Fun fact: Colorado is actually the third state to cast votes in the presidential primary election after Iowa and New Hampshire.

Coloradans’ ballots hit mailboxes last week, and although we do have until March 3 at 7 p.m. to vote, technically our voting began after Iowa and New Hampshire but ahead of Nevada and South Carolina. Our results will be announced with 13 other states on Super Tuesday.

Colorado is a much better national bellwether than Iowa or New Hampshire. The people who turn out for caucuses in those states are overwhelmingly activist, white, and not representative in terms of the demographics and attitudes of the rest of the country.

So while issues like health care and jobs are important, the most critical consideration will be choosing the most electable candidate. Democrats are laser-focused on beating President Donald Trump.

The status of the race is unpredictable, but the overarching concern is whether Team Sanders will burn down the party.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has declined to commit to leaving the presidential primary race before the convention if he fails to win the party’s nomination.

And, there are troubling considerations for party unity should Sanders lose in a contested primary or at a brokered convention.

Alarmingly, last month the National Emerson College Poll found that only 53% of Sanders supporters would definitely support the eventual nominee if he loses the nomination. By comparison, 87% of Biden’s supporters, and 90% of Warren’s supporters said they would vote for whoever the nominee is.

And, what could be worse for Democrats in November? Feeling the Bern.

Many view Sanders as the party’s current front-runner. That scares the hell out of Democratic moderates for good reason. Sanders is a socialist. He also happens to be holding a campaign event downtown Denver on Sunday.

Republicans are salivating over a Sanders nomination. Trump has already begun calling Sanders a communist, and the party will certainly label key Democratic Senate candidates across the county as socialists too.

A recent Gallup poll reaffirmed that Americans will not elect a socialist candidate for president. Asked whether they would vote for their party nominee who was a “generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be socialist,” 45% said yes and 53% said no. In fact, acceptance for a socialist nominee is actually 2 percentage points lower now than when Gallup asked the same question in June 2015.

So while 47% of Democrats describe their political views as liberal, conservative and moderate Democrats makeup 51% of Democrat voters. Although Sanders is emerging as the front runner on the far left, he only managed to garner 25.7% of the New Hampshire vote and 75,000 fewer voters than he did in 2016. The best thing going for him though is the number of viable moderate candidates competing against each other.

The most prevailing question now is which moderate candidate is capable of challenging the socialist frontrunner and beating Trump.

It will be important for Democrats to try to quickly coalesce around a moderate candidate while Sanders races to broaden his appeal.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg won Iowa and nearly beat Sanders in New Hampshire garnering 24.4% of the vote, followed closely by Sen. Amy Klobuchar with 20 percent of the vote,

With her surprise New Hampshire showing, it appears that Klobuchar has the “Klomentum.” She has picked up support from Elizabeth Warren’s supporters who want to see a woman nominee and Biden supporters looking for a moderate alternative. Klobuchar was also the only Democratic candidate on the debate stage to express concern with Sanders’ brand of socialism at the top of the ticket.

Enter Michael Bloomberg, who skipped the first states and has focused on amassing delegates on Super Tuesday, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on an unprecedented television advertising blitz and a massive nationwide field organization.

Unlike other candidates, Bloomberg has a fundamental advantage over his peers. He doesn’t have to spend his time raising money. He has hired an elite campaign staff across the country and here in Colorado. His staff is strategically fine-tuning his message to audiences across the country. His latest ad on being presidential is hands down the best campaign ad of the season. He is also quickly amassing significant Colorado endorsements. However, he has not been tested on the debate stage yet, and it is clear that the other candidates will work to discredit him as they did recently to Buttigieg.

Meanwhile, Biden is on the ropes and needs a strong showing in South Carolina and Nevada to remain viable going into Super Tuesday.

There are also some other intangibles that will help moderate candidates in Colorado.

This will be Colorado’s first presidential primary in 20 years following the passage of Proposition 107, which did away with the presidential preference caucus in favor of sending mail ballots to every registered voter in the state. Voters also allowed unaffiliated voters to cast a ballot in the Democratic and Republican presidential primaries. These voters tend to be more moderate and there are more unaffiliated voters in Colorado than Democrat or Republican voters.

Although it is still unclear which of these top moderate candidates is most likely to overthrow Trump, let’s hope Colorado chooses a moderate, not a socialist, come March 3.

Doug Friednash is a Denver native, a partner with the law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber and Schreck and the former chief of staff for Gov. John Hickenlooper.

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