There’s really no other effective way to do it. People tune out TV and radio and mailers are quickly recycled. You have to go door to door, meeting the residents, chatting them up, listening to their concerns, doing what you can to win them over or at least make sure that, when they’re staring down at their ballot in the fall, they might remember your face and your name and that you made the effort to win their vote.

It’s always dinner time

The state Senate district they’re vying to represent sits north of Denver and runs from farmland on the plains at the eastern edge through metro suburbs and urban pockets in Brighton, Thornton and Aurora in the south and west. The district stretches across something like 1,000 square miles.

“The way to win is just to meet people,” said May, a former state representative, talking last week while leaning against a fence rail of a pocket park in Thornton next to the Iglesia Cristiana. May has brown hair and a quick wit and she laughs easy. She could be a Tina Fey character. “This district is really eclectic, so in order to represent it well, you have to meet everybody, and the only way to do that is to walk everywhere.”

May says her campaign has been working the neighborhoods since the fall, beginning in earnest in January. The campaign has knocked 12,000 doors. She has knocked 5,000 herself. She clearly enjoys it on some level only other politicians might understand.

As we walked I noted that it was dinner time, as if that were a bad thing. “It’s always dinner time,” May joked, gaining momentum.

She knocked on about 10 or 15 doors in 20 minutes, checking voter registration information on her cell phone as she went. She talked for 10 minutes to a family packing up a car and gave them some literature. She shared a laugh with the Republican dad. She walked to the next house and folded a flier into the screen door handle and then without looking up walked to a house two doors down and across the street.

Good conversation

Fifteen miles northeast in Brighton within sight of Barr Lake earlier on the same day, I walked a leafy subdivision with Priola, the term-limited state representative of Brighton-based House District 56 and the owner of the local family greenhouse business. He had a treasure trove of printed-out walk lists and clipboards and pens in the trunk of his car. We parked on the edge of Dewey Strong Park near a charter school. Priola is built like a former athlete and bounds with positive energy down the streets and up the driveways.

It was a Friday afternoon and there weren’t a lot of people home. Everybody Priola met, though, smiled and laughed and seemed to enjoy talking with him. He spent 15 minutes with an unaffiliated voter who lived in a corner house. The conversation seemed to start slow. Then the man moved out from the doorway and joined Priola on the porch. In the end, Priola said, the man agreed to stick up a Priola lawn sign on the property. “Good conversation. Good conversation,” Priola said, smiling.

“I walk every night and every weekend. I started walking in the fall, but, really, I love it,” he said. “I’m social and I like to keep moving, you know.”

Priola said he gets good ideas for legislation by talking to people at their doors. He said walking doors day and night is how he first won his seat, defeating Democrat Dave Rose in 2008, the year Democrats turned out in waves to elect Barack Obama president. “It works,” Priola said. “I walked the district. The other guy, not so much.”

Priola said running for the Senate seat presents a challenge but mainly just because the district is larger than typical House districts. He was walking an urban Spanish-speaking part of the district the week before, he said.

“I have been blessed to learn Spanish. So, you know, it’s fun,” he says. “One guy asked me ‘Que partido?’ Well, when I told him I was a ‘Republicano,’ he was, like, ‘Oh no, no.’ I once got invited into a quinceanero. The guy wanted me to join the party in his house, but I told him I couldn’t, that I had to keep walking.

The district, Donald and Hillary

Senate District 25 has been represented by Democrat Mary Hodge for eight years. She won her last election in 2012 by 15 points. Voter registration statistics show the district leans Democrat, but not by much. As in most Colorado swing districts, unaffiliated voters predominate. Among active registered voters in the district, 24,330 are unaffiliated; 23,174 are Democratic; 18,681 are Republican.

Traditionally, Democrats vote in greater numbers in presidential election years than they do in off years. Priola says he doesn’t read too much into the numbers.

“There’s a performance issue there that matters,” he said. “I think the numbers even out when it comes to actually casting ballots. Not everyone who is registered votes.”

In Republican-wave year 2014, district majorities voted for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Cory Gardner over Democrat Mark Udall and for Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez over Democrat John Hickenlooper.

May said she’s taking nothing for granted. Just two years ago, after serving one term, she lost her House seat by a mere 106 votes to Republican JoAnn Windholz. That must still sting. May is also sure to draw heat eventually in this year’s race for violating legislative rules last year when she filed to run for the SD 25 seat while still working as a staffer for House Speaker Dickey Lee Hullinghorst. “I’m just going to go home now,” she told Durango Herald reporter Peter Marcus when met with the news. “I’m just going to close my candidacy. What else can I do? It’s a policy. I didn’t even know. I just found out… All I can do is say I left, what more?”

On the fence rail in Thornton, May says she isn’t just looking to turn out Democrats and left-leaning unaffiliated voters. She says she’s “doing persuasion to the end.”

“People don’t decide till the end,” she said, putting up her hands and shaking her head as if it were an obvious point people fail to understand. “People want you to work so hard for that vote. Voting is the tenth thing on their lists. They’re fighting to keep a roof over their heads, keep the lights on, put food on the table. They want to hear that you’ll fight for them. They want to hear it. It’s not just about getting out the vote… You do persuasion till the end.”

Priola said people want to talk about education and jobs – and the presidential race.

“Look, I tell them, I’m just as frustrated as they are. I say we’re a nation of 330 million people and I can’t believe these are our last two choices. People are talking about the Green Party and the Libertarian Party.”

May said that she has watched people’s feelings about the presidential race change over the months, and in particular their feelings about Donald Trump. It went from curiosity to fascination to disgust.

“He’s offended just about everybody,” she said. “In the population strongholds of the district, which are ethnically and economically diverse, it’s bad. People are not happy about Trump. I’m feeling good not to be on the Trump side of the ticket.”

May says voters are “aggressive” this year in wanting to know exactly where she stands on the issues.

“I think Bernie Sanders brought it out in the Ds and Trump brought it out in the Rs. Voters are asking a lot of questions and they want answers. In Adams County they want to know about affordable housing and basic health care. In Thornton they’re asking about oil and gas and making it safe and protecting the environment. In Brighton they are deeply concerned about their school budgets.

“So I tell them, when I was in the House, every bill I ran had bipartisan support and I’m very proud of that,” May said. “I can work with Republicans successfully to serve the community. I talk about how my 26 years in human services taught me how to listen to a wide variety of people. I tell them Democrats tried to fix school finance – that we tried to push a ballot initiative that failed, so now we just have to work on the (state budget) formula at the Legislature.

“I tell them that the environmental and safety regulations the oil and gas companies are touting in their ads, I tell them, I know we need oil and gas, but that we worked to make it safer. And I know people are paying a lot to live in tiny apartments, that landlords are raising their rents every two months and so people need relief.”

May says she’s particularly proud of legislation she ran in the House to put a health clinic into north Aurora where there were no doctors offices. “Now, because of that bill, people don’t have to waste time and money taking their sick kids onto a bus to go to an emergency room, where it costs everybody more money. That’s a difference we made in people’s lives.”

The real world

Priola said his meetings with constituents similarly shape his bills and how he votes on other lawmakers’ bills.

“That’s why I do a lot on education… Even people without kids understand that education is the key to the whole state thriving. Everyone wants to see kids do well. Businesses need an educated workforce. Last year, I brought a bill to require school districts above 5,000 (students) to publish information about school board candidates in prominent places at their websites. The bill is based on people telling me they couldn’t find out anything about the candidates. I make my job about the voters, what’s concerning them.”

“That’s also why I introduce bills that are about providing job-creation incentives. I introduced a recycling bill that I really think is going to help the nascent recycling industry on the Front Range grow over the decades. So maybe in the decades to come, when I’m an old man, the Colorado Front Range will be the recycling hub of the West. We have to be planting those kinds of seeds today,” he said.

This year at the Legislature, progressive groups pilloried Priola for voting against a parental leave bill after asking for time off from the committee that was considering the bill in order to take one of his kids to the doctor. Priola’s critics called him a hypocrite.

Priola said the flap actually says something positive about how he goes about his work at the Legislature.

“Honestly, it was going door to door that colored my decision on that bill. I’ve probably knocked 45,000 doors through the years. Not once, not one time, has one person ever said, ‘You know what, I really wish I had time off to go to my kids parent-teacher conference. That’s a problem in my life.’ That never happened, not one time. And that’s because people live in the real world. They have good relationships with their employers, and employers know that if they’re too harsh, employees will just call in sick to go to the conference, or they’ll say their aunt died…

“It’s having that real world experience. I’m a small business owner. I work with people. I have lots of conversations. Too often, people run legislation that sounds good but that just clutters up the statutes, and no one is really coming to say this is a real problem. So you sometimes say, ‘C’mon, maybe this is just silly.'”

Priola is well-known in the northern part of the Senate district. He has represented those precincts in the House for eight years, and his family of farmers and entrepreneurs has long roots in the community.

The money

Republicans control currently the state Senate by one seat. Politicos on all sides this election year – in Colorado and around the country – are closely watching the chamber’s swing seats – and Hodge’s Senate District 25 seat is probably number two or three on the priority list, depending on how you calculate.

The money race between May and Priola has been tight for months. The lead has see-sawed in the last two reporting periods. May edged past Priola in July, reporting $100,982 in total contributions and $72, 951 cash on hand. Priola reported $82,080 total contributions and $64,106 cash on hand.

Outside political groups, so-called 527s, are reportedly poised to begin pouring resources into the race but, so far, the candidates said they haven’t seen much evidence of that.

“Maybe a flier or two, maybe,” said Priola with a shrug.

“No, almost nothing,” said May.

– john@coloradostatesman.com