When Denver voters cast their ballots in the first round of the city’s 2023 municipal election in April, they rejected the political fringe. They sided for the most part with mainstream moderates who favor practical solutions over conflict and street theater.

In the city’s runoff election Tuesday, voters by and large finished the job.

As ballots continued to be counted Tuesday evening – with one race still too close to call – a pattern became clear. Candidates who favored cooperation over confrontation; goal-setting over grandstanding; fixing over monkey-wrenching, and common sense over blind dogma – were winning. Which could have been anticipated from an electorate that’s weary of spiraling crime, rampant homelessness, proliferating squatters’ camps and associated urban chaos.

Only in one race – the mayor’s – had reason already prevailed back on April 4. Voters at that time chose two estimable candidates to face one another in this week’s runoff, Mike Johnston and Kelly Brough. Both Johnston, to whom Brough had conceded the mayor’s race as of press time Tuesday evening, and Brough, whom The Gazette editorial board endorsed, have displayed the vision, priorities, temperament and wisdom to take Denver in a productive new direction and to take on the city’s most pressing challenges.

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Our congratulations to Johnston, Denver’s presumptive new mayor.

In the council races on Tuesday’s ballot, voters pulled City Hall, and the rest of the city, back from the brink of a radical agenda that sought only to fan flames and drive wedges – between races, classes, political parties, even neighborhoods – rather than seek solutions that work for everyone. That agenda would have further undermined the crime fight as well as the local economy with wide-ranging policies that would imperil public safety, upend neighborhoods and break businesses.

With votes still being counted at press time in the four City Council seats contested in the runoff, radical candidates who had been backed by the likes of the Denver Democratic Socialists were losing.

Foremost among them was the City Council’s grandstander in chief, the shrill and gratuitously combative Candi CdeBaca. An apologist for lawbreakers and an antagonist of the police in a district battered by crime – CdeBaca appeared headed for a crushing defeat in her re-election bid for her District 9 seat.

She was losing 2-to-1 to political newcomer Darrell Watson, who earned the endorsement of the Denver Police Protective Association as well as The Gazette’s editorial board. The Denver business owner has touted himself as a candidate who will work toward social equity, housing, and climate solutions, among other issues, while bridging gaps between policymakers.

CdeBaca, by contrast, is the council member who had disserved her district by, among other odd outbursts, proposing to disband the city’s police force in favor of a “peace force”; hurling racist invective at two Denver police – one White, on Black – while on video, and suggesting that white-owned businesses pay reparations.

For the Council District 10 seat, meanwhile, incumbent Chris Hinds, whom The Gazette editorial board endorsed, was handily beating socialist-backed Shannon Hoffman. In District 8, Brad Revare, also endorsed by The Gazette’s editorial board, was narrowly ahead of socialist-endorsed Shontel Lewis. (Flor Alvidrez won the District 7 seat unopposed.)

Here’s Denver’s chance to hit the reset button at City Hall and get the entire community back on the right track. It’ll take hard work rather than radical rhetoric; compromise as opposed to confrontation, and a recognition of one another’s interests. It can work if we all remember we have a stake in the same community.

Denver Gazette Editorial Board