Allow me to start with a flashback. It was Thanksgiving 2024, just over 12 months back. For the first time, our son Clarke hosted the family Thanksgiving near New York City. It is a sign of our aging when the kids start to step into the role of host and convenor. The occasion was lovely.

Over the course of the weekend, Clarke more than once brought up his excitement about the mayoral candidacy of some seemingly obscure state lawmaker whose name I couldn’t quite understand.

In my best parental form, I nodded, inquired a bit, and did not completely rain on our son’s enthusiasm. All the while, of course, I was privately shaking my head in the other direction and thinking that this young candidate being touted had precisely zero chance of becoming mayor of the Big Apple.

You can fill in the rest of the story. The no-hope pretender was Zohran Mamdani. Last I looked, he was headed to Gracie Mansion, New York City’s official mayoral residence.

Most often, elections go according to form. Frontrunners win, and insurgents fall by the wayside. But history is made by those who defy expectations. Now and then, a candidate comes out of left field (or right field) and captures the moment.

Think of Federico Peña, a young, unmarried Latino who burst onto the scene in 1983 to dislodge an entrenched administration at Denver City Hall. Or of a certain geologist-turned-brewpub-owner who won the same office 20 years later. Or, for that matter, of a nameless reality television star and developer of middling success who again occupies the nation’s highest office after first engineering a hostile takeover of his own party.

A week ago, State Sen. Julie Gonzales made official her long-rumored challenge to Mayor/Governor/Senator John Hickenlooper for the Democratic nomination for the seat he currently holds. The odds of her pulling this off are long and one senses she knows that.

But facing long odds is not the same as having no chance. Among Colorado Democrats, there is a pent-up, unmistakable market demand for fresh faces and more assertive voices.

To be sure, and I am about done with New York City references, Mamdani had the advantage of running against some particularly unsavory, unlikable opponents. It is easy to detest Andrew Cuomo, while Hickenlooper is the guy with whom everyone wants to grab a beer, even as he is regarded as increasingly inconsequential and long in the tooth.

And no one mistakes Pueblo for Queens.

There is no doubting that Gonzales comes from the party’s outer left flank. On issue after issue, she has championed the progressive cause in the Colorado legislature. If she gains traction and mounts any real threat to an entrenched Hickenlooper, she will be called to account for many of her stands.

It is quite possible that Gonzales’s all-in, unyielding progressivism, even her acceptance of the Democratic Socialist label, goes a few degrees too far for the average Colorado Democrat. However, the Democratic Party, here and beyond, has moved slowly, steadily, inexorably to the left during this era just as the GOP shifted notably to the right during the Obama years.

While gubernatorial contender Phil Weiser is hardly a card-carrying member of the progressive caucus, he is mining support from these quarters as his opponent, Michael Bennet, struggles to keep pace with the left-tilting fervor.

Gonzales’s chances dwindle to near zero if she wages a conventional campaign and this turns into the typical political slog. Hickenlooper has the establishment locked down and multiple millions in his campaign bank account. Her hope has to be to turn her campaign into a viral sensation. She will quickly gain altitude, primarily online, or she will falter and become an afterthought.

Also working against Gonzales is the simple fact that Colorado does not elect women to high political office, notably U.S. senator, governor or Denver mayor. Enlightened states like Arkansas and Mississippi have female governors and senators, respectively. While our state, the second to grant women suffrage and home to much lofty rhetoric, is now one of just four states, count ‘em, never to have crossed this belated threshold. Okay, side rant complete.

I take stock of my own dissonance about Gonzales’s candidacy.  Our politics do not even remotely align. She is unabashedly and unapologetically of the left while my bearing leans hard toward the center and I have been disaffiliated from the Democratic Party for a quarter-century.

Yet, even with my own gray hairs, I am over the Democrats’ slow-to-let-go gerontocracy and its reliance on poll-driven, milquetoast standard-bearers.

A final note: On the off-chance that Julie Gonzales takes flight and manages a primary election stunner, she would go on to win the November election as well, no matter that she would be branded as “Colorado’s AOC” and that many of her positions are far removed from the Colorado mainstream. Such is the sad, moribund condition of a long-ago viable entity known as the Colorado Republican Party.

Eric Sondermann is a Colorado-based independent political commentator. He writes regularly for ColoradoPolitics and the Gazette newspapers. Reach him at EWS@EricSondermann.com; follow him at @EricSondermann