YIMBY Denver had a great election cycle in 2023. We were entering our 2nd municipal election cycle of making endorsements after starting in 2019. This year was a very important election, with an open Mayor’s seat for the first time in 12 Years and 3 open seats on the City Council; we even had a chance to replace some NIMBYs with YIMBYs. The process was started when a couple of leads took charge of the process and had a meeting with the national YIMBY Action Group to help us with a timeline. After a successful meeting a timeline was established and a spreadsheet of candidates and their contact information was put together. We then reached out to other leads in order to create the questionnaire and a 13 question comprehensive questionnaire was created. After the questionnaires were all returned a group of YIMBY Denver Leads had a meeting and decided on who to endorse. We endorsed in the Mayor’s race, and in 8/12 City Council races. We then send the list of endorsements to membership to be ratified, and once it was we informed the candidates about the endorsements.
Once the endorsements were set we set up YIMBY Denver Days of Action to canvas and phone bank for the endorsed candidates as well as encouraged our leads and members to do so individually. When the election night for the first round came around, YIMBY Denver saw our endorsement for Mayor make it to the runoff and 4 out of 8 candidates we endorsed for city council make it to the runoff or win in the first round; a success rate of 50%.
We continued to have Days of Action and individual actions for our endorsed candidates in the runoff where we had the Mayoral race, and 3 city council races. We ended up with a sweep of all 4 races; nice to see a 100% success rate.
In the end we saw seven YIMBY candidates (out of 13) win seats on the city council; six of whom were endorsed by YIMBY Denver. We also saw a YIMBY win the Mayor’s office.
This is exactly what we needed to see in Denver. We are hundreds of thousands of homes short in Denver and we need a city council and Mayor who will be pro housing; open to all types of housing and increasing density. We need a Denver for all, not just the well off.