Out gay Gov. Jared Polis (D) has been declared the winner in his bid to be reelected as the governor of Colorado, beating his Republican challenger, Heidi Ganahl.
Overwhelming support for Polis allowed multiple news outlets to call the race early as the popular governor quickly outpaced his competition.
Polis, who used to serve in the U.S. House and was the first gay parent in Congress, is a longtime champion of LGBTQ rights.
Last year he signed a bill making it easier for transgender Coloradans to afford gender-affirming health care. Earlier in his term, he signed a bill banning conversion therapy.
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Polis, who married his longtime partner Marlon Reis last year, slammed state Republicans for proposing over 150 anti-LGBTQ bills this year.
“The American people as a whole are completely accepting of who people love and how they live their lives,” he said, “and these hard policies about saying certain youth can’t play sports and certain people aren’t allowed in certain places and micromanaging what restroom people use and mandating what they do are really frankly un-American.”
Ganahl ran an anti-LGBTQ campaign, saying that the Supreme Court should allow states to ban same-sex couples from marrying. She also said that a friend’s daughter got assigned to share a dorm room with a transgender woman at the University of Colorado so she “made some phone calls and got it reversed.”
Ganahl also accused 30 school districts of accommodating students “identifying as cats,” part of the bizarre rightwing urban legend that schools are being forced to let kids who identify as animals use litter boxes instead of toilets. Nine of the school districts she named called her out for lying about them.
