Attorney General Phil Weiser took an early lead over three-term U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet in Colorado’s Democratic gubernatorial primary and held onto it, defeating the state’s longest-serving senator in more than 50 years to win a nomination that’s likely to land him in the governor’s office.

Weiser led Bennet 55% to 45% just before 8 p.m., when the Associated Press declared Weiser had clinched it.

The race for the nomination to succeed term-limited Democratic Gov. Jared Polis appeared to have tightened in recent months after Bennet spent more than a year as the perceived frontrunner, according to internal polling released by the candidates’ campaigns and outside spending groups.

Three Republicans — state Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer, state Rep. Scott Bottoms and ministry leader Victor Marx — are vying for the GOP nomination in a state that hasn’t elected a Republican governor since 2002. As of 8 p.m., Kirkmeyer is leading the Republican field, based on early and unofficial results.

Democrats have occupied every statewide office and held wide majorities in the Colorado General Assembly since the party’s candidates swept the ballot in 2018 during the first Trump midterms.

Polis won reelection to a second term four years ago by a nearly 20-point margin, and national election analysts predict this year’s Democratic nominee will be heavily favored to win the governor’s race in November.

Serving his third term in the Senate, Bennet turned what had been expected to be a crowded, wide-open race into a two-man contest last spring when he unexpectedly joined Weiser in the primary, saying that he believed that the solutions to Coloradans’ problems won’t come from “Washington’s broken politics.”

Weiser, who is term-limited as attorney general, countered with a sticky slogan that his supporters said encapsulated the choice between two of the state’s most prominent Democrats, implicitly arguing that voters who liked both candidates could keep both in office: Weiser for governor, Bennet for Senate.

Bennet, 61, and Weiser, 57, share similar backgrounds. Both are attorneys who grew up on the East Coast, the sons of Holocaust survivors and live near each other in Denver. 

Both worked in the U.S. Justice Department early in their careers, and both held prominent positions before their current offices — Bennet was superintendent of Denver Public Schools, and Weiser was dean of the University of Colorado Law School — and they’ve each won election statewide multiple times.

With the two candidates in alignment on nearly every policy question, the primary has mostly focused on which has done a more effective job fighting President Donald Trump’s administration.

Weiser boasts that he has sued the second Trump administration more than 60 times and won key rulings that reversed some of the president’s executive orders and restored billions in federal funding for state programs.

In response, Bennet and his allies — including an independent expenditure committee fueled in part by more than $4 million in contributions from former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg — have hammered Weiser for participating in fewer lawsuits than most Democratic attorneys general aimed at challenging the first Trump administration. 

Since Donald Trump took office for a second time in January, Bennet has aggressively questioned Trump’s cabinet nominees in Senate confirmation hearings, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

The veteran lawmaker has also come under fire — including from Weiser and his supporters — for voting to confirm multiple Trump nominees, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. Wright is from Colorado.

Asked by Weiser in recent debates whether he “stood by” those votes, Bennet countered that opposing a Trump nominee would have been “the easiest vote in America” for a Democratic senator. He argued that it’s been crucial to maintain a working relationship with cabinet members, including Rollins, who oversees the U.S. Forest Service and its firefighters when Colorado is facing what he termed “an existential fire crisis.”

Tuesday’s primary election occurred as multiple wildfires are burning across Colorado. One of the fires claimed the lives of three firefighters over the weekend.

Bennet, who was appointed to the U.S. Senate in 2009, has won election to the seat three times and is next up in 2028.