As I tweeted earlier, I suspect that I may be the only person who attended both the Bennet for Senate victory party and the Maes for Governor victory party in Denver tonight. There certainly can’t be much crossover between the two candidates, in terms of supporters… and reporters would have been assigned to one or the other. As for me, in service of party-hopping and live-tweeting, I got to see both.
I arrived at Bennet’s party, at Mile High Station on Lower Colfax, just in time to see the second half (or thereabouts) of his victory speech, and the balloon drop and such. Then I headed to LoDo’s to join Maes fans in their long wait. For a while, it looked like we might not get a declaration of victory before night’s end, but then the margin began to widen, and ultimately Maes, despite the lack of a concession by McInnis, declared himself the GOP nominee for governor:
A bit earlier, a little less than an hour before he declared victory, I managed to snag a brief interview with Maes, in which he discused McInnis’s decision to not conceded yet:
The video was live-streaming to the Internet as I was shooting it, hence the somewhat choppy nature of the clip. Same deal with this footage of Michael Bennet shaking hands — including, at around the 32-second mark, mine:
And of course I live-casted Maes’s entire victory speech:
More photos after the jump.
Bennet works the crowd while, blurred in the foreground, I hold up my iPhone to video-cast the scene, live.
A Maes supporter watches the results come in on TV.
The results looked quite a bit like this for much of the evening.
Maes talks to a supporter, while other supporters chat and wait.
Maes talks with the media after declaring victory.