Victor Marx won the Republican primary for governor of Colorado, and NBC News projects he did it by the slimmest of margins after a protracted count of the final votes. Marx took 39.9% of the vote, just ahead of Barb Kirkmeyer’s 39.4%, with Scott Bottoms finishing a distant third.
The result was not clear when the polls closed on the June 30 primary. It hardened only after the count dragged on, turning a three-candidate contest into a photo finish that will send Marx into the general election against Phil Weiser, the Democratic nominee. For Colorado Republicans, it ended a nomination fight that had been too close to call and left the party with a candidate who will now test whether voters are ready to break a streak of more than two decades without electing a Republican governor.
Marx is a former Marine and the founder of an evangelical ministry, a résumé that helped define his political rise even before the campaign entered its final stretch. Weiser brings a very different profile: he is a two-term state attorney general and former University of Colorado Law School dean who beat Michael Bennet in the Democratic primary. Jared Polis is term-limited, which means Colorado voters will choose a new governor in November whether they want to or not.
But Marx’s wider notice this year came after a May interview with KUSA of Denver, when he was pressed on whether he had killed people. Asked, “Do you think that you’ve killed people as an adult?” Marx replied, “I’ve been in other situations where, possibly, people or persons died as a result of me defending myself in other countries,” a line that has followed him into the race. That exchange mattered because it gave the primary a second storyline beyond the vote count: not just who would win, but what kind of nominee the GOP would send into a statewide contest.
Marx has also said an abusive stepfather forced him to kill a man when he was 7 years old, and he has described his ministry as one that rescues women and children held in captivity, including a mission involving kidnapped girls from Islamic State territory. Those details do not change the math of the primary, but they explain why his campaign now enters the general election under a harsher glare than a narrow victory alone would suggest. The question in Colorado is no longer whether Marx can survive the Republican field. It is whether he can expand beyond it fast enough to matter against Weiser in November.
