Katie Wallace, a longtime Democratic campaign and policy aide, was selected Tuesday night by a Democratic vacancy committee in Senate District 17 to fill the seat of Sen. Sonya Jaquez Lewis, who resigned under a cloud of controversy.
Wallace beat seven others to win the job. She will hold the seat until 2026, when she will need to run for reelection to serve out the final two years of Jaquez Lewis’ term.
Wallace secured nearly 60% of the vote to win the race in a single round of voting. There were about 100 voting members of the vacancy committee, all of them Democrats, a fraction of the more than 160,000 people who live in the district.
“Through 13 years of grassroots organizing in our neighborhoods and making policy on behalf of us in both the statehouse and Congress, I learned that change happens when we listen first and act second,” Wallace told the vacancy committee before the vote was taken.
Wallace said her priorities at the Capitol will be protecting the environment, battling for affordable housing and addressing “the disastrous impacts of TABOR.” She was referring to the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.
Wallace’s resume includes stints with the Colorado Senate Democrats’ campaign arm and U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo. She also worked on the policy team U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse. She also worked as a legislative aide at the Colorado Capitol and on Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns.
She grew up in Lafayette and now lives in Longmont.
Wallace was endorsed by Democratic state Reps. Karen McCormick, Kyle Brown and Javier Mabrey, as well as Democratic state Sen. Judy Amabile. She also had the backing of former Colorado House Speaker KC Becker, former state Sen. Mike Foote and former state Reps. Jonathan Singer and Edie Hooton.
Senate District 17 spans Longmont, Lafayette and Erie.
Jaquez Lewis, who was reelected to a four-year Senate term in November, resigned abruptly Feb. 18 amid an ethics investigation into her alleged yearslong mistreatment of her Capitol staffers. The announcement came just before the Senate Ethics Committee revealed that Jaquez Lewis, a Longmont Democrat, had submitted at least one fabricated letter of support sent to the panel that purported to be from a former aide.
The aide told legislative investigators that she didn’t write the letter and hadn’t been in touch with Jaquez Lewis for roughly a year.
Prosecutors in Denver and Boulder have opened a criminal investigation into Jaquez Lewis, as first reported last week by The Denver Post. When reached by The Colorado Sun, Denver and Boulder county district attorneys’ offices declined to elaborate on their probe.
Senate District 17 has gone unrepresented at the Capitol since Jaquez Lewis resigned.
Wallace will be one of 22 members of the Colorado General Assembly this year who at some point were appointed to the House or Senate by or through a vacancy committee. That means that more than 1 in 5 state lawmakers in Colorado owe their success to the vacancy process.
The other Senate District 17 vacancy candidates were Andrew Barton, a program manager at Common Cause Colorado, who go 14% of the vote; Julie Marshall, public relations director for the Center for Humane Economy, who got 10% of the vote; and community activist Peter Salas, who got 6.5% of the vote. The four remaining candidates each received less than 4% of the vote.