Ken Salazar, former secretary of the interior, former U.S. senator and former Colorado attorney general, on Tuesday night declined again to say whether he plans to run for governor.

The featured speaker at the Denver Young Democrats’ holiday party only smiled and told The Colorado Statesman he was “focused on helping my friends get elected this year… including Hillary Clinton.” (Salazar is rumored to be on the short list of Clinton’s vice presidential picks.)

But the question will keep coming and, if Salazar were going to announce he was running for governor – Gov. John Hickenlooper is term-limited in 2018 – he couldn’t have picked a better place to warm up to the idea nor a better crowd with which to practice his speech.

The group held its sold-out event in the ornate, cascading first-floor rooms of the Governor’s Residence in the stately Boettcher Mansion.

Standing at a podium before a wall of windows dark with the night – “Shouldn’t every living room have a podium?” a wag cracked earlier – Salazar said he had been to the residence thousands of times, that he knew it very well, “even the bedrooms upstairs,” he added, drawing “oohs” and “ahhhs” from the 20- and 30-somethings who packed the room, a reaction that drew laughs from the so-called “young-at-heart Dems,” including many lawmakers and candidates.

Introducing Salazar, DYD President Aaron Culbertson read out a long list of Salazar’s accomplishments. He seemed unprepared for the length of the list, reading it slowly, careful not to miss a beat.

“Allow me to elect,” he said when he got to the end of the list – “I mean to introduce Ken Salazar.” It was a comic slip, and the room erupted in laughter long before Culbertson finished speaking.

“We will elect him, if he decides to run!” said campaign veteran Danielle Glover, vice president of the national Young Democrats and a board member of the Colorado Young Dems.

Salazar told the crowd it’s the future that matters, not the past, and that means young people matter most.

“You have to look to the young people,” he said. “So, when I look at the Young Dems of Denver, I see it’s the Young Dems of the entire state of Colorado and the Young Dems of the entire United States of America that are going to keep the country moving forward on the moral universe and [along] the arc of progress that Martin Luther King defined, which is long, but it bends toward justice.

“And that’s why we’re going to beat Donald Trump and his party this November,” he said to cheers. “And we’re going to elect a Democrat to the White House in 2016.”

Jack Kroll, a candidate for the 1st Congressional District seat on the University of Colorado Board of Regents, asked Salazar how he would tackle the student debt crisis. Kroll asked for a show of hands among the crowd of all of those still paying off student loans. A lot of hands shot up.

“We have to do a better job funding higher education,” Salazar said. “We have to make sure we see higher education as the kind of right that we think of when we talk about K-12 education.”

Culbertson said he felt that, with the news cycle so focused on the Republican primary, it can be difficult for Democrats to stay positive and motivated.

“What do you think the Young Democrats should be focused on in terms of priorities for the next election cycle?” he asked Salazar. “How would you recommend we attack this ever so important election?”

Salazar had returned several times during his remarks to the value he said young people bring to electoral campaigns. He said young volunteers provide the winning boost in creativity and energy that campaigns desperately need. He said there is much to be inspired by this coming year.

“This election is about civil rights and voting rights and protecting the rights of those who are different, whether it’s because of their race or nationality or sexual orientation,” said Salazar. “Those are significantly important and defining issues of our time and that’s what our party is fighting for – issues like climate change. As our Native American brothers and sisters say, ‘We borrow our planet from our children.’

“So how do we win?” he said. “We have to take it all around the state, from Steamboat Springs and Routt County to La Plata and Durango and Fort Morgan and down to the San Luis Valley, where I’m from, and to Alamosa, because Denver can’t deliver – it can do a big part of it, but it can’t do it alone.

He said it’s crucial for the Young Denver Democrats to cast their eyes beyond the capital city.

“You have more resources, frankly, than elsewhere around the state, so I would say take the model you already have here, which has been so monumentally effective in winning campaigns, and take it to other places, so we can organize… from the northeast to the northwest and southeast to the southwest.”

Salazar said a true statewide strategy based on a one-state philosophy was the secret to his success in 1998, when he ran for attorney general. That year he defeated popular Republican John Suthers against great odds. Salazar said he toured the state three times.

“When all was said and done, the [Democratic candidate for governor] lost by 1/10 of 1 percent,” he said. “But I won my election by almost 4 percent. What made the difference? I think it was that I decided early on in my campaign that, for a Democrat with my background to win, I had to see the fight as, ‘We are one Colorado.’ I had to make sure that those counties that have less than 500 people, that I would have people there who were organizing for me.

“John Suthers called me at 7:00 in the morning to concede. ‘You won more votes in Larimer County; you won more votes in Morgan County; you won more votes in Moffat and Routt County than I ever expected you to win.’

“And so every vote counts. Every vote counts,” Salazar said.

Glover told The Statesman that young voters are an increasingly significant bloc in Colorado and that they are leaning strongly for Democratic candidates.

“Donald Trump is leading the Republicans and he is talking about keeping Muslims out of the country. That’s not where we’re at. That’s a sideshow. That’s not what’s happening on the Democratic side.”

– john.tomasic@gmail.com