Rick Palacio won reelection to a third term as chair of the Colorado Democratic Party on Saturday at the biennial meeting of the party’s state central committee in downtown Denver, fending off challenges from campaign consultant David Sabados and former congressional candidate Vic Meyers.

Palacio won on the first ballot with 53 percent of the vote. Out of 468 votes cast, the incumbent received 248, Sabados got 182 and Meyers had 38.

“It was a decisive win, and I’m looking forward to the next two years,” Palacio told The Colorado Statesman after results were announced at the Marriott Denver Downtown.

Palacio said he was confident that a divisive leadership race – punctuated by a controversy over appointments he made to the central committee just days before the vote – wouldn’t rend the party ahead of next year’s election.

“I have a lot of faith in our Democrats across our state,” Palacio said. “Colorado Democrats know that it requires some unity and it requires a lot of hard work to have electoral wins. Everyone in this room today is determined that we reelect (U.S. Sen.) Michael Bennet and that we elect our next Democratic president. That’s what matters at the end of the day, and that’s what we’ll be focused on.”

The leadership election took place just two days after Palacio announced that he was appointing 46 men to the state party’s governing body, following advice from a lawyer for the Democratic National Committee that the central committee’s composition was out of whack and had wound up with too many women after county parties held their reorganizations earlier in February.

The rule requiring “gender balance” has been in place since the 1970s, but Sabados and Meyers contended that, in years past, state Democratic chairs have made appointments to rectify imbalances on the committee after leadership elections, not before.

The chair vote didn’t happen until after more than two hours of heated debate over whether to seat the 46 men (although it turned out that only 43 had made the meeting and been credentialed). The vote to accept the new appointees was 260-164.

“I think there’s a lot of questions about the last-minute appointments that have not been resolved,” Sabados said after the chair results were announced. “As a party, we need to figure out how to have a much better process with that in the future because there were a lot of concerns, and not just from people supporting me. Ultimately, people wanted to move forward with the meeting, and that made sense, but, we need to put some systems in place for elections going forward.”

Sabados said he was glad that he’d run and hoped that the issues he ran on wouldn’t be ignored by party officers over the next two years.

“We need to make sure our party is investing in county parties better than we have been. We’re losing a lot of races around the state that we shouldn’t be. I hope that that message resonated pretty clearly this afternoon, because I think there were a lot of folks who agree. I hope we see some changes in the party going forward,” Sabados said.

Palacio told The Statesman that he had heard the criticism and planned to act on it.

“The party – any political party – is a work in progress,” he said. “We’re going to continue making sure we’re out talking to counties and making sure we’re connecting with elected officials and activists, making sure their voices are heard and, if there are changes that need to be made, that we consider them carefully and put them in place if necessary.”

In a separate vote later that afternoon, Democrats elected 1st vice chair Beverly Ryken to a third term, backed 2nd vice chair Barbara Jones and party treasurer Christopher Ott for second terms and elected Martelle Daniels as secretary.

See full coverage in the March 6 print edition.

– ernest@coloradostatesman.com