Phil Weiser, 58, Colorado’s attorney general, is in a heated race against U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, 61, for the Democratic nomination for governor. They are friends and share mostly similar progressive, Democratic policy views.

Primary election day is June 30.

Weiser first came to Colorado in 1994 and was a longtime professor and dean of the CU Law School at Boulder.

He won election in 2018 (by 51.6%) and was reelected in 2022 (54% of the vote) as Colorado’s 39th attorney general. He oversees a staff of over 700 people, that includes more than 400 attorneys, located in the Ralph Carr Judicial Building just west of the state Capitol in Denver.         

Unlike in Washington, D.C., Colorado’s attorney general is elected separately and not a member of the governor’s cabinet.

Weiser won his place on this year’s primary ballot by receiving about 90% of the vote at this spring’s Democratic Party state assembly. Bennet petitioned his way on to the ballot.

Weiser is considered the underdog, because Bennet has more name recognition, though most Coloradans think poorly of Congress. (Most Coloradans would be challenged if they were asked to spell either of the candidate’s last names.)

Notable Democrats, past and current, are split in their support. Popular former three-term Gov. Roy Romer is serving as honorary chair of the Weiser campaign.

Weiser is also endorsed by Dottie Lamm, former Denver Mayor Federico Pena, former U.S. Sen. Tim Wirth, former U.S. Rep. David Skaggs, former Fort Collins Mayor Jeni Arndt and an impressive number of local and county officials.

Weiser was born in New York. He graduated with high honors from both Swarthmore College and New York University Law School, where he was an editor of the law review. His high honors earned him a clerkship with a federal appeals court judge and, later, clerkships with U.S. Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

He later served for about three years as a senior lawyer in the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. He also served as an expert on telecommunications law on President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council.

At CU School of Law, Weiser regularly taught constitutional, antitrust and telecommunications law.  He founded institutes focused on telecommunications and entrepreneurship.

He also authored or co-authored a few books including “Digital Crossroads: American Telecommunications Policy in the Internet Age” (MIT, 2005). He also authored a book on the American jury process.

While at CU Law, Weiser chaired the Innovation Council for Gov. Bill Ritter. He has argued two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

He told us, in an interview this week, that he is especially proud of his successful lawsuit against the producers of opioids that won $900 million in funds for addiction prevention and treatment in Colorado.

He is also proud of his fight to prevent the state’s largest grocers from merging. This has recently won him the endorsements of the Teamsters and United Food and Commercial Workers.

Weiser and his legal teams have sued President Donald Trump or the Trump administration about 65 times, winning a majority of the cases with some still pending.

Weiser is very aware that Colorado is losing some businesses and that streamlining regulations and permitting needs to be even more of a top priority.

He pledges that, if elected governor, he will be Colorado’s chief marketing officer and that he will appoint a chief innovation officer. He wants Colorado to be a leader in start-up companies and take advantage of the AI revolution.

He is also aware that citizens in rural Colorado want more of a voice at the state Capitol, and he pledges to establish, by executive order, a director of rural affairs and collaboration in the governor’s office, a position with cabinet rank.

Weiser has used his powers as attorney general to do the following, according to his campaign and blueprint for Colorado:

• Fought illegal car towing.

• Returned more than $500 million to fraud and scam victims.

• Opposed corporate collusion that had the effect of illegally raising rental prices in apartment projects.

• Won $32 million from vaping companies, money then used to promote youth mental health.

• Worked for new laws to keep guns stored safely from children.

Weiser criticized Gov. Jared Polis for his recent controversial commutation of a jail sentence for convicted former Mesa County election clerk Tina Peters. He called it “mind-boggling” and an act that undermines the rule of law. Bennet also condemned this.

Weiser likes to call himself a “show-up” guy. He believes he would be more accessible and more likely to connect with Coloradans than his opponent. His staff characterizes him as a person of great empathy and, as one put it: “To know Phil is to like Phil.”

He is married to a physician and is the father of two. He loved playing basketball as he was growing up and has become a dedicated Denver Nuggets fan. He is still grieving, he told us, over their premature exit from this year’s NBA playoffs.

In a debate with Bennet, Weiser emphasized his strong record of suing Trump and that Congress wasn’t doing its job.

Bennet attacked Weiser by saying that Colorado wasn’t working and needed fresh leadership that he could provide. Bennet campaigned, as all Democrats are doing this year, on affordability. Weiser campaigned on his record and emphasized the facts. 

Weiser remains the underdog, but he has put together an impressive coalition of venerable old-guard Democrats with younger progressive activists. He has gained momentum and probably benefits from the anti-Washington mood that is particularly strong in Colorado.

Weiser’s handicaps are lower name recognition and maybe coming across to some voters as more of a policy wonk and law professor than a traditional prosecutor or charismatic candidate.

But there is little doubt that Weiser is a fighter and is well-prepared. And he is running against a candidate who has spent almost all his public-service career in Washington, not in Colorado.

We predict this heated contest will become even more heated. It will be a closer race than most people expected.

News columnists Tom Cronin and Bob Loevy write regularly on Colorado and national politics and co-authored “Colorado Politics: Governing a Purple State.”