron Brockett, Tina Marquis and Jill Grano, who successfully bridged local partisan divides and earned endorsements from a combination of progressive and moderate individuals and groups, unsurprisingly earned more votes than candidates supported by a single group.
Now that the votes are nearly counted, we’re entering the familiar post-election ritual of interpreting voters’ mandates. Or, as it’s more commonly known, taking credit and assigning blame. Looking at returns from across Boulder County, what are your big takeaways?
Bob: Psychologist Abraham Maslow, most famous for his hierarchy of needs, also wrote, “In any given moment, we have two options: to step forward into growth or step back into safety.” This week, voters did both. They stepped forward by approving a long-needed increase in the number of Boulder County commissioners under Ballot Question 200, and by approving funding for a new Front Range passenger train line under Ballot Issue 7A. But they also stepped back into safety by reelecting Aaron Brockett as Boulder’s mayor and by retaining all three Boulder City Councilmembers who sought reelection.
Brian: Going into Nov. 3, I felt confident enough about five of the six open seats to make my prediction: Aaron Brockett for mayor, the incumbents Tina Marquis, Ryan Schuchard and Tara Winer, and former councilmember Jill Grano. I thought the sixth seat would come down to another photo finish between Sam Fuqua and Ryan Jamieson, who each brought distinct but strong sets of endorsements.
Sam ended up winning that last spot on council. Using the method for forecasting results I shared last year, I had forecast Grano moving from second to first and Fuqua potentially squeaking out a fourth-place finish with Winer taking fifth and therefore getting just a two-year term. For Winer, even her fourth-place finish is a drastic change from her overwhelming victory in 2023. It also illustrates how the strategies and constituencies for council elections in even years are going to be very different from those in past elections.
Bob: Another big takeaway for me is that voters rejected Boulder Ballot Issue 2K, which would have allowed the city to borrow an additional $400 million for infrastructure, accompanied by the biggest tax increase in city history to pay for it.
Think about that, Brian: Voters reelected every council incumbent, including the mayor, who placed 2K on the ballot, but overwhelmingly rejected their handiwork. I believe the message voters sent to council was this: We want you to continue to lead us, but you need to think more carefully about how you’re handling some city affairs. It’s a wake-up call, which I hope council heeds.
Brian: Issue 2K was the headline local ballot measure within the city. It had weak support from the start, elicited vituperative opposition and lacked any organized pro-campaign, so its failure is disappointing but not surprising. It lost 45% to 55%. The margin was much closer than conventional wisdom suggested. In our private wager, I took the over on your line of 35% yes on 2K, so you owe me a coffee.
The gap between Issue 2K and 2M is also interesting. The latter, which changed the municipal debt limit, passed 54% to 46%. Voters sent another mixed mandate (remember Bedrooms are for People?). They reelected incumbents who supported a failed bond measure while also voting to allow more debt.
That leaves the incoming council with some difficult decisions about how to budget for maintenance of our declining facilities in 2028 and beyond.
Bob: If we can avert our eyes for a moment from our parochial interests here in Boulder, I am so proud of Americans around the country for electing a Congress that will restore balance in our nation. Over the last two years, our nation has been like a critically ill person running a deadly high fever. But like a good doctor, the voters stepped in this week to provide the medicine that breaks the fever and will help the patient eventually recover. The sickness will linger for a while. But we can now hope for survival.
Brian: Voters around the country rendered an unambiguous verdict on the unaffordability and corruption under President Trump. While Colorado voters disappointingly backed some bad-faith culture war propositions, Boulder County voters overwhelmingly rejected these measures while also electing Democrats up and down the ballot.
As we know, party labels break down within Boulder, and while seven of the nine councilmembers will have been endorsed by Boulder Progressives, they are not a hive mind. They’ll pursue different, and likely conflicting, priorities, which is a healthy part of any democracy.
Councilmember-elect Grano had an excellent blog post in October about the importance of building coalitions to get to five votes on council. One likely priority for the new council is performance auditing, with many of the winning council candidates campaigning on stronger fiscal oversight and transparency.
There are at least five votes to pursue this, but I will wager that a performance audit, while well-intentioned, will turn into a political quagmire that will neither find the profound levels of waste being alleged nor satisfy the critics looking for a pretext to replace City Manager Nuria Rivera-Vandermyde.
Meanwhile, the consequences of “government efficiency” at the federal level continue to show up in our community. Given the urgent need for investments to keep families in Boulder and harden ourselves against climate disruptions, this year’s election should remind politicians that calls for fiscal austerity might only resonate with voters in odd years.
Back to Issue 2K. With its failure, how should Boulder pay for rec centers, a public safety center and other overdue maintenance? You called for appointing a committee similar to the Capital Investment Strategy Committee you chaired back in 2011 to bring an alternative proposal to voters. Should council try to bring another omnibus proposal, break up maintenance into smaller pieces for the 2027 election or wait until 2028?
Bob: Brian, I think if council and the community committee they appoint next year can pare down the $400 million proposal to something voters find more palatable, a smaller omnibus tax measure covering rec center refurbishment and a new police dispatch center could certainly fly with the voters in 2027 or 2028. I favor doing that next year.
In fact, the work has already begun. After they put the $400 million Issue 2K on the ballot last summer, city staff and councilmembers conceded that there’s at least $130 million of the $400 million they asked for that they don’t really need. I wrote about this in my newsletter on Monday. Sometimes Plan B is better than Plan A.
Brian: Speaking of listening to voters, the political conversation has changed since your last campaign as a candidate in 2023, especially online.
We certainly saw some candidates bending over backwards to appeal to voters on Nextdoor, Reddit, TikTok and other social media platforms. From where I sit, Tuesday’s results unambiguously indicate that appeasing the loudest voices online is not a winning strategy when even-year council elections bring out a larger, different electorate.
Ryan Jamieson, who finished in seventh place, appropriately called out this toxic dynamic in a Nextdoor post saying, “candidates would come here to engage and would be interrogated, castigated, and finally deemed unfit for support, if not just insulted outright. … It’s an ongoing battery of purity tests with successive posters simply looking for reasons to disqualify a candidate. As a result, Nextdoor posters spend significantly more time tearing down possible candidates than they do working to get them elected.”
I hope future candidates and campaigns learn from these experiences and resist the siren’s call of superficial engagement from a few dozen unrepresentative voters and invest their energy in other places throughout our community.
The shift in the tenor of local conversations elicited repeated warnings from electeds. Bob, you were also on the receiving end of some sharp comments over your endorsement of Aaron Brockett for mayor this year. What advice do you have for newly elected officials trying to sort through all that feedback and decide whose voices to prioritize?
Bob: Before I answer that, it’s worth remembering what this election means for the mayor’s relationship with council. Everyone who will serve on the 2027-28 city council endorsed Aaron for mayor. So, even though the voters elected Aaron for mayor, council got the mayor they wanted, which is how the mayor used to be selected before we started this direct-elect thing in 2023.
Regardless of how the mayor is chosen, people need to understand that the mayor is just one of nine votes on council. He doesn’t have any extra power or authority. And he doesn’t administer the functions of the city, as mayors do in a “strong mayor” form of government like Denver, Chicago or New York.
But to your question about whose voices matter, elected officials need to listen to all the people they serve. Council didn’t do that when they put Issue 2K on the ballot. A voter survey commissioned by council last spring told them that only 45% of the electorate supported the proposed $400 million bond measure. That’s almost exactly the percentage that voted in favor of 2K. I guess sometimes it’s helpful to read your own polling.
Brian: It seems absurd to even think about the 2027 elections days after this 2026 election. Now that council is elected in even years, odd-year elections like November 2027 will still feature Boulder Valley School District board seats, and there are always more ballot measures.
Without a council race as an anchor, turnout for these races is likely to be even lower than before with an electorate even less representative of the broader population than in even years. What will odd-year elections be like going forward, both for an activist trying to get issues on ballots and for a voter looking at a smaller ballot?
Bob: I wasn’t a fan of shifting city council elections from odd years to even years, which the voters approved a couple of years back. This was the first even-year city council election and, as predicted, it got a bit buried under all of the state and federal stuff. If it wasn’t for the ill-conceived Ballot Issue 2K and the quixotic mayoral campaign of Aquiles La Grave, this year’s city ballot would have been a bit of a yawner compared to the existential questions on the national stage. One result of the shift to even-year council elections is that anyone wanting to put something on the local ballot that wouldn’t gain broad voter support might try to sneak it through in an odd year, when fewer people will be paying attention.
Brian: Once the new council is seated in December, members will begin planning for a “retreat” where they will work through their wish lists to come up with a work plan. I see a strong mandate from this election to prioritize housing affordability, stabilize the budget, end warrantless surveillance, build safer transportation options, invest in climate resilience and address Xcel’s disruptive power shutoffs. What advice do you have for our new council in coming up with their 2027 work plan?
Bob: Brian, I’m not sure I agree with your list of 2027-28 “mandates.” On the nine-member council, there will be only two new members, one of whom served on council before. And nearly everything on your list was a community priority when I was first elected to council back in 2015. So, not much new here.
Nonetheless, since you asked, here’s my advice to the newly elected councilmembers and mayor: In the final days of the political campaign that just ended, you went door to door, seeking votes. I’m sure you learned a few things while talking with constituents on their doorsteps. I urge you to continue going door to door, both virtually and actually. You no longer need votes from residents, but you need to hear what they have to say. Listen.
Brian: One last thing, Bob. The election is over, but the election certification process is not. Check out all the excellent and essential work the County Clerk’s office does in tabulating, auditing and certifying the vote through November by attending the risk-limiting audit and the canvass board meeting. Then comes the swearing in of our new elected officials in December and January.
Thanks for another great conversation, Bob. There is always plenty for us to discuss!
