The race for Colorado attorney general is coming down to a fiery clash over experience and the future of the state’s aggressive litigation against the Trump administration.
Jena Griswold, a Democrat who has been Colorado’s secretary of state since 2019, faces Michael Allen, a Republican who is serving his second term as the district attorney for the Colorado Springs area.
Looming large in the race is President Donald Trump, whose administration has been hit with a deluge of lawsuits from Colorado’s current Democratic attorney general, Phil Weiser, and his peers in other states since Trump returned to office in 2025. Weiser has to date launched or joined nearly 90 legal challenges of everything from the freezing of food assistance benefits to an executive order attempting to restrict mail voting.
The raging legal battles have presented a key campaign talking point for Griswold in a state where the president remains deeply unpopular, with voters having thrice rejected him at the polls. Trump has also been a recurring foil for Griswold, who has lambasted the president’s unfounded claims of election fraud and has resisted his attempts to restrict mail voting during her time as Colorado’s chief elections officer.
If elected attorney general, she has pledged to continue fighting Trump in court, saying he is the “most corrupt president in the history of this country.”
“I am the candidate with the experience that matters most to voters: Standing up to Donald Trump,” Griswold, 42, said in an interview with The Denver Post.
While Griswold, who has a law license, is the de facto front-runner in increasingly blue Colorado, her thin legal resume may prove to be her biggest vulnerability. Allen is hoping his decades of work as an attorney — which includes successfully prosecuting one of the state’s most high-profile hate crimes in recent years — will persuade voters to make him the first Republican to win statewide office since 2016.
“My opponent just has no legal experience to speak of,” said Allen, 54. “If you’re looking to hire the state’s top lawyer (and) the state’s top chief law enforcement officer, you ought to have experience.”
But to take the office out of Democrats’ hands, Allen will have to win over a sizeable chunk of the state’s left-leaning voters, a prospect that could be complicated by his conservative background.
The Trump factor — and what comes next
Griswold has made Trump central to her campaign, saying the Republican president has retaliated against Colorado over its mail voting system and for the incarceration of one of his allies, former Mesa County Clerk and election denier Tina Peters.
Peters was convicted of giving a person unauthorized access to county voting equipment after the 2020 election. She was released from prison in June after Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, granted her clemency. Prior to that, the Trump administration had taken a number of adverse actions against Colorado, including the cancellation of millions of dollars in federal grants and Trump’s veto of a bill that would’ve helped pay for a water pipeline in southeastern Colorado.
Griswold said Weiser’s lawsuits to stop dozens of Trump’s actions were “exactly the right thing to do.” She has pressured Allen, who has repeatedly suggested that much of Weiser’s litigation is politically motivated, to reveal which lawsuits he’d abandon if elected attorney general.
Allen has named only one, Weiser’s challenge of Trump’s relocation of U.S. Space Command from Colorado Springs to Alabama. He says that while he doesn’t personally agree with the decision, he doesn’t think it’s illegal.
Colorado Attorney General candidate Q&A
In an interview, Allen did not specify a lawsuit he would continue, instead saying he would review each piece of litigation to determine its merit. But he acknowledged there was evidence that the Trump administration had punished Colorado because of politics, referencing an email late last year between Trump officials asking them to discuss “immediate actions” toward Colorado amid Trump’s furor over Peters. The email, which was first reported by The Post, was revealed as part of a Colorado lawsuit alleging retaliation by the federal government.
Allen says his own office may have been a victim of Trump’s ire. It has yet to see a $340,000 federal grant it won in 2025.
“If that is tied to that sort of punitive action by the president’s administration, that is absolutely wrong,” Allen said. “… We would definitely continue to fight on those types of things.”
While much of the political discourse has centered on Trump, he will be president for only the first two years of the next Colorado attorney general’s tenure, which begins in January.
Allen said the next officeholder must have a vision beyond the current occupant of the White House, adding that Griswold’s “entire platform is about fighting Trump.”
With a budget of around $150 million, the attorney general manages an office of roughly 700 lawyers and staff. One of its chief duties is defending the state’s laws and interests in court. While much of its focus is on civil matters, the office also investigates and prosecutes some criminal cases and represents the state in criminal appeals.
Both Allen and Griswold say they want to focus on consumer protections, a pillar of Weiser’s two terms as attorney general.
Allen credited Weiser for his efforts, which have included lawsuits against grocery chain mergers and corporate landlords accused of price fixing. But he said the office was not keeping pace with the record number of consumer protection complaints filed. Allen also wants to focus on prosecuting organized criminal activity, using the statewide grand jury to go after fentanyl rings and human trafficking.
Griswold said she wanted to beef up the attorney general’s workers’ rights division to fight against wage theft and other workplace abuses. Other priorities for her include pushing back on price gouging, protecting abortion rights, limiting pollution by corporations and ensuring new data centers “pay their own way” to prevent surging utility costs.
“One of the big reasons I’m running for attorney general is to stand up for everyday people,” Griswold said.
Career lawyer vs. government executive
As Griswold seeks to make the race a referendum on Trump, Allen has framed the debate around credentials.
A U.S. Navy veteran and Colorado native, Allen graduated from law school at the University of Kansas in 2005. After stints at various offices in Kansas, including serving as an assistant attorney general, Allen joined the Fourth Judicial District Attorney’s Office in Colorado — which covers El Paso and Teller counties — in late 2011. He was elected district attorney in 2020 and was reelected in 2024.
Allen, who lives in El Paso County, was the lead prosecutor in the case against the Club Q shooter, Lee Aldrich, who killed five people and injured nearly two dozen at an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs in 2022. Aldrich was sentenced to life in prison.
Griswold, who also grew up in Colorado, graduated from law school at the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. Most of her legal experience consists of working as a litigation associate at a Washington, D.C.-based law firm for about 18 months after she passed the bar exam in Colorado in late 2011, according to her campaign.
Griswold passed the D.C. bar exam and was admitted to the bar in September 2012, roughly seven months before leaving the firm.
She also worked as a voter protection attorney for about four months during former President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, served as then-Gov. John Hickenlooper’s liaison in Washington from 2013 to 2015, and ran her own consulting firm before being elected secretary of state in 2018. She lives in Louisville.
Allen says Griswold’s lack of courtroom experience and know-how for prosecuting tough cases makes her ill-equipped to serve as the state’s chief law enforcement officer.
Griswold argues the attorney general is an executive role, not a trial attorney. She says the main tenant of the job is guiding the legal direction of the office.
“You are not in court arguing cases,” she said.
Doug Spencer, a University of Colorado Boulder law professor, said that’s largely true, but added: “You want your attorney general to bring to the table experience with the law, because that is their value and role to the government.”
“That is going to be a liability that (Griswold), fairly, is going to need to confront,” Spencer said.
During both the June primary campaign and now in the general election, Griswold has limited her exposure to opponents who’ve sought to use her experience as a key line of attack.
Her Democratic primary opponents repeatedly criticized Griswold for not attending debates and forums, saying she did not want to answer questions about her experience. Griswold declined to participate in a June debate with her three primary challengers, but did attend a debate in May. Her campaign said she also participated in roughly a dozen forums.
More recently, she turned down a debate with Allen proposed by 9News; anchor Kyle Clark said Allen had agreed to the debate. Her only face-to-face meeting with Allen was on Wednesday night at a debate hosted by the Colorado Sun on the University of Denver campus.
Can a Republican reclaim the AG’s office?
Though Republican Cynthia Coffman served a term as attorney general just before Weiser, winning a statewide office in Colorado has since become an uphill battle for Republicans as the state’s electorate has shifted blue.
Weiser was elected attorney general in 2018 by a 6.5-percentage-point margin, and he was reelected in 2022 by nearly 12 points. Griswold has raised nearly six times as much as Allen, with over $2.6 million to Allen’s $444,014, according to the most recent campaign finance reports.
But with no incumbent this year, Allen believes he has a shot at flipping the office. He said talking about everyday issues, rather than focusing on divisive national politics, would resonate with voters.
Griswold has moved to paint Allen as a “Trump loyalist” who’s aligned with views that she says are out of touch in the state. She criticized comments Allen made in January during an interview on a conservative talk radio show, where he said the federal immigration officer who shot and killed Minnesota protester Renee Good showed “trigger discipline” for firing only three rounds.
Allen has said he opposes abortion, and he personally urged people to support a state ballot measure in 2020 that sought to ban abortion in Colorado after 22 weeks of pregnancy. (Colorado voters and lawmakers have since expanded abortion access.) He assailed the state’s red flag law, which allows judges to temporarily remove guns from people who are deemed a threat to themselves or others, after its enactment in 2020. And he’s been critical of state laws that restrict local law enforcement’s interactions with federal immigration officials, all of which were passed by Democrats.
As attorney general, Allen would have to defend and enforce those and other laws. He said he was prepared to do so, regardless of his personal or political views.
“The officeholder does not have the privilege of picking and choosing which laws they like or don’t like,” he said.
Allen, in turn, has criticized Griswold for repeated missteps during her time as Colorado’s chief elections official.
The secretary of state’s office accidentally posted a spreadsheet containing election systems passwords online months before the 2024 election, sent mailers on how to vote to roughly 30,000 noncitizens in 2022 and unintentionally made information publicly accessible on voters who’d requested confidentiality for their records in August. (Allen was one of the people whose information was posted.)
Griswold, responding to the 2024 voting passwords leak, said she regretted the error but alleged that it had been politicized by “MAGA extremists.” The mistake was reported to an election denier, who had previously called for Griswold to be hanged, by a Republican state lawmaker and another GOP politician before it was made public.
Spencer, the CU law professor, said an increasingly polarized political climate, coupled with the fact that the attorney general is an elected position, creates “an inherent tension between somebody who needs to be attuned to the politics of their state … as well as a need to promote to the public that law will be administered in a nonpartisan kind of way.”
That could factor into whether anti-Trump sentiment is enough to keep the office in Democrats’ hands, or if voters are willing to buck the state’s leftward trend in favor of a career prosecutor.
“These two candidates are lending themselves to a very close, competitive race,” he said.
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