John Hickenlooper Wins Reelection in Colorado Senate Race, Beating Mark Baisley

Democratic U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper won reelection in Colorado on Tuesday, November 3, 2026, retaining his seat by beating Republican state Sen. Mark Baisley and Forward Party candidate Bob Chew, Colorado Public Radio reported.

CNN and Fox News both projected Hickenlooper the winner shortly after polls closed in Colorado at 7 p.m. MT, The Coloradoan reported. The projection came before any votes were reported on the Colorado Secretary of State website. The Associated Press results feed also marks the Colorado Senate race as called for Hickenlooper.

The count at the call

In the AP results feed, Hickenlooper had 267,695 votes when the race was marked called, with 15.51 percent of precincts reporting, or 656 of 4,230. An earlier AP table in the same feed showed Baisley at 116,747 votes. The early projection, made with only a small share of precincts reporting, rested on the size of that gap and on a race that had never looked close in the run up to election day.

The call landed minutes into Colorado's count, not hours. Polls closed at 7 p.m. MT, and the two networks moved soon after, in time for CPR to report that Hickenlooper had retained his seat in its 7:03 p.m. MT update of the Senate race.

A quiet race

CPR reported that the general election race was relatively quiet compared with the more competitive Colorado U.S. House races on the same ballot. Little outside money was spent on either major candidate, and Hickenlooper was expected to easily retain the office. The result on Tuesday matched that expectation. Baisley, a state senator running statewide against an incumbent senator, never turned the contest into the kind of fight that drew national attention or national spending to Colorado this year.

His last term

Hickenlooper is a former mayor of Denver and a two term governor of Colorado. He was first elected to the Senate in 2020. CPR reported that he says the next term will be his last in office.

Before the general election, he faced a closer than anticipated primary challenge from progressive state Sen. Julie Gonzales. He came through that challenge, then won the general election on Tuesday against Baisley and Chew. The new term he starts now is, by his own account, the last one he plans to serve.

The rest of the ballot

The Senate race shared a Colorado ballot with U.S. House races that CPR described as more competitive than this one. That contrast shaped the night in Colorado: the state's Senate seat was settled within minutes of the polls closing, while the harder fights sat lower on the ballot. For the Senate, voters chose among three named candidates, the incumbent Hickenlooper, the Republican state senator Baisley, and the Forward Party candidate Chew, and the networks were able to project the winner before the Secretary of State had reported a single vote.