Michael Bennet — and Not Phil Weiser — in the Colorado Governor Democratic Primary | Part 1

Newsletter — Issue 9 — May 12, 2026 | Part 1 of 2 on the Colorado Democratic Primary for Governor

This newsletter has been published by Engage Colorado.

Michael Bennet — and Not Phil Weiser — in the Colorado Governor Democratic Primary | Part 1

This Engage Colorado Newsletter was written by Dan Caruso with the support of the Caruso Ventures team. The Ensuring Colorado's Innovation Future Coalition did not review and has not endorsed this Engage Colorado Newsletter.

I am endorsing Senator Michael Bennet over Attorney General Phil Weiser in the Colorado Democratic Primary for Governor on June 30. Simply put, Bennet is more likely to prioritize the long-term prosperity and well-being of every Coloradan over maintaining blind loyalty to the far-left or far-right agenda of either political party.

This newsletter — Part 1 of 2 on the Democratic primary for Governor — focuses on why I will not be voting for Phil Weiser. The affirmative case for Senator Bennet will follow in the next issue.

The Phil Weiser Record

I have known Phil for almost two decades. We have collaborated on numerous initiatives, particularly during his time at CU Law. He has been a guest on The Bear Roars podcast twice. I consider him a friend. Nothing that follows is personal — it is my honest opinion on what is best for Colorado.

Phil is one of the most credentialed legal minds in Colorado. He clerked for Justices Byron White and Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the U.S. Supreme Court before serving as senior counsel in the DOJ Antitrust Division under President Clinton. In 1999 he joined the CU Boulder Law faculty, where over the next two decades he founded the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship and served as Dean from 2011 to 2016. He took leave during that period to serve as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the DOJ Antitrust Division and as senior advisor to the National Economic Council under President Obama. In 2018 he was elected Colorado Attorney General. I respect his legal, political, and academic career.

Phil has spent his career in law, academia, and government — never as an operator in the private sector. He has never run a business, met a payroll, deployed capital, or weighed an investment decision. And as someone whose career has been spent entirely in legal and policy work, his answer to every problem tends to be the lawyer's answer: a new law, a new regulation, a lawsuit, or a fine.

His actions as Attorney General have shown alliance with the far-left agenda — across the cases he has pursued, the cases he has declined to pursue, and the way he has spoken about each. That alliance should concern any Coloradan who shares the Open Letter's vision of Colorado as "the premier technology and innovation ecosystem between the coasts" — and its concern for the long-term prosperity and well-being of every Coloradan.

A pattern across two administrations.

Phil's office has filed more than 60 federal lawsuits in the 16 months since Trump's January 2025 inauguration — roughly one new lawsuit every eight days.

During the four years of the Biden administration, Colorado joined none of the significant multistate actions state attorneys general brought against federal rules — including the challenges to mass student-loan forgiveness (Biden v. Nebraska, where the challengers ultimately prevailed at the Supreme Court), the ESG fiduciary-duty rule, the Title IX sex-redefinition rule, Executive Order 14019 on voter registration, and the social cost of carbon. This is not an argument that Phil should have joined any of those particular actions. Engage Colorado has not taken positions on these particular federal rules; if we had, we would likely agree with some and disagree with others. The point is the asymmetric tempo. The threshold for federal litigation in the Colorado Attorney General's office has shifted dramatically based on which party occupies the White House. That shift reveals an activist political posture — not the neutral application of legal judgment a state Attorney General's office is supposed to apply.

"Protecting our democracy" — the duplicity.

Phil has built much of his political brand on the language of "protecting our democracy." His record across multiple election-integrity and free-speech questions tells a different story: an Attorney General who invokes that language loudly when it serves his political base — and abandons it when it points in a politically inconvenient direction.

Four straight Supreme Court losses — each on a constitutional liberty.

Phil's office has lost at the U.S. Supreme Court four times during his tenure as Attorney General. Each case was a defense of Colorado law or rulings — but the legal strategy in each defense involved choices about which theories to advance and how aggressively to push them. Each loss came on a constitutional liberty question, by margins that included justices from across the ideological spectrum.

In each case, the office could have argued narrower theories, conceded at lower-court level, or declined to seek further review. The office chose otherwise — and the choices lost. In defending Colorado law and rulings, Phil's office repeatedly advanced positions that compel speech, criminalize speech without subjective intent, override federal constitutional structure, or regulate speech based on viewpoint. These are not edge-case losses. They are the defining First Amendment and federalism cases of the past three years — and Colorado lost every one of them, often by margins that included even the Court's most progressive justices.

The Tina Peters case — prosecuted her conduct, ignored her concerns.

Tina Peters is a convicted felon. The former Mesa County Clerk allowed unauthorized imaging of an election server during a software update in May 2021, and Phil's office worked with the Mesa County DA to prosecute her on the access-and-disclosure conduct. That prosecution was legitimate.

What Phil's office did not do was investigate the substantive technical claims her cybersecurity expert raised in an 83-page report filed with the Mesa County Board of Commissioners. Those claims — that 28,989 election log files were deleted during a Dominion Voting Systems trusted-build update, that the deletion may have violated 52 U.S.C. § 20701's 22-month federal retention requirement, and that chain-of-custody protocols may have been compromised across multiple Colorado counties using the same update — were testable technical questions, not partisan accusations. A disinterested Attorney General would have commissioned an independent forensic audit of the technical claims, entirely separate from the prosecution of Peters's conduct. Phil's office did not. The technical concerns were answered with press releases and dismissive characterizations rather than with the kind of forensic transparency that builds public confidence in elections.

The voter-roll challenge and the DOJ noncitizen cross-check.

In 2024, a civil challenge was filed under the National Voter Registration Act alleging that Colorado's voter rolls contained material inaccuracies. Phil and Secretary of State Jena Griswold publicly labeled the suit a "sham" and "part of a national campaign to undermine voter confidence." Whatever one thinks of the plaintiffs, the substantive question of voter-roll accuracy is the kind of question a disinterested AG resolves with a transparent data release, not a press release.

In December 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice formally requested Colorado's voter data to cross-check for noncitizen registrations. Phil refused, publicly announcing he would not be "bullied" by the federal government. The refusal may have been defensible on privacy grounds taken in isolation. But Phil neither commissioned the equivalent audit in-state nor released the aggregate data necessary for any third party to verify the rolls' accuracy. For someone who campaigns on protecting our democracy, Phil's actual record reveals an Attorney General more focused on appeasing the far-left agenda of his party — even when doing so leaves testable technical questions unanswered, or substitutes political characterization for transparent audit.

"Rule of law" — selectively applied along party lines.

Phil's other defining slogan is "the rule of law." His own words: "Colorado will always stand for the rule of law, even when the President refuses to do so." And: "When it comes to preserving our democratic republic, the rule of law is everything."

The slogan is doing political work, not legal work. Phil has applied "the rule of law" as a one-way instrument — invoking it loudly against Republican administrations, and abandoning it when applying it would create political friction with the far-left base.

The Mesa County deputy case — sued for cooperating with federal law enforcement.

In June 2025, Mesa County sheriff's deputy Alexander Zwinck pulled over a Brazilian national, Caroline Dias Goncalves, on I-70 for a routine traffic infraction. Zwinck shared driver's-license-stop information with federal partners on an interagency Signal chat that included ICE officers — a routine cross-agency information-sharing protocol he had long followed. ICE arrested the driver shortly after.

Phil sued the deputy. Personally. Under a Colorado statute prohibiting state and local law enforcement from cooperating with federal civil immigration enforcement. This was the first lawsuit filed under that statute. Phil has since opened similar investigations of officers at four additional Colorado law enforcement agencies — Vail PD, Eagle County Sheriff, Mesa County Sheriff, and Colorado State Patrol — for the same conduct.

This is the same Phil Weiser who promises that Colorado "will always stand for the rule of law, even when the President refuses to do so." A Colorado deputy following a long-established information-sharing protocol with federal partners — a practice that predated SB25-276 — was prosecuted by the state Attorney General for doing so. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed. The deputy resigned. The Mesa County commissioners voted to countersue.

Unfriendly to the innovation economy.

In May 2024, when Governor Polis was considering whether to veto SB24-205, Phil publicly backed the bill. He opposed the veto. The bill became law.

In the months that followed, Phil acknowledged the law was "really problematic" and warned it would "push businesses elsewhere" — words that should have moved an Attorney General with sole enforcement authority to act. He has had five voluntary tools available to limit the damage: a formal AG constitutional opinion, a public non-enforcement commitment, a decline-to-defend, a public call for repeal, or an indefinite rulemaking hold. He has used none of them.

Every meaningful pause on the AI Act has come from outside his office. Governor Polis convened a workgroup that produced a policy framework. The legislature passed a substantial rewrite — SB26-189, repealing SB24-205 — by overwhelming bipartisan margins (the House by 57–6, the Senate on third reading), which the Governor is expected to sign this week. xAI sued Phil's office to enjoin enforcement; the U.S. Department of Justice intervened on the plaintiffs' side. The federal court ordered enforcement halted. The Attorney General — who alone has the constitutional and statutory authority to limit a law he himself called broken — has not taken any concrete action.

The Palantir warning.

Phil's words proved prophetic. In February 2026, Palantir Technologies — Colorado's largest publicly traded company — moved its headquarters from Denver to Miami. In its SEC-filed risk disclosure to shareholders, Palantir specifically cited Colorado's AI policy, comparing the state's oversight regime to the European Union's AI Act and warning shareholders that compliance with such obligations could be difficult, onerous, and costly, with adverse effects on the company's business and growth prospects.

The Open Letter and the "all in" pledge.

In March 2026, more than 400 Colorado business and civic leaders signed an Open Letter, Ensuring Colorado's Innovation Future, calling on the Governor and Attorney General to take nine specific actions to restore Colorado's standing as a place where innovation can build. Phil's response, on April 20, 2026: "On this, I am all in, and I am committed to the nine points you raise."

In the weeks since, his office's posture has not visibly changed. The xAI lawsuit, filed by xAI in federal court against Phil's office to enjoin enforcement, continues, with the U.S. Department of Justice intervening on the plaintiffs' side.

The broader pattern of hostility to capital.

Phil's office has filed a second-front state antitrust action on top of the FTC's federal review (Kroger-Albertsons), served as counsel for Boulder County in the climate-tort lawsuit against Colorado's only in-state refinery (Suncor), and joined nearly every multistate antitrust action against Big Tech — while taking the opposite position on ESG coordination among financial institutions.

Each of these might be defensible. The cumulative posture sends a single signal to founders, investors, and corporate strategy teams: Colorado is one of the most uncertain jurisdictions in the country in which to deploy capital — second-filer antitrust risk on every deal, novel state-court tort liability on energy infrastructure, aggressive enforcement on traditional businesses paired with permissiveness for politically aligned coordination, and an AG's office that prioritizes political theater over the predictability that markets require.

The cost to Colorado.

Since 2019, roughly 98 companies have relocated or scaled back Colorado operations, with 27 leaving in 2025 alone. Colorado has lost a net 34 public-company headquarters since 2022. The state now ranks sixth in the nation for regulatory burden.

The Open Letter, Ensuring Colorado's Innovation Future, was written precisely because of this trajectory. Reversing it will require a Governor whose first instinct toward business is partnership, not prosecution; whose first instinct toward capital is welcome, not suspicion; and whose first instinct toward federal coordination is collaboration, not litigation. Phil's record as Attorney General shows none of those instincts. A Phil Weiser governorship would deepen the trajectory the Open Letter calls on Colorado to reverse — a further setback to Colorado's reputation, to its capacity to attract capital, and to the long-term prosperity and well-being of every Coloradan.

The case in summary.

Phil's record as Attorney General has been a record of selectively applied principles. "Protecting our democracy" applied to Republican adversaries, abandoned on testable election-integrity questions. "The rule of law" applied to Colorado deputies who cooperate with federal law enforcement, abandoned when applying it would create friction with the far-left base. The state's largest public company moved to Miami citing his policy choices in its SEC filings.

The Governor's office is the next role he is asking Coloradans for. The same instincts that have defined his AG tenure would, by structural design, define his governorship — at the cost of the long-term prosperity and well-being of every Coloradan.

What You Can Do

The Colorado Democratic Primary for Governor is on June 30. Centrist engagement now is what shapes the field.

Engage Colorado Stands For

Engage Colorado makes the case for pragmatic, balanced, and competent leadership — leadership that puts the long-term prosperity and well-being of every Coloradan ahead of the divisive extremes of either national party. That is the editorial standard of this publication, and it is the standard by which every endorsement is made.

This issue is the first half of that case for the Governor's primary. Part 2 — the affirmative case for Senator Bennet — is forthcoming.

— Dan Caruso

Managing Director of Caruso Ventures, Host of The Bear Roars Podcast, and Board Chair of Boulder Roots Music Fest