Background
A former state senator, Obama campaign alum, and a national figure in the education reform movement. Wrote a book about his Teach for America experience in rural Mississippi and was a high-school principal for six years. He’s 43 years old, married with kids and lives in the Denver area.
Political history
Served in the state Senate representing northeast Denver from 2009 to 2016. Worked as an advisor to Barack Obama on education issues during the 2008 presidential campaign.
Why he says he’s running
Wants to offer two years of debt-free college, get Colorado to 100 percent renewable energy by 2040 and bridge political divides.
Who’s funding his campaign?
Click here to see who’s funding Johnston’s campaign.
His answers to our questionnaire
Click this link to read how Johnston answered questions we asked him about education, transportation, TABOR, healthcare, immigration and more.
It was mid-January when Colorado’s 2018 Democratic primary race for the governor’s seat officially took off.
That was when Mike Johnston, a 42-year-old recently-departed senator who represented northeast Denver, launched his campaign with all the bells and whistles: A splashy speech, a message of “Frontier Fairness,” a slick video, a top-notch consultant, and a bold proposal complete with echoes of Bernie Sanders and FDR.
Johnston was the second big-name Democrat to announce.
What’s Johnston’s background?
Johnston, who grew up in Vail, is a nationally known figure in the education reform movement.
He is a Teach For America alum who wrote a book about his time teaching in rural Mississippi and later served as a high school principal for six years. He went to Harvard. He went to Yale where he got a law degree. He became a state senator in Colorado where he sponsored more than 120 proposed laws including the Dream Act for immigrants and the CLEAR Act against racial discrimination. He’s a big fan of the HBO series “Game of Thrones.” He advised President Barack Obama on education policy. The New York Times in 2016 might have predicted his run for governor by calling him one of 14 young Democrats to watch. He and his brother operate the Christiania lodge at Vail.
Where does he fit along the spectrum of the Democratic Party in Colorado?
As a former state senator, he might not have the high statewide profile of Boulder Congressman Jared Polis, former State Treasurer Cary Kennedy or Lt. Gov. Donna Lynne who are also running in the primary. Before he announced, former U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar had been talking with Arvada Congressman Ed Perlmutter about which one of them might run for governor. (Salazar didn’t; Perlmutter did but dropped out after Polis got in.)
Johnston said he reached out to others he respects who were likely thinking of running and told them he was doing it. “No one has tried to persuade me not to run,” he said.
Last March, Colorado’s Democratic base turned out heavily for Bernie Sanders, and the Vermont democratic socialist crushed Hillary Clinton in our caucuses, beating her by about 20 points. The state’s political elite was firmly behind Clinton while the activist base clearly was not. Clinton supporters dismissed the caucus loss by saying caucus-goers make up a slim margin of Democrats statewide; Clinton rallied the base and beat Donald Trump in November in Colorado.
“I supported Hillary in the caucus,” Johnston told The Colorado Independent. But he frames himself as someone “with big and bold ideas who is able to bridge those divides to actually get results and build the coalitions it takes to get things done.”
For instance, he says that in the legislature he worked on criminal justice reform with activists from the progressive left and with Republicans on immigration issues. He talks about the ASSET bill, which allowed undocumented students to get in-state tuition, and the CLEAR Act to limit racial disparities in the criminal justice system and help those released from jail back into the workforce and into housing.
In a nod to Sanders, he promised not to take any money from political action committees in his campaign. There is, however, a Super PAC operating in the 2018 governor’s race that uses the same “Frontier Fairness” slogan as Johnston and is likely to support his candidacy.
Johnston will have to navigate with dexterity the valley between Democrats who think the party should move more to the left and those who think that because Clinton won here it should stay the course. And he’ll have great help along the way since he hired Craig Hughes, a top Democratic political consultant who handled the campaigns of U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and the Colorado efforts for Obama.
On the campaign trail, Johnston has styled himself as a bridge-builder who could bring people together in a divisive time. “Not just both sides of the Continental Divide,” he said during an August candidate forum Breckenridge, “but the urban and rural, the conservative and liberal, the newcomers and natives. It is going to take someone as governor who can not just pass policy but can build community.”
He produced the first TV ad in the Democratic primary— it was about banning guns
In late February, Johnston became the first candidate to put an ad on TV. In the wake of another mass shooting, this time at a high school in Parkland, Florida, Johnston’s ad focused on banning “military-style weapons” and directly taking on the NRA gun lobby.
Where is he drawing his support?
“I think that’s a really interesting issue about where his base comes from,” says Jim Carpenter, a Democratic operative who managed Ken Salazar’s successful 2004 campaign and was chief of staff to former Gov. Bill Ritter. “I think that all of these candidates have to figure out and do some pretty cold hard calculations about where they go, particularly if there’s a primary.”
One constituency Johnston might connect with is young professionals and millennials, said Curtis Hubbard, a partner at OnSite public affairs, who is now running Lynne’s campaign.
As a former state senator, Johnston has a geographical base around Denver, and being from Vail will get him attention out there. He has ties to the national education reform movement, which taps him into big money and networks. He also has ties to Obama. In his first 10 weeks on the campaign trail, he reported a record fundraising haul, bringing in more than $625,000, impressing political observers. He raised more than $300,000 more in second fundraising quarter. That said, nearly 70 percent of the campaign contributions Johnston’s accepted in his first quarter round of fundraising came from outside the state. As of June 13, 54 percent of the $2.3 million that Johnston has raised came from out-of-state contributors.
Former Colorado Democratic Gov. Dick Lamm supports him, as does ex-Democratic U.S. Sen. Gary Hart. Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg held a campaign event for Johnston in February. A more controversial segment of support, however, came from billionaire hedge-funder John Arnold who has “attracted opposition from unions and government employees for his national activism on pension reform” who held a joint fundraiser in Telluride with Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman, who a Republican who backed Mitt Romney.
Johnston was the first candidate in the entire race to turn in signatures— 20,000 of them— to the Secretary of State’s office to qualify for the ballot, a move signaling a smooth campaign operation and one that also gives him an edge. Signatures of voters who signed petitions for multiple candidates to get on the ballot will only count for the candidate who turns his or hers in first.
So what’s his big, bold proposal?
It is big. And it is bold. And this is it: “The Lifetime Opportunity Promise,” a plan to subsidize education for workers pushed out of jobs by automation and globalization that has hints of a free-college-tuition Sanders idea and the Civilian Conservation Corps from FDR’s New Deal.
The Colorado Independent asked Johnston to describe how the plan would work by imagining someone for whom his proposal would benefit. So he did:
Think of a 35-year-old man whose only job since high school was driving a truck, he said. As more driverless big rigs come on the market, he gets laid off. He always liked computers but he never had any training in how to use them in a career. The laid-off truck driver would enroll in a state program that would help him pick from options in a handful of growth industries involving computers. Maybe a tech company in his home county needs coders. He could attend a community college in Denver, enroll in a coding boot camp at a nonprofit like Galvanize, or an online program at CSU to get the training and certification he needs. Maybe it would cost $6,000. Maybe the truck driver could only afford $2,000 and would have to load up on $4,000 in debt. Well, the state would cover the $4,000. But in return, the truck-driver-turned-coder would commit to do service work for the state of Colorado for the next few years. That could include five or six weekends a year doing anything from helping with disaster relief to anything else he could handle. That would save the state money from having to pay for workers.
“It’s almost like a merger of a job-training program and a national service program at the state level with the focus on long-term investment of workers and long-term investment in the state,” Johnston says. He says he doesn’t know of another state-based program like it elsewhere in the country.
Just before Polis announced his campaign launch with a pledge to get Colorado to 100 percent renewable energy by 2040, Johnston made the same promise in a campaign video.
How might a new primary system we just passed affect a Johnston candidacy?
No one knows yet but it could benefit a candidate who does not come from the far left wing of the party more than one who does.
Because voters approved ballot measure Prop 108 on Nov. 8, Colorado’s next governor’s race will be the first year unaffiliated voters will be allowed to have a say in whom the Democratic Party nominates for governor. Democrats will still caucus for their candidates at precincts around the state — and unaffiliated voters cannot participate in those — but once candidates land on the primary ballot, either by coming out of caucuses or petitioning on, unaffiliated voters could be allowed to vote.
This would mean (if the law ends up going into place as planned without a lawsuit) that in the 2018 governor’s race, mailed ballots will be sent to unaffiliated voters with the names of Democratic and Republican primary candidates. Voters can chose one party or the other to participate in.
One aim of Prop 108 was to water down the voting power of the activist base in each party by broadening the electorate to include more voters in party primaries. Proponents of the measure saw it as a way to lessen the chances of Colorado nominating extreme candidates on either side.
Any potential buzzsaws for Johnston?
Sure.
Education reform can be extremely controversial and Johnston hasn’t been immune. When he was asked to give the 2014 commencement address at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, dozens protested his selection as speaker. According to The Washington Post at the time, protesters said Johnston “embraces a vision of education reform that relies heavily on test-based accountability while weakening the due process protections of teachers.”
But Johnston met with the protesters for two hours the day before his speech, and “received a standing ovation after his remarks the next day.”
Johnston encountered protestors during a campaign stop in Colorado Springs in December. Outside a building on the campus of Colorado College, two women held signs accusing him of being “anti-public schools” and propped up by shadowy out-of-state interests. A flyer they handed to passersby stated incorrectly that Johnston was a former principal of a charter school. Johnston stopped to speak with them. Watch how he handled the encounter here.
In the Colorado legislature, he pushed laws to require that half of teacher evaluations come from standardized testing. “It also remade the state’s teacher tenure law — a controversial form of job protection that a California court just struck down — making it easier to fire veteran teachers and changing how teachers are reassigned to new positions, prompting a lawsuit from the Colorado Education Association, the statewide teachers’ union,” reported the digital news magazine Ozy in 2014.
Tyler Sandberg, a Colorado political operative who works in conservative and Republican circles, had this take on Johnston’s gubernatorial announcement.
He would be a very tough general election candidate, but the teachers union will fight like hell to beat him in the Dem primary#COpolitics https://t.co/6GzeplPWMt
— Tyler Sandberg (@wtylersandberg) January 16, 2017
Early in the race, the Colorado Education Association, the state’s teachers union, stayed out of it.
“Our next governor will play an enormous role in school funding, state assessment, educator evaluations and many other areas critical to educators and the success of our students,” CEA President Kerrie Dallman said in a written statement. “We need to hear from all of the candidates on their ideas to provide our students with the schools they deserve and look forward to having these conversations with every person running for our state’s highest office.”
By February, though, they had found their candidate— Cary Kennedy— “as CEA’s unanimous choice for governor in a member-driven, democratic recommendation process that represents more than 35,000 educators across the state. American Federation of Teachers – Colorado also announced their unanimous support for Kennedy.”
Johnston says he expects strong support from teachers across the state.
In 2013, Johnston lost a statewide ballot measure fight when voters shot down a school-finance proposal he championed, called Amendment 66, because it would have raised taxes by a billion dollars. It’s that last part that’s a ready-made sound byte for his opposition.