The candidates who won or lost their races in Denver’s just-concluded municipal election weren’t the only winners and losers on June 6.

Now that the votes are counted, Mayor-elect Mike Johnston is mobilizing his transition team, while runner-up Kelly Brough is considering what’s next.

But before the dust settles, we wanted to take stock of some other political winners and losers – and one result that was closer to a draw.

Winner: Feddy and the Dreamers

Loser: The Webb Machine

Simply put, former Denver Mayor Federico Peña picked the winner of the June 6 runoff, while his immediate successor, former Mayor Wellington Webb and his wife, former state Rep. Wilma Webb, backed the loser.

But more than that, Johnston’s campaign and the governing style he’s promised closely resembles the aggressively idealistic approach his fellow former legislator, Peña, brought to city hall.

Peña was the young candidate bearing bold visions when he prevailed in 1983 over the consummate insiders – incumbent Mayor Bill McNichols, who finished third in the first round of voting, and District Attorney Dale Tooley, who faced Peña in the runoff.

Like Johnston, Peña was derided as a pie-in-the-sky stargazer, with his ubiquitous “imagine a great city” slogan earning his campaign team and the new administration a dismissive nickname: Feddy and the Dreamers.

On election night this week, Johnston supporter Doug Linkhart – a former legislator, councilman and city department director – drew a parallel, applauding voters for choosing “vision over continuation.”

“I think Mike has what Federico Peña had 40 years ago, and that’s vision,” Linkhart said. “I think Mike’s vision is similar – it’s looking to the future of the city and what we can be, not just managing things the way they have been.”

The contrast with Brough, who ran on her experience as a chamber of commerce CEO and chief of staff for former Mayor John Hickenlooper, was explicit.

After Brough conceded and Johnston declared victory, the freshly minted mayor-elect described how he envisions turning his campaign dreams into reality.

“I think that for me, the vision is the ‘why’ you want to do it, and the problem-solving is the ‘how’ you do it,” he said.

“So that’s why we worked really hard when no one else did to say we’re going to build out a comprehensive white paper on every single policy we roll out, we’re going to put a comprehensive budget out for everything we roll out. We’re going to say exactly how much it’s going to cost and where the money’s going to come from … that means that we’re talking about a plan to get 1,400 people who are unhoused into housing – that’s not a letter to Santa Claus, that’s actually a real plan with a real budget and real evidence that it works.”

Like Brough, Webb boasted years of experience at city hall when he won election in 1991 to the first of his three terms as mayor, on the heels of a term as city auditor.

Webb and his political apparatus are legendary, having propelled numerous Democrats into office. That record includes kicking Michael Hancock’s 2011 mayoral campaign into high gear with an endorsement when the councilman appeared to be stuck in third place ahead of the first round of voting. Webb’s crack get-out-the-vote machine help seal the deal in the runoff.

But while Webb provided one of this election year’s best quips – calling Johnston the guy who went “from Vail to Yale” – his political magic didn’t spur Brough’s campaign across the finish line.

Mixed bag: The Establishment

Johnston and Brough both came under fire for their association with groups that epitomize the establishment, but Brough’s dozen years fronting the Metro Denver Chamber of Commerce might have done more damage to her prospects than Johnston’s decades-old membership in Yale’s fabled Skull and Bones, an exclusive undergraduate club that counts former presidents and titans of industry among its illustrious alumni.

Early in the runoff, Brough’s campaign and her supporters tried to raise a fuss over Johnston having been “tapped” into the once-secret society – rumor had it a Bonesman had to leave the room if its name was uttered – but he shrugged it off, describing it as merely one of Yale’s hundreds of “social clubs” and insisting it had long ago shed its unsavory and creepier practices. The attack provoked snickering on the campaign trail but didn’t appear to gain any steam.

Brough’s past as a prominent advocate for the chamber of commerce could have carried more weight with voters, at least after an outside group supporting Johnston hammered voters with some of the more conservative-aligned positions she advocated for during her tenure, such as support for fracking and opposition to raising the minimum wage – perilous stances in an overwhelmingly Democratic electorate.

Political strategist Steve Welchert suggested that the guilt-by-association attacks might have cancelled each other out.

“We all understood she was down in the polls, because she’s the one who drew first blood, right?” Welchert said in a recent panel discussion on the race. “But when you draw first blood, complaining about your opponent being a member of Skull and Bones at Yale, (Johnston’s campaign was) ready for that and popped her back on the chamber of commerce, so it all became neutral.”

Added Welchert: “That’s not how you want to come out of the gate swinging, I don’t think, on something that’s not particularly substantive. So on the one hand, you’ve got a corporate candidate against an elitist candidate, right? So Denver voters are choosing between the corporatist and the elitist.”

Winners: Jenn Ridder and Justin LaMorte

The two powerhouse Democratic strategists who ran Johnston’s hard side and soft side, respectively, are on a roll.

A Denver native and campaign veteran – her parents, Rick Ridder and Joannie Braden, co-founded the enduring Colorado-based RBI Strategies & Research political consulting firm – Ridder joined Johnston’s campaign as a senior advisor after the runoff was set and steered the candidate into the winner’s circle.

She’s used to running winning campaigns, having served as states director for Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential run after managing Gov. Jared Polis’ 2018 gubernatorial campaign.

Ridder is currently executive vice president for mobilization and campaign management at Precision, a dominant national political consulting firm founded by Obama alums Stephanie Cutter, Jen O’Malley Dillon and Teddy Goff.

Politico’s Eli Stokols – a Colorado alum – and Lauren Egan reported this week that Ridder has been in talks with the White House about “a role in the president’s re-elect,” but in the wake of Johnston’s win, there’s been “chatter” that she could wind up with a job in the new mayor’s administration – “possibly even as his chief of staff.”

LaMorte supervised Advancing Denver, the independent expenditure committee that supported Johnston, fresh from a string of high-profile Colorado wins.

Before arriving in the state just four years ago, LaMorte worked the political desk at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for the 2016 cycle and was deputy political director at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for the 2018 cycle.

He moved to Colorado to manage Democrat Dan Baer’s short-lived U.S. Senate campaign in 2019, and later he essentially called the shots for Hickenlooper’s successful 2020 run for the same office, starting after the former governor won the primary.

Last year, LaMorte managed U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet’s reelection campaign, running up the widest margin for a Colorado senator in more than two decades, and last month he took over as executive director of Rocky Mountain Values, a nonprofit whose mission is to educate voters about U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert ahead of the Silt Republican’s bid for a third term. LaMorte also recently signed on as general consultant for U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, who is seeking a fourth term next year.

Ernest Luning has covered politics for Colorado Politics and its predecessor publication, The Colorado Statesman, since 2009. He’s analyzed the exploits, foibles and history of state campaigns and politicians since 2018 in the weekly Trail Mix column.