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Michael Bennet

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Michael Bennet

Michael Farrand Bennet (born November 28, 1964) is an American attorney, businessman, and politician serving as the senior United States senator from Colorado, a seat he has held since 2009. A member of the Democratic Party, he was appointed to the seat when Senator Ken Salazar became Secretary of the Interior. Bennet previously worked as a managing director for the Anschutz Investment Company, chief of staff to Denver mayor (and his future Senate colleague) John Hickenlooper, and superintendent of Denver Public Schools. Bennet is running for Governor of Colorado in 2026.

Bennet is the son of Douglas J. Bennet, a former State Department official and president of Wesleyan University. Early in his career, Bennet worked for Ohio governor Richard Celeste. He received a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School, worked as a law clerk, and was counsel to the U.S. deputy attorney general during the administration of Bill Clinton.

Bennet served then-Mayor Hickenlooper as his chief of staff from 2003 to 2005 and became superintendent of the Denver public school system in July 2005. Governor Bill Ritter appointed Bennet to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Ken Salazar when Salazar became Secretary of the Interior in January 2009. Bennet was elected in the 2010 Senate election, defeating Republican nominee Ken Buck. He chaired the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) for the 2014 cycle. Bennet became Colorado's senior senator in 2015, after Mark Udall was defeated. He was reelected to the Senate in 2016 and 2022.

On May 2, 2019, Bennet announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. He dropped out of the race on February 11, 2020, after a poor showing in the New Hampshire primary.

Bennet was born in New Delhi, India. His mother is Susanne Christine Bennet (née Klejman), a retired elementary school librarian and Jewish Holocaust survivor who was born in 1938 in Warsaw, Poland, and immigrated to the United States with her family in 1950. Her parents survived imprisonment in the Warsaw Ghetto. His father was Douglas J. Bennet, who was born in New Jersey, and served as an aide to Chester Bowles, then the U.S. ambassador to India. Douglas Bennet ran the United States Agency for International Development under President Jimmy Carter, served as president and the CEO of National Public Radio (1983–93), and as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs in the Clinton administration (1993–95). His grandfather Douglas Bennet was an economic adviser in Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration.

Bennet grew up in Washington, D.C.; his father served as an aide to Vice President Hubert Humphrey, among other politicians. He was held back in second grade because of his dyslexia. He enrolled at St. Albans School, an elite all-boys preparatory school, and served as a page on Capitol Hill.

In 1987, Bennet earned his Bachelor of Arts in history from Wesleyan University, the alma mater of his father and grandfather. At Wesleyan he was a member of Beta Theta Pi. In 1993, Bennet earned his Juris Doctor from Yale Law School, where he was the editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal.

From 1988 until 1990, when he left to attend Yale, he served as an aide to Ohio governor Richard Celeste. After law school he served as a law clerk for the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals and as an associate to Washington, D.C. attorney Lloyd Cutler. He then served as counsel to the Deputy Attorney General during the Bill Clinton administration. His father, Douglas Bennet, worked in the Clinton Administration as well, as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs. Following a stint as an assistant to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut, Bennet moved west. After briefly living in Montana, he moved with his fiancée to Colorado in 1997. Bennet worked for six years in Denver as managing director for the Anschutz Investment Company, where he led the reorganization of an oil company and helped consolidate three movie theater chains into the Regal Entertainment Group.

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