Gov. John Hickenlooper is projected to hold his office, according to calculations by The Denver Post on Wednesday morning.
With 93 percent of votes counted as of about 7:20 a.m., Hickenlooper is leading Bob Beauprez, a Republican, by roughly 22,000 votes. Votes are still being tallied in predominantly Democratic Boulder and Denver counties.
Hickenlooper holds 48.3 percent of the vote while Beauprez is trailing with 47.1 percent.
As Election Day turned to Wednesday, Democratic strongholds in Denver and Boulder still had tens of thousands of votes left to count. Swing-state counties and GOP holdouts, meanwhile, had far fewer ballots left for Beauprez to make gains.
Still, Secretary of State Scott Gessler said there was a chance the race would go into overtime.
“I think there is a strong likelihood right now that we will have a recount in the governor’s race,” Gessler said.
The race emerged as one of the tightest in Colorado and put Republicans on the edge of a sweep of statewide races for the first time in more than four decades.
Hickenlooper came out just before 11:30 p.m. to address his supporters and thank them for their work. “Do not lose heart. Get a little sleep,” he told them. “You are the reason Colorado is by far the greatest state in America.”
Beauprez also addressed supporters telling them, “I think that we’re going to be around to the wee hours of the morning or maybe tomorrow.”
Democrats put their hopes in key swing areas, such as Jefferson and Larimer counties, where officials delayed the count of thousands of ballots until Wednesday.
The excitement at the Republican event only grew as the night progressed and the party’s wins mounted. Not since 1970 have Republicans won all four state constitutional offices at once. Republicans were also in a position to make gains in the state legislature.
“It’s very close,” said state Sen. Kent Lambert, R-Colorado Springs, referring to the governor’s race. “The trend appears as though Beauprez is picking up more votes. If we get the governorship, it means we won all the statewide offices, which would be huge.”
The narrow margin raised the prospect of a recount, which is automatically triggered if the top two candidates are separated by 0.5 percent or less.
Hickenlooper, 62, is trying to avoid becoming the first elected Colorado governor to lose a bid for a second term in more than half a century. Beauprez, 66, a former congressman, is hoping to ride this year’s Republican current to political redemption after his staggering 17-point loss in the 2006 governor’s race.
The race is attracting national attention as one of the most competitive in the country and a referendum on the state’s political shift in recent years that included efforts to legalize marijuana, allow civil unions and enact tougher gun control.
The nature of the race became clear in the final days as polling showed it tied. It’s a far closer campaign than many expected and reflects the greater-than-anticipated Republican wave, driven by the national political mood.
Republicans went into Election Day with a 7.2 percent registration advantage on returned ballots and both parties scrambled to corral votes in the final hours.
At one voting center in Lakewood, a key swing area in Jefferson County, the governor’s race polarized voters.
Earleen Whitaker, a 70-year-old therapist, said she came to Bear Valley Church to vote because she was disheartened with the Republican Party.
“I like Hickenlooper,” she said. “I think he works across the board. I think he’s done a lot to even divides across Colorado cities.”
For Stan Compton, an 86-year-old retired firefighter, the national Republican mood influenced his vote, as did Hickenlooper’s reversal on the death penalty.
“I just don’t think (Hickenlooper) was a leader,” he said of his vote against the governor.
Ken Bickers, a political scientist at the University of Colorado, said Hickenlooper had the deck stacked against him with the mood of the nation.
“There’s an anti-incumbent mood that’s affected lots of candidates, not just Democrats, but especially Democrats, and that’s a difficult obstacle for any candidate to overcome,” he said.
The election represented Hickenlooper’s toughest political test in his 12-year career and challenged his budding national profile as a rising star in Democratic circles.
Hickenlooper once enjoyed a charmed political career as an independent-minded former two-term Denver mayor, ranking as one of the most popular governors in the nation, now serving as chairman of the National Governors Association.
A rebounding economy gave the governor a powerful position to start his campaign, and Republicans initially wondered whether it was even possible to unseat him.
But a Democratic legislature pushed Hickenlooper to the political left and a series of campaign missteps put doubts in voters’ minds.
In 2013, the governor signed legislation to put tougher restrictions on gun ownership after the Aurora theater shooting — even after he initially suggested such laws would not have prevented the incident.
It sparked a firestorm that led to the recall of two state senators and re-emerged on the campaign trail in June when the governor appeared to apologize for the gun measures in a private meeting with county sheriffs, a video of which surfaced on the Internet.
The same year, Hickenlooper also reversed his position on the death penalty and granted convicted killer Nathan Dunlap an indefinite reprieve from execution, citing concerns about Dunlap’s mental illness.The controversy resurfaced in August when Hickenlooper suggested the possibility of granting Dunlap clemency.
Meanwhile, the governor irritated members of his own party by not taking a tougher stance on fracking and by calling Colorado’s decision to legalize marijuana “reckless.”
A plunging approval rating, combined with a midterm election that tilted Republican, opened the door for Beauprez to mount a low-budget campaign that put him in contention.
A staunch conservative who became a political pundit and then a bison rancher after he left Congress in 2006, Beauprez emerged from a party primary in which he was considered more moderate than his rivals.
Beauprez raised $1.7 million and added at least $844,000 of his own money, still far short of the $5.4 million in Hickenlooper’s coffers, according to the most recent reports. Outside groups put in more than $10 million combined, mostly to air thousands of television ads in the race.
In the campaign, Beauprez emphasized Hickenlooper’s stumbles and depicted the governor as an ineffectual and indecisive leader. Republicans also tied Hickenlooper to an increasingly unpopular President Barack Obama, who shot pool with the governor during a June visit to Denver.
Democrats attacked Beauprez for his role in the sale of a community bank that later failed and hammered his statements against abortion and birth control, taking a page from an issue that galvanized the U.S. Senate race.
Beauprez said he supports repealing major laws, such as driver’s licenses for people in the country illegally and legalized marijuana, but he tried to moderate his stances by saying he would enforce existing state law.
The governor’s race took an increasingly bitter tone as the two rivals jousted in eight contentious debates in the final months and ended on a sharply negative note.
Beauprez launched a much-maligned TV ad in the final days that pointed to failures in the state corrections system that led to the release of parolees and asked, “With John Hickenlooper as governor, is your family safe?”
At Hickenlooper’s election party, supporter Vince Orlando of Boulder said the governor should have taken a more aggressive stance against Beauprez.
Failing to do so made his campaign appear “wishy-washy,” Orlando said.
“The Republicans smartened up,” he said.
El Paso County Treasurer Bob Balink attributed the GOP success to grunt work. “The Republican Party’s worked very hard, harder than in the past,” he said. “That’s what it’s all about. Getting out the vote.”
John Frank: 303-954-2409, jfrank@denverpost.com or twitter.com/ByJohnFrank
Jesse A. Paul, Jordan Steffen and John Ingold contributed to this report.
