John Wright Hickenlooper Jr. ( HIK-ən-loop-ər; born February 7, 1952) is an American politician, geologist, and businessman serving as the junior United States senator from Colorado since 2021. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the 42nd governor of Colorado from 2011 to 2019 and as the 43rd mayor of Denver from 2003 to 2011.
Born in Narberth, Pennsylvania, Hickenlooper is a graduate of Wesleyan University. After a career as a petroleum geologist, in 1988 he co-founded the Wynkoop Brewing Company, one of the first brewpubs in the U.S. Hickenlooper was elected the 43rd mayor of Denver in 2003, serving two terms. In 2005, TIME named him one of America's five best big-city mayors. After incumbent governor Bill Ritter said that he would not seek reelection, Hickenlooper announced his intention to run for the Democratic nomination in January 2010. He won an uncontested primary and faced Constitution Party nominee Tom Tancredo and Republican Party nominee Dan Maes in the general election. Hickenlooper won with 51% of the vote and was reelected in 2014, defeating Republican Bob Beauprez.
As governor, he introduced universal background checks and banned high-capacity magazines in the wake of the 2012 Aurora, Colorado, shooting. He expanded Medicaid under the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, halving the rate of uninsured people in the state. Having initially opposed marijuana legalization, he has gradually come to support it.
He sought the Democratic nomination for U.S. president in 2019 but dropped out before primaries were held. He subsequently ran for the U.S. Senate, winning the Democratic nomination and the general election, defeating incumbent Republican Cory Gardner. At 68, Hickenlooper became the oldest first-term senator to represent Colorado.
Early life, education, and career
Hickenlooper was born in Narberth, Pennsylvania, a Main Line suburb of Philadelphia. He is the son of Anne Doughten (née Morris) Kennedy and John Wright Hickenlooper. His great-grandfather Andrew Hickenlooper was a Union general, and his grandfather Smith Hickenlooper was a United States federal judge. A cousin, Bourke B. Hickenlooper, a Republican known as "Hick", was governor of Iowa from 1943 to 1945 and a U.S. senator from Iowa from 1945 to 1969.
Hickenlooper was raised by his mother from a young age after his father's death. He is a 1970 graduate of The Haverford School, an independent boys school in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where he was a National Merit Scholarship Semifinalist. New York magazine reported that at this time his heroes were Neil Young, Ray Davies, and Gordie Howe, and that his pet peeves were violence and "beer boys."
Hickenlooper attended Wesleyan University, where he received a B.A. in English in 1974 and a master's degree in geology in 1980. He recounted first smoking pot when he was 16 and using lithium carbonate capsules to go through with his final exam. In 1989, Hickenlooper was arrested in Denver for "driving while impaired" and did community service.
Hickenlooper worked as a geologist in Colorado for Buckhorn Petroleum in the early 1980s. When Buckhorn was sold, Hickenlooper was laid off in 1986. He and five business partners opened the Wynkoop Brewing Company brewpub in October 1988 after raising startup funds from dozens of friends and family along with a Denver economic development office loan. The Wynkoop was one of the nation's first brewpubs. By 1996, Westword reported that Denver had more brewpubs per capita than any other city. Hickenlooper claims his restaurant was the first in Colorado to offer a designated driver program.
Mayor of Denver (2003–2011)
In 2003, Hickenlooper ran for mayor of Denver. Campaigning on his business experience, he developed a series of creative television ads that separated him from the rest of the crowded field, including one in which he addressed unhappiness over a recent increase in parking rates by walking the streets to "feed" meters. He won the election and in July 2003 he took office as Denver's 43rd mayor. Time named him one of America's five best big-city mayors in 2005.
On taking office, Hickenlooper inherited a "$70 million budget deficit, the worst in city history", which he was able to eliminate in his first term "without major service cuts or layoffs", according to Time. He won bipartisan support for a multibillion-dollar mass public transit project, intended in part to attract investment and funded by a voter-approved sales tax increase.
In 2003, Hickenlooper announced a ten-year plan to end homelessness in Denver, citing it as one of the issues that prompted him to run for mayor. 280 U.S. cities announced similar plans. The effort did not end homelessness in Denver, and in 2015 Denver's city auditor "released a scathing audit faulting the plan's implementation." The head of the agency responsible defended the program, saying it was "still housing 300–400 people a month in varying ways", while Hickenlooper argued that the point of such an ambitious target was to focus attention and resources on the problem. In his governor's budget request for 2017–18, he asked lawmakers to allocate $12.3 million from taxes on marijuana to building homes for chronically homeless people.
Hickenlooper established the Denver Scholarship Foundation, providing needs-based college scholarships to high school graduates.
In May 2007, Hickenlooper was reelected with 88% of the vote. He resigned as mayor just before his inauguration as governor.
2008 Democratic National Convention
Hickenlooper was an executive member of the Denver 2008 Convention Host Committee and helped lead the successful campaign for Denver to host the 2008 Democratic National Convention, which was also the centennial anniversary of the city's hosting of the 1908 Democratic National Convention.
In a controversial move decried by critics as breaching partisan ethics, the Hickenlooper administration arranged for the DNC host committee, a private nonprofit organization, to get untaxed fuel from Denver city-owned pumps, saving them $0.404 per US gallon ($0.107/L). Once the arrangement came to light, the host committee agreed to pay taxes on the fuel already consumed and on all future fuel purchases. Also, Coors Brewing Company, based in Golden, Colorado, used "waste beer" to provide the ethanol to power a fleet of FlexFuel vehicles used during the convention.
Governor of Colorado (2011–2019)
Elections
2010
Hickenlooper was viewed as a possible contender for governor of Colorado in the November 2006 election to replace term-limited Republican governor Bill Owens. Despite a "Draft Hick" campaign, he announced on February 6, 2006, that he would not run for governor. Later, he supported Democratic candidate Bill Ritter, Denver's former district attorney, who was subsequently elected.
After Ritter announced on January 6, 2010, that he would step down at the end of his term, Hickenlooper was cited as a potential candidate for governor. He said that if Salazar mounted a bid for governor, he would likely not challenge him in a Democratic primary. On January 7, 2010, Salazar confirmed that he would not run for governor in 2010 and endorsed Hickenlooper. On January 12, 2010, media outlets reported that Hickenlooper would begin a campaign for governor. On August 5, 2010, he selected CSU-Pueblo president Joseph A. Garcia as his running mate. Hickenlooper was elected with 51% of the vote, ahead of former congressman Tom Tancredo, running on the American Constitution Party ticket, who finished with 36.4% of the vote.
2014
Hickenlooper won a tightly contested gubernatorial election with 49% of the vote to Republican businessman and former congressman Bob Beauprez's 46%.
Tenure
On January 11, 2011, Hickenlooper was sworn in as the 42nd Governor of Colorado after winning by 15 points. He was the second Denver mayor ever elected governor. His victory was a landslide despite Democrats' poor results overall in the 2010 elections. Republicans flipped twelve governorships nationwide in 2010. NPR described Hickenlooper as having a "pro-business centrist profile" and as "known to try to build consensus and compromise on tough issues", while 5280 called him as "one of those unicorn-rare, truly apolitical politicians", noting support from business leaders and some Republicans.
On December 4, 2012, Hickenlooper was elected to serve as vice chair of the Democratic Governors Association.
On March 18, 2016, Hickenlooper signed bill HB 16–1284 into law, punishing companies for boycotting Israel.
On August 25, 2017, it was reported that Republican Governor of Ohio John Kasich was considering the possibility of a 2020 unity ticket to run against Donald Trump, with Hickenlooper as vice president.
Constitutionally limited to two consecutive terms, Hickenlooper could not run for governor in 2018.
On June 5, 2020, the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission fined Hickenlooper $2,750 for twice violating Colorado's gift ban as governor. Hickenlooper received a flight on a private jet owned by homebuilder and donor Larry Mizel, the founder of MDC Holdings. He also received private security and a ride to the airport in a Maserati limousine on a trip to the Bilderberg Meetings in Italy. The state spent an estimated $127,000 in attorney's fees investigating the violation.
U.S. Senator (2021–present)
Elections
2020
Hickenlooper had previously been considered the front-runner to fill the United States Senate seat to be vacated by Ken Salazar upon his confirmation as Secretary of the Interior in the Obama administration. He confirmed his interest in the seat. But on January 3, 2009, Governor Bill Ritter appointed Denver Public Schools Superintendent Michael Bennet to the position. Bennet previously served as Hickenlooper's chief of staff.
In a YouTube video published to his campaign channel on August 22, 2019, Hickenlooper announced that he would run for the U.S. Senate in 2020. Some preliminary polling data showed him with a substantial lead against incumbent Republican Senator Cory Gardner. Hickenlooper was also leading the Democratic primary field by a fairly wide margin before he announced. He was quickly endorsed by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, a move protested by candidates already running before Hickenlooper's entry.
On June 30, Hickenlooper defeated former state house Speaker Andrew Romanoff in the Democratic primary, winning the nomination to challenge one-term incumbent Republican Cory Gardner. He defeated Gardner by 9 points and took office on January 3, 2021.
At 68, Hickenlooper was the oldest elected freshman U.S. senator from Colorado. He was the oldest person to become a freshman U.S. senator in the 21st century until Peter Welch of Vermont surpassed him at age 75 in 2022.
Tenure
January 6 Capitol attack
In the wake of the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol, Hickenlooper said he would support efforts to remove Donald Trump from office, in line with most of his party.
STOCK Act violations
In May 2022, an analysis by the nonprofit news organization Sludge found that Hickenlooper had violated the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act of 2012 by failing to disclose within 45 days five stock trades his household made, which were worth between $565,000 and $1.3 million. A June 2022 analysis by Business Insider found that Hickenlooper had again violated the STOCK Act by disclosing stock trades made by his wife between two and 14 months later than required by law, including purchases worth between $516,006 and $1.2 million and sales worth between $130,004 and $300,000.
Committee assignments
Committee on Energy and Natural Resources
Subcommittee on Energy
Subcommittee on Public Lands, Forests, and Mining
Subcommittee on Water and Power
Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
Subcommittee on Children and Families
Subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety (Chair)
Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation
Subcommittee on Aviation Safety, Operations, and Innovation
Subcommittee on Communications, Media, and Broadband
Subcommittee on Space and Science (Chair)
Subcommittee on Tourism, Trade and Export Promotion
Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship
2020 presidential campaign
On March 4, 2019, Hickenlooper announced his campaign to seek the Democratic nomination for president of the United States in 2020. His candidacy had been a matter of media speculation for months before his announcement. Hickenlooper formally launched his campaign on March 7, 2019, in Denver, Colorado. A video titled "Stand Tall" was released to announce the campaign and outline his reasons for running. Hickenlooper formed Giddy Up PAC in 2018 in anticipation of a presidential campaign, raising more than $600,000 in the midterm cycle. The campaign struggled to gain traction in the crowded and increasingly competitive Democratic presidential primary field, and Hickenlooper ended his candidacy in a YouTube video on August 15, 2019, and instead began exploring a run for the U.S. Senate.