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Brauchler yet to concede in tight battle with Democrat
Democratic candidate Phil Weiser claimed victory over Republican George Brauchler in a close attorney general’s race Tuesday night after a tight battle focused on experience and the role the office should play in setting policy.
Brauchler, however, left Colorado Republicans’ Election Night event without conceding.
Weiser was leading the attorney general’s race with 49.5 percent percent of the vote, according to partial results at 11 p.m. with 77 percent of the vote in. Republican candidate George Brauchler had 47.7 percent of the vote.
The lead was tight enough for Brauchler to say earlier that he held out hope that he can still pull out a win with voters from the state’s conservative corners.
“I feel optimistically cautious,” he said shortly before 9 p.m. “There’s a ton of ballots still out there in the rural parts of the state.”
The attorney general’s race offered voters starkly different choices. Brauchler, a career prosecutor, faced off against Weiser, a law professor and former policy adviser in the Obama White House.
The winner will succeed Republican Attorney General Cynthia Coffman, who opted not to run for a second term and made a failed bid for the GOP nod for governor.
Brauchler, the district attorney in the 18th Judicial District, prosecuted the Aurora theater shooter and touted his courtroom experience as necessary for the job.
A colonel in the Colorado Army National Guard, Brauchler has deployed overseas and was chief of military justice for the 4th Infantry Division in Tikrit, Iraq.
On the campaign trail, Brauchler cast Weiser as an academic who lacked the real-world experience necessary to run the attorney general’s office.
Weiser, a former dean of the University of Colorado Law School, pointed voters to his experiences outside academia.
He worked on antitrust cases in the U.S. Department of Justice and worked as a policy adviser in the Obama administration.
William F. Robinson III, a Denver attorney, ran on the Libertarian ticket.