Michael Bennet (Democratic Party) is a member of the U.S. Senate from Colorado. He assumed office on January 22, 2009. His current term ends on January 3, 2029.
Bennet (Democratic Party) ran for re-election to the U.S. Senate to represent Colorado. He won in the general election on November 8, 2022.
He was first appointed to the Senate in 2009 by Gov. Bill Ritter (D) to replace Ken Salazar (D). Bennet won a full term in 2010 after defeating former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff in the Democratic primary and defeating Ken Buck in the general election. He won re-election in 2016, defeating Darryl Glenn (R).
Before his appointment to the Senate, Bennet had served as the superintendent for Denver Public Schools and was chief of staff for Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper (D).
As of a 2014 analysis of multiple outside rankings, Bennet is an average Democratic member of Congress, meaning he will vote with the Democratic Party on the majority of bills.
Bennet was born in 1964 in New Delhi, India, where his father was an aide to the U.S. ambassador, and grew up in Washington, D.C. He received a B.A. in history from Wesleyan University and a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal.
After graduating from Yale in 1993, Bennet clerked for Judge Francis D. Murnaghan on the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and worked as an associate lawyer at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. In 1995, he became counsel to U.S. Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, and in 1997, special assistant to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut.
Bennet moved to Colorado in 1997, where he became managing director at Anschutz Investment Company. In 2003, then-Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper hired Bennet as his chief of staff. Two years later, he was selected as the superintendent of Denver Public Schools, where he served until 2009.
On January 21, 2009, Gov. Bill Ritter (D) appointed Bennet to the U.S. Senate after incumbent Ken Salazar (D) resigned to take a position in the Obama administration. In 2010, Bennet won the general election against Republican Ken Buck with 48.1% of the vote. He was re-elected to the Senate in 2016. Bennet was a member of the Gang of Eight, a group of four Democratic and four Republican senators who attempted to pass a bipartisan immigration bill in 2013. His January 24, 2019, floor speech in response to Sen. Ted Cruz (R) about the partial government shutdown became the most-watched C-SPAN video on Twitter as of May 2, 2019.
In 2019, Bennet published The Land of Flickering Lights: Restoring America in an Age of Broken Politics, a book in which he assessed the state of American government.
