The top leadership in the Colorado state House of Representatives is a matriarchy. The top three positions – speaker, majority leader and assistant majority leader – are all held by women.

The situation is reversed in the Colorado state Senate. There it is a patriarchy. The top three positions – president of the Senate, majority leader and assistant majority leader – are all held by men.

But the men do not rule everything in the state Senate leadership. Farther down the chain of command, women serve as the majority whip and the majority caucus chair.

Similar to the state House of Representatives, the state Senate is organized on a political party (partisan) basis. The Democrats have a commanding majority in the state Senate, so all the top leaders are Democrats.

Also, all five of the top leadership posts in the state Senate are filled by senators from safe Democratic seats. Those are Senate districts in which, in recent statewide elections, the district has voted more than 55% Democratic and thus is always represented by a Democrat.

There are no top state Senate leaders from competitive seats, which consistently vote 45% to 54% Democratic and can be won by either political party. State senators from safe Democratic seats tend to be more liberal than senators from competitive seats, who are usually more moderate.

Thanks to campaign websites and office-holder websites, we know a great deal about the Democratic leadership in the state Senate, which is currently in session. Here’s what they look like:

Senate president: Steve Fenberg (District 18) is from Boulder, one of the most liberal and Democratic counties in Colorado. While in college in 2006, he helped to found New Era, an organization which registered to vote about 150,000 new young voters. Fenberg served as New Era’s executive director.

In 2016 Democratic state Sen. Rollie Heath was term-limited (8 years) in District 18. Fenberg ran to succeed Heath and easily won the seat. He was reelected in 2020.

Fenberg’s safe Democratic seat is ultra-safe at 83% Democratic.

Fenberg advanced quickly in the Senate leadership. In 2018 he became the Democratic Party majority leader, the second-highest position in the state Senate. Four years later, in 2022, to fill a vacancy, he was elected state Senate president.

Majority leader: Dominick Moreno (District 21) comes from a family that originated in Silverton in western Colorado but moved to Commerce City (Adams County north of Denver) in the 1970s. His grandfather was a coal miner, and his father was a truck driver and later a high school janitor. His mother taught Head Start (pre-school for low-income children) for 25 years. 

Moreno was the valedictorian in his graduating class at Adams City High School. He won a scholarship to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Jobs in college included packaging meals for people with terminal illnesses, staffing overnight shifts at a women’s shelter and tutoring elementary school students in low-income Washington neighborhoods. He also taught English classes for children and adults in Palmitas, a village in Sinaloa, Mexico.

After Georgetown University, Moreno returned to Colorado and was elected to the city council in Commerce City. In 2012 he was elected to the Colorado House of Representatives and then in 2016 he was elected to the state Senate. In 2017 he completed Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government program for Senior Executives in State and Local Government.

His safe Democratic seat is reasonably safe at 57% Democratic.

Assistant majority leader: Robert Rodriguez (District 32) represents southwest Denver and a small part of Aurora, where he has lived for more than 20 years. He moved to Colorado when he was four years old.

Rodriguez graduated from Northglenn High School. After beginning his working career in a mail room, he climbed his way up the corporate ladder to a senior position at a Denver insurance agency. He also was director of business management at an organization, founded by his father, to help former criminal offenders work their way back into the community.

Before elected to the state Senate, he served as vice-chairman of the Denver Democrats. He lives in Virginia Village with his wife Deidre, two cats and two dogs.

His safe Democratic seat consistently votes 74% Democratic.

Majority whip: Julia Gonzales (District 34) has the responsibility, as majority whip, of getting Democratic senators into the Senate chamber to vote on bills that are backed by the Democratic Party leadership.

Gonzales was the sixth of seven children. She was born on the San Carlos Apache reservation in Arizona, then grew up on the borderlands of south Texas. Her mother taught elementary school. Her father was a rancher.

She went to Yale University. In 2005 she worked with a coalition of working-class families and community organizations to support affordable housing, a clean environment and good jobs.

Gonzales returned to Colorado and organized statewide movements on immigrant rights. She worked for in-state college and university tuition regardless of immigration status. She labored to stop city government money from being spent on immigration enforcement.

A liberal and progressive Democrat, Gonzales worked for Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders to be elected president of the United States. In 2018 she ran for and won her seat in the Colorado Senate.

Gonzales represents a safe Democratic seat that is 82% Democratic. That helps explain why she was unopposed by the Republicans when she ran for reelection in 2022.

Majority caucus chair: Janet Buckner (District 29) went to Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in education. She became a medical salesperson, training doctors and other hospital personnel. After a three decades professional career, she retired in 2007.

Her husband, John W. Buckner, served in the Colorado House of Representatives from southern Aurora. When he passed away in 2015, a vacancy committee elected his wife, Janet Buckner, to serve the remainder of his term in office. She subsequently was elected to the state Senate.

Sen. Buckner has been a strong supporter of equal pay for equal work as it applies to women. She has lived in Aurora since 1975. Her family includes her twin daughters, her son and three granddaughters. Her safe Democratic seat votes 65% Democratic.

Tom Cronin and Bob Loevy are news columnists who write about Colorado and national politics.