John Hickenlooper was a geologist and businessman before entering politics.
61 Facts About John Hickenlooper
2.
John Hickenlooper won an uncontested primary and faced Constitution Party nominee Tom Tancredo and Republican Party nominee Dan Maes in the general election.
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John Hickenlooper expanded Medicaid under the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, halving the rate of uninsured people in the state.
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John Hickenlooper sought the Democratic nomination for US president in 2019 but dropped out before primaries were held.
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John Hickenlooper subsequently ran for the US Senate, winning the Democratic nomination and the general election, defeating incumbent Republican Cory Gardner.
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At 68, John Hickenlooper became the oldest first-term senator to represent Colorado and the only Quaker member of Congress.
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John Hickenlooper was born in Narberth, Pennsylvania, a middle-class area of the suburban Main Line of Philadelphia.
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John Hickenlooper is the son of Anne Doughten Kennedy and John Wright Hickenlooper.
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John Hickenlooper's great-grandfather Andrew Hickenlooper was a Union general, and his grandfather Smith Hickenlooper was a United States federal judge.
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John Hickenlooper was raised by his mother from a young age after his father's death.
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John Hickenlooper is a 1970 graduate of The Haverford School, an independent boys school in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where he was a National Merit Semifinalist.
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John Hickenlooper recounted first smoking pot when he was 16 and using lithium carbonate capsules to go through with his final exam.
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John Hickenlooper worked as a geologist in Colorado for Buckhorn Petroleum in the early 1980s.
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When Buckhorn was sold, John Hickenlooper was laid off in 1986.
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In 1989, John Hickenlooper was arrested in Denver for "driving while impaired" and did community service.
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John Hickenlooper won the election and in July 2003 he took office as the 43rd mayor of Denver.
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On taking office, John Hickenlooper inherited a "$70 million budget deficit, the worst in city history", which he was able to eliminate in his first term "without major service cuts or layoffs", according to Time.
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John Hickenlooper won bipartisan support for a multibillion dollar mass public transit project, intended in part to attract investment and funded by a voter-approved sales tax increase.
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In 2003, John Hickenlooper announced a ten-year plan to end homelessness in Denver, citing it as one of the issues that prompted him to run for mayor.
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John Hickenlooper established the Denver Scholarship Foundation, providing needs-based college scholarships to high school graduates.
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John Hickenlooper was an executive member of the Denver 2008 Convention Host Committee and helped lead the successful campaign for Denver to host the 2008 Democratic National Convention, which was the centennial anniversary of the city's hosting of the 1908 Democratic National Convention.
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John Hickenlooper was viewed as a possible contender for governor of Colorado in the November 2006 election to replace term-limited Republican governor Bill Owens.
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John Hickenlooper said that if Salazar mounted a bid for governor, he would likely not challenge him in a Democratic primary.
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On January 12,2010, media outlets reported that John Hickenlooper would begin a campaign for governor.
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On January 11,2011, John Hickenlooper was sworn in as the 42nd governor of Colorado after winning by 15 points.
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John Hickenlooper's victory was a landslide despite Democrats' poor results overall in the 2010 elections.
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On December 4,2012, John Hickenlooper was elected to serve as vice chair of the Democratic Governors Association.
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John Hickenlooper received a flight on a private jet owned by homebuilder and donor Larry Mizel, the founder of MDC Holdings.
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John Hickenlooper received private security and a ride to the airport in a Maserati limousine on a trip to the Bilderberg Meetings in Italy.
30.
John Hickenlooper had previously been considered the front-runner to fill the United States Senate seat to be vacated by Ken Salazar upon his confirmation as Secretary of the Interior in the Obama administration.
31.
John Hickenlooper was leading the Democratic primary field by a fairly wide margin before he announced.
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John Hickenlooper was quickly endorsed by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, a move protested by candidates already running before Hickenlooper's entry.
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John Hickenlooper defeated Gardner by 9 points and took office on January 3,2021.
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On March 4,2019, John Hickenlooper announced his campaign to seek the Democratic nomination for president of the United States in 2020.
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John Hickenlooper's candidacy had been a matter of media speculation for months before his announcement.
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John Hickenlooper formally launched his campaign on March 7,2019, in Denver, Colorado.
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John Hickenlooper formed Giddy Up PAC in 2018 in anticipation of a presidential campaign, raising more than $600,000 in the midterm cycle.
38.
The campaign struggled to gain traction in the crowded and increasingly competitive Democratic presidential primary field, and John Hickenlooper ended his candidacy in a YouTube video on August 15,2019.
39.
In 2013, a campaign sought clemency for Nathan Dunlap, a black man facing execution for the 1993 murder of four people, with three former jurors saying they would not have voted for the death penalty had they known of his undiagnosed mental illness, while the mother of a victim, a former co-worker of Dunlap, and the Arapahoe County District Attorney urged John Hickenlooper to let the execution take place.
40.
John Hickenlooper granted Dunlap a reprieve, reversible by a future governor, citing inequity in the legal system and the evidence against capital punishment's effectiveness as a deterrent, saying, "It is a legitimate question whether we as a state should be taking lives".
41.
In May 2014, John Hickenlooper signed five bills related to disaster relief in the wake of flooding and wildfires.
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John Hickenlooper said the initiative "sends the wrong message to kids that drugs are OK" and that "federal authorities have been clear they will not turn a blind eye toward states attempting to trump those laws".
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John Hickenlooper said that the federal government should not stop states from decriminalizing illicit drugs beyond marijuana, as well as allowing for safe, supervised injection sites.
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In March 2014, John Hickenlooper signed House Bill 1241, which funded the Rural Economic Development Initiative.
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In 2016, John Hickenlooper launched a program called Skillful, with the help of LinkedIn and the Markle Foundation.
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John Hickenlooper's administration created the first methane-capture regulations for oil and gas companies in the entire country.
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John Hickenlooper believes fracking is a beneficial practice with minimal environmental harm, even testifying in a 2013 hearing before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that he had drunk a glass of fracking fluid produced by Halliburton.
48.
In February 2021, John Hickenlooper was one of seven Democratic US senators to join Republicans in blocking a ban of hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking.
49.
Exactly eight months after the 2012 mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, John Hickenlooper signed bills into law requiring universal background checks on all gun transfers in Colorado except gifts between immediate family members, and banning magazines with more than 15 rounds.
50.
John Hickenlooper was a member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns until 2011.
51.
John Hickenlooper expanded Medicaid and established Colorado's health insurance marketplace, Connect for Health Colorado, through the provisions of the Affordable Care Act.
52.
John Hickenlooper voted against providing economic support to undocumented immigrants during the COVID-19 pandemic on February 4,2021.
53.
John Hickenlooper's platform called for revamping the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 to clamp down on anti-competitive behavior.
54.
John Hickenlooper's first wife, Helen Thorpe, is a writer whose work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, George, and Texas Monthly.
55.
On July 31,2012, John Hickenlooper announced that he and Thorpe were divorcing after 10 years of marriage.
56.
Pringle and John Hickenlooper welcomed a baby boy via surrogate in December 2022.
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John Hickenlooper spent a summer in his teens volunteering with the American Friends Service Committee in Robbinston, Maine, helping establish a volunteer-run free school.
58.
In 2010, John Hickenlooper told The Philadelphia Inquirer that he and Thorpe attended Quaker meetings and tried to live by Quaker values.
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John Hickenlooper is the great-grandson of Civil War Brivet Brigadier General Andrew Hickenlooper and the grandson of federal judge Smith Hickenlooper.
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John Hickenlooper later recounted the event during his 2020 presidential campaign.
61.
John Hickenlooper is an avid squash player and continues to compete as a ranked player in national tournaments.