Bob Chew, the Colorado Forward Party nominee for the seat held by Democratic U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, plans to report loaning his campaign $1.1 million and raising an additional $170,000 in the most recent quarter, his campaign told Colorado Politics.

The 67-year-old Boulder resident, a Navy veteran and founder and former CEO of an engineering firm, said when he launched his run in May that he planned to spend at least $2 million to offer voters “a real choice beyond the two-party status quo.”

“Washington is a circus. Republicans and Democrats have failed us, and if we keep voting for them, I assure you they will continue to fail us,” Chew said at his campaign launch, according to a release. “The only way things change in this country is if we start electing people who are free from the control of party bosses, party mega-donors, and lobbyists.”

Hickenlooper, a former two-term Denver mayor and two-term governor, survived a challenge from the left to win the nomination for a second term in the June 30 primary. He’s facing Republican state Sen. Mark Baisley and a handful of minor party candidates, including Chew, in November.

Since statehood, Colorado has never elected an independent or third-party candidate to the U.S. Senate, though one of the state’s earliest senators, Henry M. Teller, was briefly a member of the Silver Republican Party during the five non-continuous terms he served, from 1876-1909.

On Monday, Chew’s campaign put up a series of ads on digital billboards across the state featuring modified quotes attributed to iconic American presidents, including Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, punctuated by a Chew campaign slogan.

“I cannot tell a lie, Republicans and Democrats really f***ed things up,” reads one of Chew’s digital billboards, alongside a portrait of George Washington.

The billboards are part of what Chew’s campaign said will be an initial $1.5 million statewide ad buy, including broadcast TV, cable, radio, digital and mail. His campaign plans to hit the airwaves at the beginning of August with an over $700,000 buy planned to run through September.

Chew moved to Colorado in 2017. Last August, he changed his registration from Republican to become a member of the Forward Party, his campaign said.

The party, which spun off from Andrew Yang’s unsuccessful run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, qualified to become one of Colorado’s eight minor political parties two years ago, when it secured the ability to nominate candidates directly to the general election ballot. The state’s other minor parties include the Libertarians, the Green Party and the Unity Party.

Chew’s campaign plans to file a campaign finance report with the Federal Election Commission by Wednesday’s deadline, covering the year’s second quarter, which ended on June 30, his campaign said. The report, his campaign noted, will show the candidate finished the quarter with just over $1 million cash on hand, and received $1,000 contributions from Yang and his fellow national Forward Party co-chair Christie Todd Whitman, a former Republican governor of New Jersey.

A campaign spokeswoman for Baisley, the Republican who switched to the U.S. Senate race at the end of last year after spending most of 2025 running for governor, told Colorado Politics in a text message that Chew’s candidacy could tilt the race toward Hickenlooper, the Democratic incumbent.

“The reality is that third-party candidates do nothing more than spoil races, often in Democrats’ favor,” said Baisley campaign aide Mary Elizabeth Fabian. “Senator Baisley is focused on running a race based on his track record of supporting opportunity for Coloradans and challenging those who ignore the cost of living crisis this state is facing.”