Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser announced his bid to be the state’s next governor on Thursday morning, becoming the first Democrat to enter what will likely be a crowded 2026 primary field.
“As your Attorney General, I’ve spent the last six years taking on big fights for the people of Colorado, standing up against irresponsible companies that harmed consumers, defending our freedoms, improving public safety, and protecting our land, air, and water,” Weiser said in a Thursday morning press release unveiling his campaign. “… This campaign will focus on engaging with you and having real conversations, to hear what’s on your mind, to learn how our state government can best serve you, and to get your ideas on how we can meet our challenges, together.”
Weiser’s early jump into the race will allow him to begin raising money immediately, even though the June 2026 Democratic primary is still nearly 18 months away.
His announcement also serves as a starting pistol for what will be an extensive 2026 campaign season, and it ends the yearslong shadow campaign that’s been waged quietly by would-be successors to Gov. Jared Polis: Weiser has long been expected to pursue the governor’s mansion after Polis, as has Secretary of State Jena Griswold, U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse and Ken Salazar, a longtime Colorado political figure who’s now U.S. ambassador to Mexico.
Several lesser-known Republican, unaffiliated and third-party candidates have filed to run, but Weiser is the first major candidate of any affiliation to declare his campaign.
Weiser, 56, is entering the last two years of his second term as Colorado’s attorney general. He previously worked as the dean of the University of Colorado Law School and as a policy adviser in the Obama administration. He first moved to the state to clerk for a federal judge after graduating from New York University’s law school. He also clerked for two U.S. Supreme Court justices, Byron R. White and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Weiser, whose mother was born in a Nazi concentration camp one day before it was liberated in 1945, has said he came to Colorado because he looked for clerkships in states that had a baseball team and a Jewish community.
His six years as attorney general have seen his office oversee the distribution of tens of millions of dollars in settlement payments from companies involved in the opioid crisis. He has also joined several prominent national lawsuits and legal efforts, including to block the merger of the Kroger and Albertsons grocery chains, and he’s backed consumer protection litigation against groups including Wyatts Towing and, more recently, controversial companies in the housing market like RealPage and CBZ Management.
When he ran for AG in the 2018 election, Weiser prominently described his plans to combat then-President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and generally to serve as a legal bulwark against the Trump administration.
His pitch for the governor’s mansion will likely turn on those same pledges, as Trump prepares to enter the White House again later this month on a platform of mass deportations and promises of regulatory rollbacks. Indeed, in a call with state House Democrats in early December, Weiser said his office had already begun researching when the military or National Guard could be called out — as Trump has pledged to do to support his deportation plans.
An early poll of four potential 2026 Democratic gubernatorial candidates showed Weiser in last in terms of support by likely primary voters, behind Neguse, Griswold and Salazar, though the highest share of respondents — 37% — said they were undecided. More voters said they had never heard of Neguse or Weiser than the other candidates.
Name recognition was also a concern for Weiser when he ran for statewide office as a law school dean six years ago. But he raised more than $1 million on his way to beating a left-wing primary opponent and then a Republican challenger back then. He will now have an early start to openly court Democratic donors again.
High-profile legal battles with Trump also may help elevate Weiser further in the coming years, much as election conspiracies helped bolster Griswold’s profile following the 2020 presidential election. She, too, is serving her second and final term in her current office.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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