Sen. Wayne Allard (R) Elected 1996, 2d term up 2008
Born:	Dec. 2, 1943, Fort Collins
Home:	Loveland
Education:	CO St. U., D.V.M. 1968
Religion:	Protestant
Marital Status:	married (Joan)
Elected  Office:	CO Senate, 1982-90; US House of Reps., 1990-96.
Professional Career:	Veterinarian, 1968-present; Loveland City Health Officer, 1970-78; Owner, Allard Animal Hosp., 1970-90.
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Wayne Allard is a Republican senator elected in 1996. He grew up in the northern end of the Front Range, the son of a cattle rancher and developer, attended veterinary school, then in 1970 started a veterinary practice in Loveland--a lively business in an area with vast feedlots. His father was a Democrat and a friend of conservative Democratic Congressman Wayne Aspinall, but both father and son switched parties after Aspinall was defeated by a liberal in the 1972 primary. In 1982, Allard was elected to the state Senate, where he succeeded in limiting the length of legislative sessions to 120 days, so legislators would be more in touch with their constituents. In 1990, when Congressman Hank Brown ran for the Senate, Allard ran for the House in the 4th District, which covered much of the High Plains and the northern end of the Front Range. Against a former local university president and legislator, Allard won a 54% victory. He was easily re-elected in 1992 and 1994 and, when Brown retired from the Senate after just one term, Allard ran for the seat.

Allard's voting record was one of the most conservative in the House. He was scarcely the most prominent candidate going into 1996, but others better known declined to run--former Senator Gary Hart, Governor Roy Romer, former Governor Dick Lamm. His primary opponent, Attorney General Gale Norton--now Bush's Interior secretary--lost in the Supreme Court defending Colorado's anti-gay rights Amendment 2 a month before the June 1996 nominating convention, and her support of abortion rights rankled many Republican activists and voters. With strong support from religious conservatives, Allard led 40%-31% at the convention. With more money, he ran a blitz of ads before the primary, stressing his background as a veterinarian: ''Four candidates for the U.S. Senate. Three more lawyers and Wayne Allard.'' In the August 13 primary, Allard won 57%-43%.

The Democratic nominee was Tom Strickland, law partner of Phil Brownstein, one of the state's key fundraisers and political insiders. Strickland had more money and sophistication, but Allard ended up with more votes. Strickland held fundraisers with Robert Redford and Gloria Steinem and attacked Allard's ''Neanderthal'' positions on the environment; Allard said he was interested in ''sound science'' rather than emotional appeals, more local decision-making and less bureaucracy. Allard ran ads attacking Strickland for defending clients with environmental problems, including one company trying to build a medical waste incinerator in a poor Denver neighborhood. Allard won 51%-46%.

Allard has a very conservative voting record in the Senate and has often been part of small minorities taking conservative stands--on the Chemical Weapons convention and the May 1997 budget deal, for instance. As ranking member and chairman of the Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, he has strongly supported missile defense and pushed to develop space-based radar and defenses for space-based assets.

Allard gets low ratings from national environmental groups, but has done much work on his own environmental causes. With 2d District Democrat Mark Udall, he has worked successfully to create a wildlife refuge at Rocky Flats, a much-polluted nuclear plant near Denver that closed in 1989; this was modeled on his action as a House member, when he joined with Democrat Patricia Schroeder to make the Rocky Mountain Arsenal site a wildlife refuge. He won a 15% increase for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden.

One of Allard's most interesting proposals is a ban on the interstate shipment of roosters for cockfighting. He explains: "I'm a veterinarian. I've never supported the idea of animal fighting. My training is not to encourage that kind of treatment of animals with no purpose other than fighting." By summer 2000, Allard had rounded up a majority of senators as co-sponsors. Cockfighting is illegal in every state but Louisiana and New Mexico; Oklahoma voters voted to ban it in November 2002.

Allard promised in 1996 to hold town meetings in all 63 counties. Every year he has kept that promise, recently adding to his schedule the state's 64th and newest county, Broomfield, which was carved out of several Denver-area counties in November 2001. By fall 2002, he claimed to have held 601 public meetings. Yet as the election approached, he remained relatively little known. Perhaps one-quarter of 2002 voters did not vote in Colorado in 1996 and had never seen Allard's name on a ballot. The county meetings may not have helped much. Some 79% of Colorado voters live in 10 large counties, where a public meeting is likely to have little impact, and the time Allard and his wife spent driving to meetings in the other 53 or 54 counties every year might have been more profitably spent setting up events likely to be covered by Denver TV stations. Allard, analyst Charlie Cook has written, "always manages to avoid the publicity that some of his colleagues crave so dearly." To such charges Allard responded, "At the end of the day, there are work horses, and there are show horses. As a veterinarian, I know the difference."

Allard's 2002 opponent was again Tom Strickland, who served as Colorado's U.S. Attorney from 1999 to 2001. Early polls showed Allard ahead, but well under 50%, with as many as 30% undecided. There was a vast contrast in style between the rural and stolid Allard and the urban and urbane Strickland: The candidate of the simple rural areas versus the candidate of the sophisticated urban core in a mostly suburban state. Strickland said his favorite food (in landlocked Colorado) was sushi; Allard said his was his wife's Crisco cherry pie. Allard boasted that he handed $2.5 million back to the treasury because he kept a small staff, and pointed out that Strickland passed out a $250,000 surplus in the U.S. Attorney's office to employees as bonuses. Allard constantly called Strickland a lawyer-lobbyist; Strickland called Allard a far right winger and ran ads saying he lived in a right-wing "Wayne's World." Strickland described himself as a conservative Democrat, ready and able to work with senators in both parties; he called for broader access to health care and a $12,000 per year deduction for college tuition. Though he had called for new gun control laws in 1996, in 2002 he said he only wanted current gun laws enforced--a suggestion of how public opinion on gun control had changed in Colorado.

Much of the campaign dialogue focused on corporate wrongdoing and the candidates' involvement in it. Some of the accusations came in the candidates' 13 debates, but voters saw it more in the independent expenditure ads. Over the summer, the bulk were run by liberal groups against Allard; the Club for Growth and the NRA chimed in with ads against Strickland later. Strickland accused Allard of promoting the 1999 acquisition by Qwest of USWest, which had turned out badly, and criticized him for buying 50 shares of Qwest one day after the acquisition was announced. Allard responded that in 1998 Strickland made a profit of $25,000 in one day because he was let in to the IPO of Global Crossing (which later failed). Allard called Strickland a liberal "elitist" who had worked for a company that wanted to build a medical waste incinerator in north Denver in the late 1980s.

The two candidates' campaigns spent about the same, though Allard charged that far more independent spending was made on Strickland's behalf. But Allard had a countervailing advantage. Colorado's newcomers have been heavily Republican, and in 2002, the Republican party made a major ground effort to register them and to get them to vote absentee. In 1996, Colorado Republicans' registration advantage was 102,000; in 2002, it was 171,000. There was a stark and unusual difference in polls in this race: In late October, Democrats' tracking polls and most public polls showed Strickland even or ahead, while Republican tracking polls showed Allard leading. Evidently the Republicans' polls were right: Allard won 51%-46%, the exact same percentages for both candidates as in 1996. Allard was shellacked in Denver and Boulder and carried the old-line suburban Jefferson and Arapahoe Counties with only 51% and 52% of the vote. But he won 65% in fast-growing Douglas County, where the turnout was up 40% from the last off-year election, and 66% in Colorado Springs's El Paso County. Strickland carried some fashionable resort areas in the Western Slope and a few Hispanic counties in the south; Allard won large margins in most of the Western Slope and most of the Eastern Plains counties. Strickland carried metro Denver 51%-45%, but Allard carried the rest of the state 57%-39%.

Allard had long said that he intended to serve only two terms. But after 6th District Rep. Tom Tancredo renounced his term limit pledge in September 2002, Allard, asked whether he would run again, said, "I may or may not. I don't want to talk about what I'll be doing six years from now. I don't see me running again."

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DC Office
525 DSOB 20510, 202-224-5941; Fax: 202-224-6471; Web site: allard.senate.gov

State Offices
Colorado Springs, 719-634-6071; Denver,303-220-7414; Grand Junction,970-245-9553; Loveland,970-461-3530; Pueblo,719-545-9751.

Committees

• Armed Services: Emerging Threats & Capabilities; Readiness & Management Support; Strategic Forces (Chmn.).
• Banking, Housing & Urban Affairs: Financial Institutions; Housing & Transportation (Chmn.); Securities & Investment.
• Budget.
• Environment & Public Works: Fisheries, Wildlife & Water; Superfund & Waste Management.

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	CON	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2002	5	20	13	6	43	88	66	100	100	100	--
2001	5	--	0	13	--	--	88	100	100	--	100

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2001 LIB	--	2001 CONS		2002 LIB	--	2002 CONS
Economic	30%	--	66%		14%	--	84%
Social	0%	--	79%		0%	--	62%
Foreign	7%	--	72%		0%	--	76%
For National Journal's complete 2002 Vote Ratings, as well as previous ratings dating back to 1995, please click here.

Key Votes Of The 107th Congress (More Info)
1. Approve Bush Tax Cuts Y 2. Expand Patients' Rights N 3. Campaign Finance Reform N 4. Permit ANWR Development Y 5. Confirm Ashcroft as AG Y 6. Bar Gays in the Boy Scouts Y		7. $ for Hate Crime Prosecution N  8. Overseas Military Abortions N  9. Bar Coop. with Intl. Court Y 10. Trade Promotion Authority Y 11. Authorize Force in Iraq Y 12. Homeland Sec. Dept. Union *

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
2002 general	Wayne Allard (R)	717,893	51%	$5,223,592
	Tom Strickland (D)	648,130	46%	$5,160,517
	Other	50,059	3%
2002 primary	Wayne Allard (R)	unopposed
1996 general	Wayne Allard (R)	750,325	51%	$2,233,429
	Tom Strickland (D)	677,600	46%	$2,894,916
	Other	41,686	3%
Prior winning percentages: 1994 House (72%); 1992 House (58%); 1990 House (54%)