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One way to campaign on family values

Brief by Central Staff

Politics – April 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine

Colorado Republicans may not be able to campaign hard on “family values” this year, because there’s one Democratic family that is really in the running: the Salazars of the San Luis Valley.

Ken Salazar is Colorado’s attorney general, and the only Democrat to hold statewide elected office. He’s the likely Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate to replace Republican incumbent Ben Campbell of Ignacio, who announced in early March that he would not seek a third term.

His brother John, now a state representative, was already running for the Democratic nomination for the Third Congressional District seat. It, too, is open, since Republican incumbent Scott McInnis announced last year that he would not run for a seventh term.

So it’s possible that Colorado could send two brothers to Washington.

While it has happened that brothers have served in the U.S. Congress at the same time from different states (in 1967, for instance, Robert Kennedy was a senator from New York while brother Ted was a Massachusetts senator), or the same state at different times (Stewart and Morris Udall of Arizona), we’re not aware of any brothers representing the same state at the same time in different houses of Congress.