In a campaign ad released last month, a grinning Bob Chew-as-rebel-pilot zoomed away from a giant, spherical pile of $100 bills that he’d labeled the “Debt Star.”
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The “Star Wars”-inspired ad underscores the core animating issue of Chew’s semi-independent bid to represent Colorado in the U.S. Senate: the national debt.
Running under the banner of the Forward Party, the 67-year-old former Republican is mounting his first political campaign. He’s hoping to unseat a mainstay of Colorado politics, Democratic U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, as well as leapfrog Hickenlooper’s other longshot challenger, Republican state Sen. Mark Baisley.
To finance his run, he’d donated $2.8 million to his own campaign as of late September, and he told The Denver Post that he was willing to spend as much as $3.7 million by Election Day, Nov. 3.
Here’s what you should know about Chew, who joins three other third-party candidates in the race.
Who is Bob Chew?
Chew, a nine-year Boulder resident, formally left the GOP last year. In an interview, he said he never voted for President Donald Trump, backing Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson in Trump’s first election in 2016. A former Navy sailor who served on a nuclear submarine, Chew is a chemical engineer by education.
In 1996, he founded a company that provides “engineering and technical services to pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing facilities.”
He describes himself as a McCain Republican, in the vein of the late U.S. Sen. John McCain. He said he was disillusioned by the GOP under Trump (though he said he supported former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s presidential bid in 2024). He’s hoping that a similar wave of disillusionment — among unaffiliated as well as partisan voters — propels him to victory.
He criticized Republicans’ embrace of election denialism and Democrats’ efforts to move away from fossil fuels and coal-fired power plants, which he said was causing increases in energy costs.
Colorado U.S. Senate candidate Q&A
So he’s entirely self-funded?
Not entirely, but his own donations make up the vast majority of his campaign war chest. He said his campaign would likely be a one-and-done: His pockets are deep enough to drop a few million on a longshot Senate run, but not so deep that he can keep doing it every couple of years.
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What are Bob Chew’s policies?
As his “Star Wars” parody suggests, Chew is pretty concerned about the national debt, which is now over $40 trillion. He wants to reduce that. He doesn’t support a wealth tax (let alone Colorado’s Amendment 87, which would increase taxes on the state’s wealthiest individuals and companies), but he said he supported taxing the estates of people after they died.
On immigration, he supports a secure border and preventing more people without proper legal status from entering the United States, but he wants amnesty for those already living in the country who didn’t have serious criminal records.
As Colorado battles drying conditions and low snowfall, Chew says he does not believe climate change leads to drought or severe weather changes.
He hopes to win the race alongside a couple of other independent candidates who can then form a bloc in the Senate to force negotiations between Democrats and Republicans. He compared it to the role that former Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia once played in the Senate.
Can Bob Chew win?
We’re living in Donald Trump’s America, so anything is possible, and Chew is making a go of it.
But in an increasingly blue state in a two-party political system, he faces a steep uphill climb, to put it mildly. Even a one-on-one race against Hickenlooper (Chew said he wants Baisley to drop out) would offer vanishingly small odds.
Colorado Democrats and Democratic-leaning unaffiliated voters demonstrated in June — when Hickenlooper survived a closer-than-expected primary — that they’re not happy with the party’s leadership. But that doesn’t mean a self-funded outsider, let alone one who’s far from the left-wing candidate that scared Hickenlooper, is poised for an upset.
If nothing else, Chew said he hoped to pick up enough votes to shove the national debt issue into the public and political consciousness.
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