In over thirty-five years in Colorado politics, I learned something: when things get hard, many legislators fold. When the votes aren’t there, when leadership’s against them, when the room full of lobbyists and donors is telling them to wait, many of them fold, lower their expectations, and move on. A few don’t.
Julie Gonzales doesn’t fold. I’ve watched her work, and I know the difference.
Colorado families are being squeezed from every direction. Rent has become something most young people no longer can afford. A trip to the emergency room can wipe out a family’s savings. Trump is dismantling the constitutional protections that keep families safe, running up costs, stripping rights and the Senate, the institution with the most power to respond, has largely watched. Too many of them have never had to fight for their seat at the table. They were invited. They don’t know what it looks like to win a room that never wanted you there.
Julie knows.
The skills you need to lead an effective resistance, organizing, building coalitions, knowing when to apply pressure and when to change the rules themselves are exactly the skills you develop when you spend your career succeeding in institutions that weren’t designed to include you. The daughter of a rancher and a second grade teacher, Julie has spent twenty years doing exactly that. It has made her the most effective legislator I’ve seen come through this state; she has passed over 200 pieces of legislation in the past eight years. Like me, Julie has succeeded as a state senator not because the institution was designed for women like us, but because in many ways, it wasn’t.
Julie passed Colorado’s Reproductive Health Equity Act before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. She didn’t react. She anticipated. She looked at a federal judiciary being methodically stacked against reproductive freedom, and she went to work building state-level protections while there was still time to do it on her own terms. She read the threat before the room was ready to, understanding how power moves, and acted. Coloradans still have the right to make their own health care decisions because Julie did that work.
When corporate landlords started using algorithm-based tools to coordinate rents and price families out of their homes, Julie went after the algorithms. She authored Just Cause for Eviction protections. She pushed transparency on hospital prices and prescription drug costs. These aren’t symbolic votes. They’re the moves of someone who has learned exactly where the leverage points are and has the discipline to use them.
That is what the U.S. Senate is missing. Not more people who are willing to issue strongly worded statements, there is no shortage of those. What’s missing are people who know how to win in rooms that weren’t set up for them to win. People who have had to be strategic because they couldn’t afford not to be.
I say this as someone who has lived it. I served as Senate President at a time when that wasn’t what anyone expected of someone like me. I know what it takes. I know what it costs. And I know that it produces a kind of tactical clarity you don’t get any other way.
When Julie goes to Washington, Colorado families will have a Senator who will fight to bring down drug prices, hold corporate landlords accountable, and stand up to an administration that is using federal power to punish its enemies and reward its donors. Because she is someone who has been doing this work for two decades, winning even in rooms that didn’t always want her to succeed.
Colorado cannot afford another cautious voice when we need doers, not backbenchers or seat warmers, running for office. Julie Gonzales is not a backbencher, she is a battletested leader who doesn’t shy away from a fight, but still manages to leave her door open to those with whom she disagrees. We need someone who has spent her whole career mastering the art of winning where she wasn’t expected to and who will bring that exact skill set to the most important fight of our lifetimes.
Please join me in casting your ballot for Julie Gonzales in the Democratic Primary on June 30th, she is exactly what this country needs.
Democrat Joan Fitz-Gerald served as president of the Colorado Senate from 2005 to 2007. She was the first woman elected to that position in Colorado history.