In a matter of weeks, Denver voters will begin returning ballots in the runoff election, choosing between Mike Johnston and Kelly Brough to be the city's next mayor.
Political strategists sometimes say that campaigns are really exercises in telling stories: Beyond the fundraising, organizing, policy proposals, ads and debates, what they're doing is telling voters about themselves, their challenges and the candidate's ability to meet the moment.
Hours after the polls closed on April 4 in the first round of voting, Johnston and Brough addressed supporters at their watch parties once both were reasonably confident they were headed for the June 6 runoff. In addition to thanking their families and campaign teams and laying out the issues they planned to run on, each told a story.
If the municipal election were a Marvel movie, these might be key elements of their origin stories.
Johnston's and Brough's stories describe how they became who they are and how that equips them to take the reins as Denver elects new leadership.
Both talk about the intersection of hard truths and hope, about the world as it is and as it can be.
Johnston is usually described as a former state senator and, more recently, the head of a major local philanthropic nonprofit, but before either of those positions he was a teacher and a principal. After getting his undergraduate degree at Yale, he taught English for two years at a high school in a small town in Mississippi as part of the Teach for America program, an experience chronicled in his book, "In the Deep Heart's Core." He followed that by getting a master's degree at Harvard and a law degree at Yale before returning to Colorado, where he found work as a principal at several schools around the metro area.
That's where the story he told on election night picks up.
One of the schools he ran enrolled students who had been in and out of state custody and had "very, very difficult lives and difficult challenges," Johnston said. He was struggling with a young woman he calls Torsha — a pseudonym, to protect her privacy — and relayed his frustration to a psychiatrist who worked with the program, who suggested he sit in on their next session and listen.
The psychiatrist — a 75-year-old Holocaust survivor named Hildegard — told Johnston that Torsha was preparing to see her mother in a week, for the first time in five years. When she was younger, the psychiatrist said, Torsha's mother was an addict who "made some terrible choices," including prostituting her daughter, who was rescued when social service found her in a motel on Colfax. She hadn't seen her mother since.
Johnston recalled the meeting the next day.
"Torsha is just running back and forth, kind of pacing in the room, nervous and now unable to stand still," he said. "And the psychiatrist turns to her and says, 'Torsha, I want you to know two things. The first is, I want you to know you are never going to have a healthy relationship with your mother.' When she says that to her, she just explodes, she starts yelling and throwing stuff on the floor and she just goes off for two or three minutes until she finally kind of collapses onto a heap on the couch sobbing. And as she's there sobbing, Hildegard turns around and says, 'But there is a second thing I want you to know, which is if you make it through this meeting with your mom, you could someday have a healthy relationship with your own kids and your own family.'"
"For the first time," Johnston said, "Torsha stops crying and looks up and says, 'Wait, you really think I can have them?' She says, 'Yes, I absolutely believe you can.' So Torsha gets up and kind of wipes the tears off her face, puts all the papers back on the table and collects yourself and walks out of the room."
Johnston — "in all of my 28-year-old wisdom" — said he wanted to know why the psychiatrist had told her that.
"'Why don't you tell her it's all gonna work out,'" he recalled asking. "'You don't know, she might see her mom, and they give a big hug and all is forgiven, and they move on.'"
She reached toward Johnston and answered. "'Michael, there are only two things that you can offer to children: truth and hope,'" Johnston said. "She said if you don't tell her the truth, she wakes up every day in search of a world that doesn't exist. But if you don't give her some sense of hope, she doesn't have a reason to get up and go looking for any world at all."
Johnston said he's thought of that story during the campaign "because the reality is, Denver has some hard truths to face."
Those truths, he said, include the fact that the community will bury two students who attended East High School, and thousands of young Denver residents will be worried about returning to their schools. In addition, he said, many adults who help protect Denver — teachers, nurses, firefighters — can't afford to live in the city. And after the election night watch party broke up later that night, some 1,400 people would be trying to find somewhere to sleep — on a sidewalk, in a park, under a bridge.
"But much bigger than those truths," Johnston continued, "is the hope that we actually know these problems are solvable. And we know these problems are solved because it is in Denver's blood to say we refuse to give up when things get difficult. We actually believe you double down and find a way out."
In Denver, he added, "I think our spirit has always been: We're not the victims of our own story — we're the authors of our own story."
Brough was chief of staff for John Hickenlooper when he was Denver mayor and was the first woman to serve as president and CEO of the Metro Denver Chamber of Commerce, a position she held for 12 years. She was also the first woman to drive a snowplow at Denver's airport, a distinction extolled in her first TV ad. But before that, she says in a campaign video, "Like a lot of families, my story started tough."
Brough's father was murdered when she was an infant, leaving her mother to raise two children in rural Montana. Her mother later remarried, but her stepfather, who worked in the oil and gas fields and adopted her when she was in third grade, was injured on the job, and her family had to rely on public assistance while he couldn't work. He went back to college and the whole family found work, including cleaning offices at night. After saving up enough to go to college, Brough married her husband and they moved to Denver, where they had two daughters and she completed a master's degree, though her husband suffered from addiction and eventually committed suicide.
"You hear about what's possible," Brough said on election night. "What changes all of that in all of our lives, it's when we get support from others. When people believe in us before we believe in ourselves, and people give you a chance to prove yourself — those people changed the course of your life. And I've been so fortunate to have so many people in my life who changed the course of life. And on top of that list is my dad. My dad adopted me, supported me, disciplined me, believed in me, and then, ultimately, he gave me permission to do something that demands so much of a family — to do this. I'm grateful he was alive to see me pull my paperwork, and I feel his support every single day that we're out here."
Brough described the period when her family "faced losing everything" in a TEDx Talk she delivered in Denver in 2013.
"There are two emotions I will share with you about that time to describe it," she said. "The first is, I can assure you, there is no emotion in life more damaging than shame. And there is no motivation more powerful than hope."
Brough described the lessons she learned growing up as a pint-sized girl — just 5 feet tall, not weighing quite 100 pounds, she recalled — with much larger brothers, including that there was no place she didn't belong as a woman, the power of humor, the importance of loyalty, not to carry grudges and to eat "very, very fast."
"Some of the most powerful moments that created who stands here today came out of hardship and weakness in those around me and in myself," Brough said. "And I think that really is the power in all of us. And to not start to acknowledge publicly that we all have weaknesses, and we all have hardship in our life, would be unfair."
She concluded the talk with a story about how her father taught her how to drive — on an old '63 Chevy pickup truck, without power steering or power brakes.
"I was so small, I would actually have to stand up to push on the clutch and lean on the shifter," she said, drawing laughter from the audience. "I think my dad did just that — laughed, every time I shifted. I could barely make the corner, and my dad said to me, 'Honey, if you can drive this, you can drive anything.' And as I look at my life story, I realized that is my metaphor, that I can drive anything."
