Well, the campaign has ended, and as you probably know, we didn’t win. What you might not know is that we actually did quite well, though not for our campaign.

The election results were right on target with the two polls I conducted, except for one thing: Bentley Rayburn and Duncan Bremer’s percentages were reversed. (For instance, everyone seemed to think that Mayor Rivera had a very good chance of winning, but my polling showed him about where he ended up. See http://coloradopols.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=1542.)

So what happened? Well, we had run a very positive campaign since February. We’d been out on the street smiling and waving almost every day for about a month prior to the primary. And so when people started thinking about voting, they thought about that positive candidate… what was his name again?

And right before the election, Bentley Rayburn’s campaign unleashed a huge media blitz, talking about integrity and how he was the positive candidate. And he had money raised from all over the country to outspend us 10 to 1 those final two weeks. Everyone, even his own campaign, was surprised that he came in third. It was a brilliant move on his campaign to be able to piggyback on what we’d been working toward for months. Congrats, General Rayburn, on running such a successful campaign… we wish you the very best in your next endeavor! (It wouldn’t have mattered if we had all of his votes and all of ours… we still wouldn’t have won.)

So we may not have won the race, but we did make a difference in it. Duncan always brought the debate back to issues instead of slogans. He stressed the utmost importance of integrity in a race that got down and dirty. And most of the other campaigns went out of their way to compliment us on running our campaign with honor and integrity. I hope we made a difference in politics in this part of Colorado for years to come.