Kenneth DeGraaf
Kenneth DeGraaf (Republican Party) is a member of the Colorado House of Representatives, representing District 22. He assumed office on January 9, 2023. His current term ends on January 12, 2027.
DeGraaf (Republican Party) ran for re-election to the Colorado House of Representatives to represent District 22. He won in the general election on November 5, 2024.
DeGraaf completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2024. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Kenneth DeGraaf was born in Michigan. He served in the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Air Force Reserve, and U.S. Air National Guard from 1986 to 2017. DeGraaf earned a degree in aerospace structures from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1990 and a master's degree in structural dynamics from Columbia University in 1991. His career experience includes working as a commercial aviator, an advanced calculus and powered flight teacher with the U.S. Air Force Academy, an environmental manager, and a flight safety officer.[1][2]
Sponsored legislation
The following table lists bills this person sponsored as a legislator, according to BillTrack50 and sorted by action history. Bills are sorted by the date of their last action. The following list may not be comprehensive. To see all bills this legislator sponsored, click on the legislator's name in the title of the table.
Committee assignments
Note: This membership information was last updated in September 2023. Ballotpedia completes biannual updates of committee membership. If you would like to send us an update, email us at:editor@ballotpedia.org.
2023-2024
DeGraaf was assigned to the following committees:
Elections
2024
See also: Colorado House of Representatives elections, 2024
General election
General election for Colorado House of Representatives District 22
Incumbent Kenneth DeGraaf defeated Michael Pierson and Daniel Campaña in the general election for Colorado House of Representatives District 22 on November 5, 2024.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | Kenneth DeGraaf (R) | 56.6 | 25,890 | |
| Michael Pierson (D) | 38.6 | 17,665 | ||
| Daniel Campaña (Unaffiliated) | 4.7 | 2,170 | ||
| Total votes: 45,725 | ||||
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Withdrawn or disqualified candidates
- Daniel Schinsky (L)
Democratic primary election
Democratic primary for Colorado House of Representatives District 22
Michael Pierson advanced from the Democratic primary for Colorado House of Representatives District 22 on June 25, 2024.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | Michael Pierson | 100.0 | 4,635 | |
| Total votes: 4,635 | ||||
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Republican primary election
Republican primary for Colorado House of Representatives District 22
Incumbent Kenneth DeGraaf advanced from the Republican primary for Colorado House of Representatives District 22 on June 25, 2024.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | Kenneth DeGraaf | 100.0 | 9,538 | |
| Total votes: 9,538 | ||||
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Endorsements
Ballotpedia did not identify endorsements for DeGraaf in this election.
2022
See also: Colorado House of Representatives elections, 2022
General election
General election for Colorado House of Representatives District 22
Kenneth DeGraaf defeated Blake Garner and Michael Giallombardo in the general election for Colorado House of Representatives District 22 on November 8, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | Kenneth DeGraaf (R) | 57.7 | 20,763 | |
| Blake Garner (D) | 39.1 | 14,080 | ||
| Michael Giallombardo (L) | 3.2 | 1,167 | ||
| Total votes: 36,010 | ||||
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Democratic primary election
Democratic primary for Colorado House of Representatives District 22
Blake Garner advanced from the Democratic primary for Colorado House of Representatives District 22 on June 28, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | Blake Garner | 100.0 | 5,512 | |
| Total votes: 5,512 | ||||
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Republican primary election
Republican primary for Colorado House of Representatives District 22
Kenneth DeGraaf advanced from the Republican primary for Colorado House of Representatives District 22 on June 28, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | Kenneth DeGraaf | 100.0 | 11,302 | |
| Total votes: 11,302 | ||||
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Campaign themes
2024
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Kenneth DeGraaf completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2024. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by DeGraaf's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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- Our Declaration of Independence was and remains revolutionary in recognizing that our Rights are Creator-endowed and therefore unalienable, not subject to the benevolence of government. My job as a representative is to ensure that the government is doing its job of safeguarding those Rights, while ensuring the government does not itself violate them. Unfortunately, the leftist majority has little interest in safeguarding and has little problem violating your Rights. Too many "legislators" seek their value in passing bills for the taxpayers to pay, yet few people see the value in the addition of over 600 each year to the over 165,000 already on the books and to a budget of over $40billion plus unfunded mandates.
- The Rights of Life, Liberty and Property are individual Rights superseding government. Government is for the collective protection and promotion of those Rights. It is not moral for an individual to violate the Rights of another, likewise it is not moral for government to violate individual Rights for its own benefit or for the benefit of others. The difference between a Republic and a Democracy is that a Republic will protect the individual from the mob; a Democracy will feed him to it.
- Government is seen as the "easy button" for top-down problem solving. Unfortunately, there's no problem the government can't make worse with a "solution," and in doing so take more than any benefit returned, with the solution to bad legislation being more legislation and more spending. In an attempt to ameliorate centralized corruption and inefficiency committees are formed instead of allowing the issue to be solved at the appropriate level. This will continue unless people return to the values that intend them to be free, not industrial tax-widgets laboring under "good intentions" of bureaucrats.
HB24-1246 to preserve hydrocarbons for energy redundancy and ensure protection of grid infrastructure.
HB23-1044 States create and budget for State laws; the feds should enforce federal laws.
HB24-1023 to ensure no deprivation of property without due process of the law.
HB24-1145&1279 would improve election security while saving taxpayer money and allow them to personally audit that their ballot was counted correctly.
As a USAFA Distinguished Graduate and Guggenheim Fellow, I have the intellectual proficiency to work through the twisted logic of legislation to work out the actual intent behind the normally deceptive title.
As an aviator I have demonstrated the ability to learn the both the machine and the mission for which it is purposed. Military aviation teaches you to think clearly in a stressful situation and the emergent situations that tend to arise not only validate performance under pressure but put other life events into a more manageable perspective. Military briefings are an interesting phenomenon, parsing through HUD footage frame by frame to extract every insight possible from a critical five seconds on the Range.
As an Environmental Manager I have worked first-hand with various regulatory agencies and was able to create mutually beneficial synergies. Several projects like an Explosive Site Plan, Hot Pit Refueling, becoming Michigan's first military "Clean Corporate Citizen", or reactivating a military range had no prescribed path forward and required a new one to be created but within regulatory compliance.
Establishing a multi-airframe training detachment in the New Mexico desert required working across the Active Duty, Air National Guard, and AF Reserves and mostly to instill the confidence in someone to relocate hundreds of miles. I was later told that this project was considered doomed from the start, but it is still in operation.
Then I worked in the Catalog department at JCPenny.
Mario’s killer was charged merely with “unlawful termination of a pregnancy”, a class-5 felony, instead of “murder.” In a dearth of humanity, HB13-1154 had stripped Mario of his personhood. The law states, “Nothing…shall be construed to confer the status of ‘person’ upon a human embryo, fetus, or unborn child at any stage of development prior to live birth.” HB22-1279 took that further, and not only removed any rights of personhood but even any mention of the humanity of an unborn human for the purpose of enabling fetal harvesting. The law specifically denies 5th & 14th amendment protections, stating ”a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus does not have independent or derivative rights under the laws of the state” and the law authorizes extermination via “ANY MEDICAL PROCEDURE, (any) INSTRUMENT, (any) AGENT, OR (any) DRUG.” Here in this law, the word “any” has a broad range, including crushing, dismemberment, chemical burning, suffocation and exsanguination.
Global CO2 generation in the extraction of its stored solar energy is about 35billion tons, of which the USA generates about 5, of which 0.140billion tons are resultant from Coloradans. But this is in relation to the over 3200billion tons in the atmosphere. CO2 itself contributes less than 20% to atmospheric energy by absorbing some of the low-energy long-wave infrared radiation emanating from earth’s average temperature of about 60F. We cannot escape the incessant drumbeat of the pending doom of the planet increasing by 1.5C above the pre-industrial ice-age.
This means that on average a US Citizen contributes (20%(5/3200)/300million =) 1-trillionth of the planet’s atmospheric energy--the equivalent of 1-drop in 20 Olympic swimming pools full of drops. Applied to 8billion people, that would be 8-thousandths, and 8/1000’s of the foretold 1.5C “tipping point” would be 0.01C, but to achieve even 95% of NetZero is estimated to cost over $12,000 per person per year. That’d be over $96,000,000,000,000 per year to achieve a 0.01C reduction. Or, we could use that $96 trillion and adapt.
“Civics, Military & Veterans Affairs” was the “kill committee” for Republican bills before the Democrat super-majority granted them the ability to kill any bill promoting individual Liberty, and to raplidly pass their tax & shackle bills out of committee and to the House floor with minimal scrutiny. While the varied ideas are interesting, they are largely outside the purview of good governance. Most impose costly, unaccountable mandates of social engineering that violate “the consent of the governed” while further sapping their prosperity, coupled with new regulations and dictates. If a good intention was a good idea, it wouldn’t need a gun—while legislators feel their societal shaping is beneficent, they neglect that compliance is coerced by the threat of force. Or worse, they think that forced compliance is good.
All of the budget items should be clearly written not squirreled away in for unaccountable spending.
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2022
Kenneth DeGraaf did not complete Ballotpedia's 2022 Candidate Connection survey.
Campaign finance summary
Note: The finance data shown here comes from the disclosures required of candidates and parties. Depending on the election or state, this may represent only a portion of all the funds spent on their behalf. Satellite spending groups may or may not have expended funds related to the candidate or politician on whose page you are reading this disclaimer. Campaign finance data from elections may be incomplete. For elections to federal offices, complete data can be found at the FEC website. Click here for more on federal campaign finance law and here for more on state campaign finance law.
Scorecards
A scorecard evaluates a legislator’s voting record. Its purpose is to inform voters about the legislator’s political positions. Because scorecards have varying purposes and methodologies, each report should be considered on its own merits. For example, an advocacy group’s scorecard may assess a legislator’s voting record on one issue while a state newspaper’s scorecard may evaluate the voting record in its entirety.
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Click here for an overview of legislative scorecards in all 50 states. To contribute to the list of Colorado scorecards, email suggestions to editor@ballotpedia.org.
2024
| To view all the scorecards we found for this legislator in 2024, click [show]. |
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In 2024, the Colorado State Legislature was in session from January 10 to May 8.
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2023
| To view all the scorecards we found for this legislator in 2023, click [show]. |
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In 2023, the Colorado State Legislature was in session from January 9 to May 8.
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See also
2022 Elections
External links
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Candidate Colorado House of Representatives District 22 |
Officeholder Colorado House of Representatives District 22 |
Personal |
Footnotes
- ↑ Ken DeGraaf for HD-22, "Home," accessed May 6, 2023
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on September 21, 2024
| Political offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Colin Larson (R) |
Colorado House of Representatives District 22 2023-Present |
Succeeded by - |