Gas prices are once again on the rise a month after the United States and Israel began bombing Iran, resulting in a severe crimp in the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. And fingers are once again pointing at the party occupying the White House, now led by President Donald Trump.

But this time, the blame game has taken on a distinctly more digital and targeted approach as November’s midterm elections come into view.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee last week an ad campaign targeting Republican incumbents it believes are vulnerable in 44 congressional districts, including U.S. Reps. Jeff Crank in the Colorado Springs-based 5th District and Gabe Evans in the 8th District north of Denver.

The ultrashort six-second video ad with the words “D.C. Republicans Did That!” It’s being “geo-targeted” to people’s Facebook and Instagram feeds when they come within close range of select gas stations in either district.

“Now, when voters fill up at the pump, they’ll have yet another reminder that D.C. Republicans are squarely to blame for the price of gas, and everything else, being too damn high,” DCCC spokeswoman Courtney Rice said.

It’s no surprise that Democrats are taking advantage of elevated prices at the pump to gain political advantage, said Jon Krosnick, a political science professor at Stanford University. He co-authored a 2016 study titled which found that a 10-cent increase led to a 0.6-percentage-point drop in support.

The price for regular unleaded fuel in Colorado sat at an average a day before the war started in late February, according to AAA. On Friday, it averaged  — an increase of just over $1 from a month ago.

While November’s election is not a presidential one, Krosnick said there will very likely be crossover in terms of dissatisfaction toward the party in charge of Congress.

“Every Republican running for office should be worried about gas prices going up,” he said.

Gas prices play an outsized role in how people gauge the severity of inflation at any given moment, Krosnick said. On nearly every corner of major thoroughfares throughout the country, giant lighted signs display the price of petrol.

“There’s no other consumer good that is as advertised to consumers like gasoline,” Krosnick said. “Not everybody in the family may be filling up the car, but everyone is driving past gas stations every day.”

Though gas prices were appreciably higher under the Biden administration following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine — reaching a peak of $4.87 per gallon of regular-grade gasoline in Colorado in June of that year, according to — Krosnick said voters care about what’s going on now.

“It’s a present-focused decision,” he said.

A ‘mitigating factor’ in the 8th District?

That was the case for Michael Kondur, a handyman who was filling up his truck last week at a Valero station at West 88th Avenue and Pecos Street in Thornton, in Evans’ congressional district. The price there was a comparatively forgiving $3.69 per gallon for regular.

“It’s the first time I’ve had a full tank in three weeks — and it will be gone in three days,” he said, also using choice words to describe Trump and Republicans in general. “I run my own business with this truck and I don’t have food on my table. Any Republican has got to go.”

Across the street at a Maverik station, where the price for a gallon of gas was nearly 10 cents higher, Carolyn McDowell said she was able to part with only $30 to fill her Chevy Silverado’s tank halfway. Her husband, who works for the delivery service DoorDash, is taking a real hit.

“It’s impacting his ability to make money,” she said.

McDowell said she’s against war in Iran, a stance that is in line with 61% of Americans who also disapprove of the conflict, according to a conducted between March 16 and March 22. The poll also found that 45% of respondents felt the military action was not going well, while 25% felt it was going extremely or very well.

Former Colorado GOP Chair Dick Wadhams, who has run his share of political campaigns, said there is no doubt that gas prices pose a problem for Evans, who’s seeking reelection in Colorado’s most politically competitive district, and Crank, who won comfortably in 2024 but is being targeted by Democrats more aggressively this year.

“The price of gas as it relates to inflation and the cost of living was a big part of Trump beating Harris in 2024,” he said of Trump’s defeat of then-Vice President Kamala Harris. “Democrats will try to make (gas prices) an issue right through November — there’s no doubt about it. The Republicans are in a vulnerable position.”

But there is a “mitigating factor,” Wadhams said, that Evans should be able to use to fight back in the 8th District — which covers a large chunk of Weld County, home to Colorado’s most productive oil and gas field.

“Gabe has a good argument against Democrats that they want to kill the oil and gas industry,” he said.

Two years ago, Democrats in the state legislature floated a bill that aimed to halt the issuance of new oil and gas permits by the end of 2029, a proposal that raised hackles in the industry. Lawmakers eventually .

In December, Republican state lawmakers attacked the Public Utilities Commission’s approval of a “clean heat” plan requiring Colorado’s larger utilities that supply natural gas to homes and businesses to substantially lower emissions over the next decade. The plan, they asserted, amounts to a mandate that forces families to buy “costly heat pumps, retrofits and electric appliances” to switch from gas to electricity.

This month, the influential environmental group Conservation Colorado filed ballot measures with the state elections office that would slap stricter penalties on the energy industry for the pollution and contamination that result from its operations.

In a , the group said it filed the measures to filed by the conservative political action committee Advance Colorado that would enshrine in the state constitution the right of producers to sell natural gas in the state and the right of consumers to use the energy source in their homes and businesses.

A spokeswoman for Evans’ campaign who declined to give her name called the Democrats’ stance on gas prices “hypocritical” in a statement.

“For years, they have pushed radical climate policies and overregulation, banning natural gas for residential heating, eliminating jobs for hardworking families, and handcuffing the very oil and gas workers who ensure reliable and affordable resources for Coloradans,” her statement read. “Now they expect us to believe they care about gas prices?”

Potentially bleak forecast

Republicans don’t just have gas prices to worry about — diesel prices are even worse.

Where a gallon of diesel fuel came in at $3.52 a month ago, , on Friday it hit $4.94.

Twenty percent to 25% of the operating cost for a long-haul trucker is fuel, said Greg Fulton, the president of the Colorado Motor Carriers Association, which represents more than 500 trucking companies in the state.

“This has come at a very difficult time for the industry,” he said of the spike in energy prices. “This is a situation where profit margins are very thin already.”

During the last peak in oil prices in 2022, Fulton said, some of that sticker shock was offset by the fact that more freight was on the road because consumers were buying more goods to accommodate new stay-at-home lifestyles set in motion by the coronavirus pandemic.

“They were able to pass along the increases easier,” Fulton said of his industry.

Trump’s widespread tariffs have made things even more constrained for trucking companies when it comes to trying to keep operating expenses down these days, he said.

“Hopefully this is more of a short-term situation,” he said.

While Iran last week , oil transport through the vital waterway was still badly hobbled by the war. Al Salazar, the director of research at oil and gas analysis firm Enverus, said the longer the strait was choked, the longer gas prices would stay high.

If the Strait of Hormuz were to remain largely closed through the end of May, Enverus projected that Brent crude prices would stay around $95 a barrel through this year and edge up to $100 a barrel in 2027. That’s because it would take time to replenish all the tanks and oil-holding facilities that are being tapped now, Salazar said.

“By the time the flow is fixed, your stocks (of oil) have all drawn down and you’re left at alarmingly low levels,” he said.

Joe Oltmann, who filed his candidacy paperwork Monday night, now seeks to participate in an electoral system that he has repeatedly tried to undermine.

He is the 22nd Republican actively seeking to earn the party’s nomination in June. It’s the largest gubernatorial primary field for a major party in Colorado this century, surpassing the GOP’s previous records set first in 2018, and then again in 2022 — and it comes as the party hopes to break Democrats’ electoral dominance in the state.

That field will almost certainly narrow in the coming months; four Republicans who’d filed have already dropped out. No more than four are likely to make it onto the ballot — either through the state assembly or by gathering signatures — for the summer primary, said Dick Wadhams, the Colorado GOP’s former chairman.

The size of the primary field doesn’t really matter, he said, because few candidates will actually end up in front of voters. Eighteen candidates filed ahead of the 2022 race, for instance, but .

On the Democratic side, a smaller field of seven active candidates is headlined by Attorney General Phil Weiser and U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet. Polis is term-limited from running again.

For 2026, Wadhams counted only a half-dozen or so Republican candidates whom he considered “credible,” a qualifier that Wadhams said he used “very, very loosely”: Oltmann, state Sens. Barbara Kirkmeyer and Mark Baisley, state Rep. Scott Bottoms, ministry leader Victor Marx, Teller County Sheriff Jason Mikesell and former Congressman Greg Lopez.

Wadhams said that other than Kirkmeyer, all of those candidates had either supported election conspiracies or a pardon for Tina Peters, the former Mesa County clerk now serving a nine-year sentence for convictions related to providing unauthorized access to voting equipment.

Oltmann, of Castle Rock, has repeatedly — and falsely — claimed that the 2020 presidential election was not won by Democrat Joe Biden, while calling for the hanging of political opponents. He previously said he wanted to dismember some opponents to send a message, , before adding that he was joking.

In his Dec. 26 announcement video, Oltmann baselessly claimed that Democrats, who have won control of the state amid demographic shifts and anti-Trump sentiment, were in power in Colorado only because of election fraud.

He said Polis and Secretary of State Jena Griswold, along with 9News anchor Kyle Clark, were part of a “synagogue of Satan.” Polis and Griswold are both Jewish.

In his announcement, Oltmann painted an apocalyptic picture of the state and said he hoped that three of its elected leaders — Polis, Griswold and Weiser — would all be imprisoned. He pledged to eliminate property taxes, to focus on the “have-nots” and to pardon Peters, whom President Donald Trump has also sought to release by issuing a federal pardon that legal experts say can’t clear Peters of state convictions.

Oltmann’s decision to join the field is an example of “extreme candidates” from either major party “who file to run but will go nowhere,” predicted Kristi Burton Brown, another former state GOP chair. She now sits on .

She said the size of the Republican primary field was a consequence of Republicans’ difficulties winning statewide races in Colorado. Democrats have won all four constitutional elected offices for two straight election cycles.

Burton Brown said it “might be a good idea moving forward” to require candidates to do more than just submit paperwork to run for office. That might include a monetary requirement: She said she didn’t support charging candidates significant sums but thought that “requiring some skin in the game” could prevent “unreasonable primaries.”

The 2026 election comes as state and national Democrats search for a path forward after Trump’s reelection last year.

Approval polling for leading Colorado Democrats has sagged this year, and voters here hold unfavorable views of both the Democratic and Republican parties that are roughly equal, .

Wadhams said that the odds were “very difficult” for any Republican gubernatorial candidate next year. While approval for Polis and other Democrats has declined, support for the Republican standard-bearer — Trump — is far lower in the state. In last year’s election, Colorado was a largely blue island in a broader national red wave.

To have a real shot of winning in 2026, Wadhams argued, the GOP needed to nominate someone for governor who could sidestep anti-Trump sentiment and press on the issues driving voter discontent. Running more divisive candidates in a blue state, he warned, would risk harming Republicans’ chances in down-ballot races the statehouse or in races for Congress.

“There seems to be an opening for Republicans we haven’t seen for a while,” he said. “But that opening will only exist if we have candidates who won’t get pulled into this conspiracy stuff and this Tina Peters stuff. Because those are nonstarters. They’re sure losers.”

But the gathering was enough to underscore the wide-open nature of the race for an office the GOP hasn’t won in 23 years. That’s a contrast to the Democratic side, which has quickly shaped up as a race between two heavyweight candidates.

Over the next nine months, each Republican will look to carve out a lane apart from the many others looking to do the same, with 19 declared GOP candidates as of Friday. Some of those at the Denver Press Club’s forum on Thursday night explicitly acknowledged the prevailing agreement in the room when it came to cutting taxes and shrinking government, and all sought to help themselves stand out.

Among the nine participating candidates, state Sen. Mark Baisley laid out a vision of a government that does “very little … but what we do do, we should do well.” Political newcomer and U.S. Army veteran Joshua Griffin pitched “running the state like a business.”

And state Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer called for a governor, such as herself, “who believes the state’s best days are ahead of us — not behind us.”

Greg Lopez, a three-time candidate for governor who briefly served in Congress last year, warned that “Colorado has been turned into the ugly twin sister of California by single-party rule.” Lawyer Will McBride decried “government tyranny disguised as public service” and declared “a movement to reclaim what is ours.”

In an aside, McBride alluded to a challenge Republicans likely face, whoever’s the nominee: “No Republican has raised more than (Democrats) have spent” on the race so far, he said. “So I think it����ap a big problem that no one really believes a Republican can win.”

Another 10 candidates, including state Rep. Scott Bottoms, Teller County Sheriff Jason Mikesell and Colorado Springs pastor Victor Marx — who’s newly declared — weren’t at the forum. How far any of the campaigns end up going — dependent on money, willpower and support — will play out over the next eight months, through the Colorado Republican Party’s state assembly in the spring and then the primary election in June.

The eventual winner likely will face either U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet or Attorney General Phil Weiser, the two Democrats leading that nominating race.

“It’s going to be competitive, the Republican primary,” Republican analyst Dick Wadhams said. “There’s no juggernaut.”

But Wadhams, who ran a campaign for the state’s last Republican governor, Bill Owens, added that several of the candidates at the top of the field seemed locked in the right wing of the party. He said that conspiracy theories asserting the 2020 presidential election was stolen; calls for the pardon of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who was convicted of breaching voting machines in search of fraud; and a push to end Republican participation in the state’s semi-open primary elections will make for a “minefield” when trying to court the most fervent Republicans without alienating the general electorate.

Polls show the Democrats now in control of the state — with the governor’s office (where Jared Polis is term limited) and near-2-to-1 majorities in each legislative chamber — as vulnerable as they’ve been in a decade, Wadhams said.

If the eventual Republican nominee can navigate the party base’s potentially alienating issues and appeal to the mainstream, he said, the person will have a shot. He said he thinks Kirkmeyer best fits that bill.

“While Republicans still face a drag from the anti-Trump attitudes in Colorado by unaffiliated voters,” Wadhams said, “for the first time — I think since probably 2018 or before — voters might seriously consider a Republican candidate for governor who talks to them about the issues they’re concerned about. They’re not going to be blinded by this opposition to (President) Trump.”

Most back Peters’ release

Nearly all of the candidates at the Thursday forum expressed some level of support for releasing Peters, who is in prison serving a nine-year sentence for her felony convictions. Trump has highlighted her case repeatedly, including with a recent threat of “harsh measures” if the state officials don’t release her.

Most supported an unconditional pardon without additional comment. Griffin said he’d consider commuting her sentence. Bob Brinkerhoff, a former state trooper, said “absolutely,” but he’d want to see if “she got the same kind of trial that Donald Trump did in New York,” referring to the president����ap felony convictions.

Kirkmeyer didn’t say no to a pardon, but she answered with a considerable hedge: “If faced with new facts, I’d consider.”

Against a backdrop of unified Democratic control of state government for the past near-decade, moderators asked which laws the Republicans would wipe away if they could. Nearly every candidate said something different.

Brinkerhoff and Griffin targeted gun laws, with Brinkerhoff singling out this year’s Senate Bill 3, which adds requirements to buy certain semiautomatic firearms, and Griffin targeting “anything that infringes on our 2A rights.”

Lopez specified a piece of the legislative process, known as the safety clause, in wihch lawmakers can determine a bill “is necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health or safety,” and enact it immediately upon the governor’s signature — versus giving the public time to petition against its enactment.

Baisley, in the only mention of abortion during the forum, said he’d erase the , which codified a right to abortion in state law. Voters have since adopted similar protections in the state constitution.

“It puts government in the position of the creator,” Baisley said.

Kirkmeyer, later echoed by Brinkerhoff, named a law that was passed in the spring, . That law explicitly protects transgender people from being “deadnamed,” or misgendered, in certain places, including schools and workplaces. It also makes it easier for people to change their gender identity and name on government documents.

Kirkmeyer called the bill part of “the war on parents.”

Concern about Trump’s call for troops in cities

On Tuesday, before a rare and rapidly assembled gathering of the nation’s top military leaders, Trump claimed the country was “under invasion from within” and suggested using “some of these dangerous cities as .”

Trump has already unilaterally sent National Guard units and active-duty U.S. Marines to help with . On the same day as Trump’s speech, one Republican governor, Louisiana’s Jeff Landry, bolstered that effort by to some of his state’s cities.

The GOP field on Thursday, however, said they wouldn’t invite the Pentagon to send troops to Colorado cities — though some had some caveats.

Jason Clark, a West Point graduate and financial professional who dons a red hat emblazoned with “Make Colorado Great Again” in many of his campaign videos, offered a blunt “F-bomb no” — a bit of self-censorship at a moderator’s request — to the idea.

Griffin, who served 16 combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, said he “would never put one of our people in the city, because we are trained to kill, not to police.” But he was open to deputizing National Guard members to help police, if necessary.

Several of the Republicans echoed Griffin. They’d call up the National Guard if necessary, but in a support role and only in emergency circumstances, or if local law enforcement was failing to keep residents safe.

“I’m very nervous about the idea of using our military domestically. However, I support our folks in blue a lot,” Baisley said, noting he’s run several failed bills recently to lift the state’s restrictions on local law enforcement working with immigration officials.��

He said he’d invite military help, but only to augment local law enforcement. Allowing independent military operations in Colorado would be “a little bit dangerous,” he said.

Declared Republican candidates for governor

• State Sen. Mark Baisley
• State Rep. Scott Bottoms
• Bob Brinkerhoff
• John Brooks
• Jason Clark
• Brycen Garrison
• Stevan Gess
• Jon Gray-Ginsberg
• Joshua Griffin
• State Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer
• Former U.S. Rep. Greg Lopez
• Victor Marx
• Will McBride
• Teller County Sheriff Jason Mikesell
• Robert Moore
• Alexander Mugatu
• Jim Rundberg
• Daniel Thomas
• Kelvin “K-Man” Wimberly

Source: Colorado Secretary of State’s Office.

Mertz, his wife and a daughter are voting for Vice President Kamala Harris in Tuesday’s presidential election, while another daughter and son support former President Donald Trump. Despite the intrafamily schism, Mertz, 75, says they all agree on one thing.

They can’t wait for the election to be over.

“I’m really tired of the political ads. They’re so frickin’ negative,” said Mertz, who lives in Arvada. “I will be extremely happy when it’s done.”

That sentiment is one that longtime Democratic strategist Andy Boian is increasingly hearing from voters bombarded by this campaign season’s steady stream of attack ads, angry political memes, and over-the-top rhetoric and insults — including the use of terms like “scum,” “garbage,” “racist,” “low-IQ” and “fascist.”

Add to that the surprising, the unexpected and the occasionally unsettling events that have marked this election like no other in recent memory, making many voters eager to put it in the rearview mirror.

Boian has worked on the last seven Democratic presidential campaigns, dating back to Bill Clinton’s in the 1990s.

“This one by far was the most bruising,” he said.

Since Trump announced the launch of his third run for the White House nearly two years ago, he rose to the top of a field of nearly a dozen GOP rivals to clinch the nomination in March. Two months later, he was convicted of 34 felonies — a first for a former president — in one of .

In July, a gunman tried to kill Trump during a political rally in Pennsylvania. Two months later, in Florida, authorities arrested a man who was allegedly planning to assassinate the former president as he golfed.

On the Democratic side of the aisle, President Joe Biden was pressured by his party this summer to drop his reelection bid — a first in modern American politics at such a late stage — after a disastrous debate performance against Trump in late June raised serious questions about his mental acuity.

Closer to home, Colorado’s elections have been marked by unexpected turns, too.

U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert late last year switched congressional districts in an attempt to salvage her political future, scrambling a pair of the state’s U.S. House contests in the process. And the state’s Republican Party descended into internecine warfare that landed warring factions in court and led to an unsuccessful attempt by some party members to oust chair Dave Williams less than three months before the election.

All of that has led to Colorado voters “feeling a good amount of fatigue” as Election Day dawns, said Robert Preuhs, a political science professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver.

“By any measure, this election is unprecedented in modern times,” he said.

Democracy a top concern

Elaine Little, an 86-year-old Republican who lives in Denver, agreed that Tuesday couldn’t arrive soon enough.

“I’ll be happy when it’s over,” she said. “I think our election process is way too long.”

A Trump backer, Little is not always enamored of how the former president speaks or the name-calling he engages in. But the way Democrats have been characterizing him in recent weeks is irresponsible, she said.

“I don’t think he’s Hitler. I don’t think he’s a dictator,” Little said. “All these things the Democrats are saying are not true.”

Not that Tuesday will necessarily be the end of anything. Colorado State University political science professor Kyle Saunders said there will be no shortage of lawyers from both sides. They will be making sure all vote counting goes according to the book, especially with the potential that the winners of close races may not be known for days.

“The attorneys have all been retained and are in place in every competitive state and will be deployed by both sides at the slightest transgression — of that I have no doubt — as is their right in our legal system,” he said. “I believe in our institutions. However, those institutions are about to be challenged. And I believe they will endure that challenge.”

The 2024 election’s potential effect on American democracy greatly concerns Marsha Peterson, a Loveland Democrat who moved to Colorado from Minnesota four years ago. Peterson, 73, is one of more than 7,200 people who responded to the statewide survey, in which The Denver Post took part.

Survey results show democracy and good government as the top concern among respondents. That’s Peterson’s top issue, too, and she worries about what Trump might do if he retakes office in January.

“He didn’t care about democracy. He didn’t care about law and order,” Peterson said, referencing the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by Trump supporters. “We must have a president who reveres our Constitution, our Bill of Rights and the history of our country.”

Former Colorado Republican Party Chair Dick Wadhams, now a political consultant, has long condemned Trump’s insistence — without evidence — that the 2020 election was stolen from him. And he’s wary of what could happen in the days and weeks following Tuesday’s election.

“I’m fearful that there could be chaos and charges of vote stealing and fraud that will be unsubstantiated,” Wadhams said.

But it’s not automatic that it will be Republicans making false post-election charges, he said.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Democrat who faced off against Trump in the 2016 presidential election, that Trump was an “illegitimate president” and that the election she lost “wasn’t on the level.” That same year, she told an audience in California that she had been warning candidates for the 2020 election that they could run a great campaign — even clinch the nomination — and still

“It’s important to remember that the stolen election stuff started with Hillary Clinton in 2016,” Wadhams said.

The big difference, he said, is that Clinton’s denials of the validity of the election results didn’t lead to an insurrection.

“It would be good for whoever wins (this time) to win it by a wide margin so we don’t have to go through what we did in 2020,” Wadhams said.

“Let’s not talk about it anymore”

As of 2 p.m. Tuesday,, which lags the number of cast ballots at the same point in the election cycle four years ago. About 28% were from Democrats, 26.4% from Republicans and nearly 44% from unaffiliated voters. Women were outpacing men in voting in every age group.

Colorado is considered safe for Harris — a trio of polls from September showed her with a double-digit percentage-point lead over Trump. But nationally, the race is a nail-biter, with a one-point lead for Harris in the popular vote in its polling average.

The spread between the candidates across the seven swing states that are likely to decide the election is , with Trump leading in five of them — mostly by a whisker — as of Monday, according to the Times’ state polling averages.

Preuhs, the Metro State political science professor, said that while today’s sharp divisions within the American electorate can result in increased levels of anxiety surrounding elections, it’s also indicative of a new and exciting level of engagement and interest in the democratic process.

“Political scientists 30 years ago were concerned about apathy and lack of interest among voters,” he said. “And those things have changed.”

And negotiating political disagreements in 2024 within a household is different for every Colorado family.

For Mertz, of Arvada, his family’s strategy is to “avoid the subject.” For Little, the Denver Republican, she knows her vote will be the opposite of her 93-year-old partner’s. And there’s no need to take it any further than that, she said.

“I voted, you voted,” Little said. “I canceled you out — so let’s not talk about it anymore.”

The Eastern Plains district, on paper, is the most Republican-leaning in the state. In 2022, U.S. Rep. Ken Buck won reelection by nearly 24 percentage points, about in line with given the 4th’s partisan makeup.

But like all things concerning U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert����ap political career, this is not a typical election year — especially as she looks to represent the sprawling district that’s geographically opposite from the one that put her in federal office. Her switch has drawn money and attention to the 4th well beyond its usual level.

Boebert headed to Congress to represent the Western Slope after taking out a Republican incumbent in an upset primary win in 2020. Two years later, after a controversy–laden first term, she pulled off a razor-close win in her reelection bid that left her looking vulnerable.

When she announced in late December that she would move to the eastern Colorado district — which includes great expanses of farmland from Wyoming to Oklahoma as well as suburban Denver’s Douglas County —  she upended the race to replace Buck, who’d announced he wouldn’t seek reelection.

Sensing, or perhaps hoping, that Boebert’s general election weakness from 2022 could linger, those looking to unseat Boebert in the Nov. 5 election have given millions of dollars in recent months to her main opponent, Democrat Trisha Calvarese. Calvarese is on pace to raise 10 times what the last Democratic nominee there did, analysts predict, and she hopes to prove conventional wisdom wrong about how deep the 4th District’s partisan divide is.

It all leads to a make-or-break election for Boebert — and for those looking to oust her from Congress.

A convincing victory would cement her place in Colorado politics and affirm her ascendancy among Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives. But a lack of incumbency in her new district, along with Boebert����ap recent scandals, give Calvarese hope that she can find a path, slight as it might be, to stop that from happening.

Boebert, 37, has fended off other competitors this year.

She won three times as many votes as her next-closest rival in the crowded Republican primary this summer, showing that her reputation as a conservative fighter carried just as much weight there as in her previous home.

On the same day as the June primary, Calvarese lost a separate special election — by a margin of 24 percentage points — to Republican Greg Lopez to fill out the rest of Buck’s current term after he stepped down early.

For the next term, the November ballot also includes Frank Atwood, of the Approval Voting Party; Hannah Goodman, of the Libertarian Party; and Paul Noel Fiorino, of the Unity Party.

Sparring over Boebert’s past

Despite the 4th District’s clear Republican advantage, Calvarese, 38, calls the race against Boebert “absolutely winnable,” and she points to finding Boebert underwater in favorability with her new district’s voters.

Calvarese has so far turned the influx of cash she’s received — more than $2.3 million in donations since the June primary — into TV ads seeking to further define Boebert for voters who may have only watched her from afar, while also introducing herself to the district.

At a recent meet-and-greet with Democrats in Loveland, Calvarese mostly focused on her own biography: Working with the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of labor unions, she helped push key parts of President Joe Biden’s agenda. Through work with the U.S. National Science Foundation, she focused on boosting manufacturing in the country.

Her parents’ cancer diagnoses brought her home from Virginia last year to provide them with end-of-life care. She said her late parents, lifelong Republicans, both urged her to give everything she could to help her community. Calvarese now lives in Highlands Ranch, where she grew up.

She didn’t shy from digging at Boebert at the Loveland event. She highlighted her opponent’s removal from a performance of the musical “Beetlejuice” last year in Denver, where security cameras recorded her vaping, apparently groping her date and flipping off staff. Calvarese also highlighted Boebert’s vote against a bill to expand health care coverage for veterans who were exposed to toxic burn bits.

The latter, including Boebert heckling Biden as he discussed the program during his State of the Union speech, is the subject of Calvarese’s first TV ad. Boebert’s campaign says her no vote was over concerns about funding for the program, and she previously said the heckling was about the 13 soldiers killed as U.S. forces pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021.

“(Voters in the district) want representation,” Calvarese said, calling the interest in her campaign “electric.”

“They are hungry for it,” she added. “And unlike Boebert, I didn’t ditch one district for another one after embarrassing myself at ‘Beetlejuice.’ ”

Boebert: New district “has liberated me”

Boebert switched districts after winning the 3rd Congressional District in 2022 and in the aftermath of a contentious divorce from her husband. She moved to Windsor, in the northern Interstate 25 corridor.

Speaking to a gathering of Elbert County conservatives on Wednesday night, Boebert pinned the move explicitly to family matters and called it “one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever made,” but also one of the best when it comes to her children.

Still, she acknowledged the political benefits of the move.

“We’re not taking our heavy R advantage for granted,” Boebert said of her political affiliation. “We either run unopposed or like we’re 10 points behind. However, being in a more Republican district … has liberated me to help Republicans statewide. So every day isn’t an in-the-mud fight. I am able to stand strong for far more than I ever would have anywhere else.”

The Republican advantage in the district can’t be understated, political analysts say.

Dick Wadhams, a Republican consultant and former state party chairman, called it “virtually unlosable for a Republican candidate.” Kyle Saunders, a political science professor at Colorado State University, echoed the sentiment, calling it “the safest Republican district in Colorado.”

Boebert, too, been a strong fundraiser, though she hasn’t disclosed more recent totals yet. New reports are due from both candidates this week.

Boebert����ap speech Wednesday, at a rented church, weaved between sermon and politics as she invoked scripture and the Founding Fathers.

She likened the nation’s recent elections to Moses and the Israelites running into the Red Sea, facing the obstacles thrown up by Biden’s policies. To part that sea, voters must have faith — and vote — this November, she said.

She said that under former President Donald Trump, who’s again the Republican nominee, the country had a booming economy and a secure U.S.-Mexico border.

“This isn’t a Christian nationalist story here,” Boebert told the crowd, directly referencing a 2022 Denver Post story about her close ideological alignment with the movement. “This is about life and peace and personal freedom. Not the immorality of our national debt … this is about securing our nation and securing our people. Securing our freedoms that are not given to us by dirty, corrupt, greedy politicians.

“They are given to us by God and secured in our Constitution.”

In an interview, Boebert also highlighted specific local legislation she’s championed as part of the key stakes in the race, including a bill to help Pueblo transition following the closure of a chemical plant there that was approved as part of the National Defense Authorization Act. Another was a bill to give small Colorado communities unique ZIP codes.

Chance to “restore honor to our district”

Calvarese likewise highlights the hyper-local issues on the minds of district voters: How to spur local manufacturing of the pesticides that farmers rely on and research on better crop yields, as well as how to help people get into tech fields through training with large language models (the basis of artificial intelligence platforms like ChatGPT). She also mentions the health care needs of the district and her parents’ struggles in finding care in Douglas County.

But in the big-picture stakes of the race, Calvarese returns to her opponent.

The election is a chance to “restore honor to our district” and “dignity” to Coloradans caught in the crossfire of Boebert’s public incidents, she said.

“When you are a person from Colorado and you meet other people from other states — or even around the world — the first thing you don’t want to hear is, ‘Oh my God, Lauren Boebert: that embarrassment,’ ” Calvarese said. “So I think it����ap a real opportunity for us. Not just Colorado, but the whole country.”

Asked to respond to Calvarese’s comment about dignity, Boebert said she was proud of her dignity. She also highlighted Calvarese’s own relatively recent return to the district and her work on the Inflation Reduction Act. Boebert characterized the IRA as raising the national debt in order to push “the Green New Deal” championed by some progressives.

“To me, that is not dignity at all,” Boebert said. “That is deception at its finest — lying to the American people about the policies that you were pushing and (which are) obviously costing Americans each and every day.”

The results of the race could last longer than just this election cycle.

Wadhams, the Republican consultant, called Boebert’s 2022 nail-biter the result of “extraordinary circumstances” following a term in office that left many voters there unhappy. Chief among them: a perception that Boebert was more focused on national attention than on serving the district.

This race gives her a chance to reset — and if she focuses on the needs of the district, he said, it could be hers for the long haul.

It����ap a sentiment echoed by Saunders, the CSU professor. Though the race has drawn a lot of attention and Democratic money, both could dry up after a decisive win next month. With longevity — and political safety — would come the opportunity for Boebert to build even more influence in the Republican Party.

“You can always lose,” Saunders said. “But she could be in that seat for 20 years, very easily.”

But state Rep. Gabe Evans, a first-term Weld County Republican whose Colorado House district largely overlaps the 8th, thinks he not only can narrow Caraveo’s margin but reverse it in his favor this November.

“I span that urban-rural divide,” said Evans, a former Army Blackhawk helicopter pilot and Arvada police officer who runs a small cattle operation on 17 acres near Fort Lupton. “I was a big city cop and I’ve lived that urban lifestyle. Now I live in Weld County — and I grew up rural.”

But first, Evans must defeat fellow Republican Janak Joshi in the June 25 primary to win the GOP nomination. The 8th District runs from the northern Denver suburbs in Adams County through the farms and oil and gas fields that stretch north to Greeley. On the Democratic side, Caraveo is unopposed.

Joshi, a former state lawmaker who served three terms in the Colorado House in the 2010s, is a retired physician. He did not provide answers to questions from The Denver Post and did not respond to several attempts to talk about his campaign.

During a primary debate at the Grizzly Rose in Denver earlier this month, Joshi said he was running for Congress “because I have to pay back my dues” for the opportunities he received in becoming a U.S. citizen. He’s an immigrant from India who has lived in Colorado for more than four decades. He said his experience with immigration and the health care sector, along with the legislature, mean he’s ready to hit the ground running in Congress.

“We need somebody who can start from Day One,” Joshi said.

Eric Sondermann, a Denver-based independent political analyst, said that in his appraisal, the June 25 election is “Gabe Evans’ primary race to lose.” He bases that on the fact that Joshi has lived in the 8th District for less than half a year, compared to six years for his opponent.

The Colorado Republican Party has endorsed Joshi, something that could work in his favor — or could be a liability, given aimed recently at chair Dave Williams, Sondermann said. The outcry among Republicans intensified this month after the party sent an anti-LGBTQ+ email to supporters timed for Pride Month.

In the meantime, Evans has received the blessing of former President Donald Trump — despite Joshi, , trumpeting: “Only Janak Joshi proudly backs Trump.” Evans also Joshi more than 3-to-1 in contributions, reporting nearly $650,000 in receipts as of June 5. The majority of Joshi’s nearly $200,000 raised has come from loans he made to his campaign.

Matchup: Doctor versus cop

Joshi, 74, made a political name for himself representing the Colorado Springs area in the statehouse, but he failed in his bid for a City Council seat in Colorado’s second-largest city in 2017.

Joshi was a physician for 30 years, specializing in internal medicine and nephrology. His website states that he owned medical clinics and dialysis centers and employed as many as 50 people. He is married with two daughters and has lived in Colorado for 45 years; he relocated to Thornton just before entering the primary.

“My underlying philosophy of conservative common sense is shaped from a strong family, from my experience being welcomed to America, and from a core belief that we all have a God-given right to make as much of our lives as possible,” he wrote on his website.

Joshi’s medical career has come under fire in the race, with Evans asking him why he continues to represent himself as a doctor when he permanently surrendered his medical license in Colorado 16 years ago. State medical authorities had determined that Joshi failed to properly evaluate and adequately treat a patient.

At a recent debate, Joshi called the circumstances behind the surrender of his license “frivolous” and compared his situation to the legal troubles faced by Trump.

“Tell me how that plays against a Democrat who does have her (medical) license,” Evans told The Post, referring to Caraveo’s career as a pediatrician.

Joshi stakes out a more conservative position than Evans on several issues.

On immigration, he supports a “deport-them-all” strategy while Evans, the 37-year-old grandson of an immigrant from Mexico, says deportation should be prioritized for the “ones who are committing crimes” in the United States.

The two men also diverge on the extent to which the country’s national security agencies need reform.

During the Grizzly Rose debate, Joshi claimed that agencies like the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had been “weaponized” and were “abusing their power” against conservatives, most notably Trump. He advocated largely dismantling the national security apparatus and rebuilding it.

“We need to defund them and start all over again,” he said.

Evans called such a move foolhardy, saying: “You can’t abolish the intelligence agencies, especially when we have a wide-open southern border where we have terrorists and terrorist sympathizers coming through.”

Just last weekend in three U.S. cities, federal officials arrested eight men from Tajikistan with potential ties to the terrorist group ISIS. The men all crossed the southern border into the country, .

“You can always have more accountability from the federal government, but you can’t just wholesale get rid of it all,” Evans told The Post on Tuesday in an interview at Petrocco Farms in Brighton, where he addressed a group of women farmers at a luncheon.

Joshi has said he would join the hard-right House Freedom Caucus if elected in November. Evans said he would not. Both men would extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, saying the nation’s $34 trillion debt is due more to out-of-control government spending than a lack of taxpayer revenue.

Joshi has attacked Evans for the backing he’s received from Americans for Prosperity Action, a conservative advocacy group tied to billionaire Charles Koch that threw its support to former Trump rival Nikki Haley during the GOP presidential primary.

The group has reported spending more than $290,000 in support of Evans, . No outside spending has been reported in support of Joshi.

Heavily Latino district

Evans long lived in and around metro Denver, starting out in Aurora and moving to Elbert County, Arvada and finally Weld County, where he and his wife are raising two young sons, in 2018. Evans showed his first calf when he was 12.

Despite his Latino heritage, he said he isn’t as fluent in Spanish as he would like to be. The 8th District is the most heavily Latino district in Colorado, with , and that segment of the electorate proved critical to Caraveo’s slim victory in 2022.

But with the Democratic Party’s somewhat in recent months, Evans thinks there’s an opportunity to connect with Latinos along more traditional lines.

“They’re about hard work, they are about building a better life for their families, they’re about faith,” he said. “Their story is my story.”

The state GOP, in , said in an email to party members that he “has a 100% record in defending taxpayers against out-of-control government spending while also being a leader to secure our border, finish the wall, protect the unborn, and defend the Second Amendment against weak Republicans and radical Democrats like Joe Biden and Yadira Caraveo.”

The party also said that, in its estimation, Joshi has a “higher likelihood of defeating the incumbent Democrat in the general election.”

But in this month’s primary, former Colorado Republican Party Chair Dick Wadhams gives the edge to Evans.

“Gabe is a young candidate who has a military background and was a police officer and he lives in Weld County on a farm with his wife,” Wadhams said. “Crime is a big issue in the 2024 election — his background lends well to what voters are concerned about.”

Sondermann said incumbency gives Caraveo an instant advantage over whichever Republican wins the primary.

Eighteen months ago, when Caraveo defeated state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, she “was able to beat as good a Republican as you’re going to get,” he said. But the race was so close that a Libertarian candidate may well have been a decisive factor. Richard Ward’s tally — 9,280 votes — was nearly six times the leading candidates’ margin.

That closeness is spurring Republicans’ hopes to flip the seat in 2024. rates the 8th Congressional District race as a toss-up in the fall, though the at the University of Virginia categorizes it as “leans Democratic.”

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Huerfano County Republican leadership in southern Colorado this week “immediately resign his position,” while state lawmaker and congressional candidate Richard Holtorf said the same.

In an Eastern Plains stronghold, Yuma County Republicans the state party for endorsing certain GOP candidates as a move that “undermines the electoral process within our party.” The endorsees include U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert in her run for the 4th Congressional District, after she secured the top line at the assembly.

Still others expressed alarm after party officials ejected a Colorado Sun political reporter from the party assembly in Pueblo on Saturday because of Williams’ belief that the reporter’s coverage of Republicans had been “very unfair.” He that he would’ve prohibited The Denver Post and 9News from covering the assembly, too.

In the face of all the criticism, the party under Williams has doubled down.

On its official account on the social media platform X, the state GOP went after Republican officeholders and candidates who criticized Williams, 4th District congressional candidate Deborah Flora a “dishonest, say-anything” politician after the party’s removal of the reporter from the venue. State Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer, a prominent figure from Brighton, caught fire from the party on the same issue.

“What����ap disgusting is your shameless boot licking of the corrupted fake news media that pushes propaganda for Democrats,” read the state party’s to Kirkmeyer’s X post.

Kirkmeyer, who holds a powerful post on the Joint Budget Committee, said in an interview that Williams was being a “bully.”

“You shouldn’t be trying to intimidate people,” she said. “We’re supposed to be trying to include people in our party, not trying to push them out.”

Former state GOP chair Dick Wadhams said the turmoil at the top of the party — and the internecine warfare within — was “unprecedented.”

He placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of Williams, who took the helm of the state GOP in March 2023 for a two-year term. Wadhams called Williams, a former state lawmaker who’s now running for Colorado’s open 5th Congressional District seat, “amoral and corrupt.”

“He’s only concerned about one thing — and that’s his personal ambitions,” Wadhams said. “We’ve never seen this before. I can’t believe it. We have a cesspool in the leadership of the Colorado Republican Party.”

Williams didn’t respond to several questions sent to him by The Post this week.

But state Rep. Matt Soper, a Delta Republican, thinks Williams “has done a pretty good job as state party chair.”

“He’s raised money,” Soper told The Post. “He has definitely been the thorn in the side of Democrats, which is what a state party chair has to do.”

Party fundraising has lagged at times under Williams, and this year Colorado Democrats have crowed that their fundraising in January and February dwarfed that of the GOP by at least a factor of two.

The intraparty criticism of Williams comes at a time when the Republican Party has for years lagged in state elections up and down the ballot, resulting in today’s Democratic dominance in Colorado. Democrats hold the governor’s office and wide majorities in the state legislature while occupying most seats in the state’s congressional delegation.

Soper served with Williams in the House, where Williams “was probably one of our most skilled bomb-throwers,” he said. That willingness to frustrate, insult and tweak is Williams’ “great strength,” in Soper’s view.

Williams’ weakness, though, “is himself” and his tendency to “march forward until he gets the answer he wants.”

“I guess from Dave Williams’ perspective, pushing out certain members within the party is OK because you’re kind of cleaning house,” Soper said. “I feel like when we’re this far in the minority, that����ap challenging to do. My whole plea to the state party is (that) I need help — I need more Republicans down here in the trenches fighting for us. At the end of the day, I don’t really care how we do it.”

Soper, too, came in for the party’s scorn earlier this week, after his disagreement with barring the reporter from the assembly on X. The party’s account replied: “The fake news media won’t like you more if you suck up to them, Matt.”

Campaign finance complaint filed

For Kelly Maher, a longtime Colorado Republican strategist, the objections go beyond Williams’ conduct at the Pueblo assembly last weekend, where some in the party also took issue with policy and platform votes that went Williams’ way.

Last week, Maher filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission against Williams, alleging he improperly used state party monies to help his congressional campaign.

Specifically, she claimed that Williams spent more than $16,000 in state party funds in February to produce and mail a flyer to voters in El Paso County targeting a primary opponent in the 5th District race, Jeff Crank. Maher’s complaint called the mailer a “poorly veiled” attack on then-presidential contender Nikki Haley but noted that the piece mostly targeted Crank and a political action committee that had endorsed him — a move she said violated federal campaign finance laws.

“He will burn the Republican Party to the ground in his singular goal of getting to Congress,” Maher said in an interview. “He cannot accomplish his goals without cannibalizing everyone else.”

Four years ago, Colorado’s unaffiliated voters — by far the largest chunk of the electorate — backed President Joe Biden by 25 percentage points over then-President Donald Trump, according to an exit poll taken at the time.

That gulf means Republicans can ill-afford to be training their ire on each other, said Kristi Burton Brown, Williams’ predecessor as GOP chair.

“When we are attacking our own conservatives, the goal of growing the party is really hard to achieve,” she said.

Burton Brown also said the endorsement of GOP candidates during the primary season — Trump received his own blessing from the state party back in January, ahead of the Iowa caucuses and Colorado’s March 15 presidential primary — is potentially counterproductive.

“It’s supposed to be a neutral body that opens up election pathways for Republicans,” she said of the state party. “Anytime the party picks and chooses candidates in a race, it gives voters the appearance of backroom deals.”

Holtorf, the state representative from Akron who is running for former U.S. Rep. Ken Buck’s seat, lashed Williams for the party’s endorsement of Boebert this week in the crowded GOP primary race and called for him to step down.

Holtorf made the June 25 primary ballot on Wednesday after state election officials deemed that he had gathered enough signatures in the district, as did another Republican contender, state Rep. Mike Lynch. Boebert and Flora had qualified for the primary ballot via petition last month, and other contenders could make the ballot, too.

“My vision of the Republican Party is (that) it����ap the Republican Party of the Reagan era,” Holtorf said. “It����ap a big tent. The purity test … that����ap being promoted by the papacy of the Republican Party under Dave Williams’ leadership is not the direction we need to go. We need to rebuild our party. We need to welcome everybody back.”

“Becoming Republican again”

Williams has also run into criticism from fellow Republicans for his desire to close GOP primaries to all but affiliated party voters, a stance Wadhams calls “dumbfounding.”

The state party sued Secretary of State Jena Griswold last summer in federal court, seeking to invalidate a ballot measure passed by voters in 2016 that opened up Colorado’s political primaries to unaffiliated voters. A judge rejected the party’s claim in February. The party’s central committee has failed to clear the high threshold needed to opt out of primaries — despite continuing pressure from Williams and others in the party, .

Senate Minority Leader Paul Lundeen, a Monument Republican, said his job is to counter the Democratic surge in Colorado by supporting Republicans in swing districts and conservative districts.

“I’m trying to attract as many people to the Republican brand as possible,” Lundeen said. “That includes conservatives and unaffiliated. (Williams is) gonna do what he’s gonna do.”

And Williams doing what he does is exactly what Rep. Scott Bottoms, a Colorado Springs Republican, wants to continue seeing.

“For quite a few years, we have just been getting more and more liberal and more and more middle of the road — more of an establishment mentality — and it was hurting us,” said Bottoms, a freshman lawmaker who’s among the most conservative in the Capitol. “Just because they have an ‘R’ after their name doesn’t mean they’re Republicans. We’re starting to see those (voter) rolls turned back around to where people are becoming Republican again.”

When he first ran for office two years ago, Bottoms said, he was told to tone down his anti-abortion beliefs. He praised Williams for embracing his position on the issue from the party chair position.

But Wadhams, the former party chair, said the anemic turnout at the Republican assembly in Pueblo — just 2,100 or so delegates out of 3,500 invited showed up, he said — was a flashing red light that new leadership was needed.

There is no way to build a “winning coalition” by alienating people, Wadhams said, especially from within the party.

“It is a hollowing out of the party,” he said. “The Democrats have a stranglehold on the state like they haven’t had since the 1930s.”

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A quick scroll through her account on X, formerly known as Twitter, reveals dozens of condemnations of the former president, with Griswold repeatedly calling him an “oath-breaking insurrectionist” and a “threat to democracy.”

“It is up to American voters to save our country next November and vote for democracy over chaos,” she posted on Nov. 30.

Those sentiments find broad support in Colorado politics, which largely has been hostile to Trump. But the outspokenness of the Democratic secretary of state — both on social media and in numerous interviews on cable news — doesn’t play well with those who expect a more even-handed approach from Colorado’s top election official, especially in a year when Trump is on the ballot again for president.

Griswold’s social media posts generate plenty of pushback, and lately Colorado Republicans have gone after her more aggressively, including by launching a doomed impeachment bid. They also have criticized her decision to support an attempt to remove Trump from the ballot in a Colorado case the U.S. Supreme Court recently overturned.

Wayne Williams, a Republican who preceded Griswold as secretary of state and lost to her in the 2018 election, says there is no question his 39-year-old successor loudly and boldly wears her liberal politics on her sleeve. She regularly expresses support for abortion rights, gun control legislation and transgender rights in her official capacity as secretary of state.

Griswold also has lambasted U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, as an election denier. Williams understands why some voters might be uncomfortable with that.

“It makes it very difficult for people to believe everything’s fair when you are on a full-out attack on candidates they support,” he said. “I believe her partisan actions undermine the confidence of voters’ faith in the office.”

But Griswold said in an interview that her vocal criticism of Trump was intrinsically linked to her duty to defend the integrity of Colorado’s elections.

“Will I become quiet? The answer is absolutely not,” she said. “We are in an unprecedented and dangerous political climate. It is not partisan or political to protect our democracy.”

Threats against Griswold

The most fervent criticism from Colorado Republicans has come since the U.S. Supreme Court early this month overruled the Colorado high court’s December decision to strike Trump from the Republican primary ballot. Griswold wasn’t among the plaintiffs in the case, but she’d filed a brief in support.

On March 4, Republican U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert against Griswold. Days later, state House Republicans announced an effort to impeach the secretary of state — though it isn’t expected to gain traction, and may not even get a hearing, in the Democratic-supermajority chamber.

Then, on March 14, the Colorado Republican Party , asking it to investigate Griswold for repeatedly calling Trump an insurrectionist when the former president had neither been charged nor convicted of such an offense.

“She has repeatedly lied to and misled the public,” the complainants said in an email issued by the state GOP.

Griswold is unfazed by the criticism.

Two Colorado courts — a Denver district judge in November and the Colorado Supreme Court the following month — determined Trump had engaged in insurrection around the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, she noted.

Griswold said she had received more than 800 threats, including death threats, since a group of Republican and unaffiliated Colorado voters filed the ballot challenge lawsuit in September.

“I will not be silenced by Republicans in our legislature trying to score cheap political points — and I’ll never be intimidated by someone like Lauren Boebert,” she said. “I will not allow the extreme right to define standing up for democracy as not doing one’s job — it’s what every single person should be doing.”

Enabling or giving cover to those making false claims about the integrity of an election, she said, is “undemocratic, un-American and unacceptable.”

Griswold has defenders in Colorado. Amanda Gonzalez, Jefferson County’s clerk and recorder and a fellow Democrat, said she admires Griswold’s fiery dedication to shielding elections from those falsely claiming they are rigged or fraudulent.

She sees the role of a state’s top election official these days as being the “democracy-defender-in-chief.”

“She isn’t the first secretary of state to speak about the damage caused by President Trump,” Gonzalez said. “I appreciate a secretary of state who stands up to that and ensures that our system is safe and secure.”

Partisan roots in election oversight

The criticism of Griswold underlines the sometimes-partisan nature of election oversight, which most notably caught the public’s attention during the 2000 Bush v. Gore debacle. Then-Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a Republican who also served as George W. Bush’s state campaign co-chair, was accused of playing favorites after she certified the state’s razor-thin results for Bush over Al Gore.

Trump’s election loss 20 years later put the office into hyper-focus, highlighted by an early January 2021 phone call made by the then-president to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Trump, who was recorded, suggested that the Republican elections chief “find” more than 11,000 votes to ensure a Trump victory in the state won by Democrat Joe Biden.

“The secretary of state used to be a backwater — now it’s high profile,” said Kevin Johnson, executive director of the Bethesda, Maryland-based .

A big part of the problem rests with how election administration is run in the United States, Johnson said.

“They manage a process that is adversarial in nature and they need to be impartial in overseeing that process,” he said of election officials. “Voters want to see neutrality in the comportment of the leader of elections.”

Colorado is one of 31 states where the secretary of state is chosen in a statewide election. In another seven states, the governor or legislature appoints the secretary. In 10 states, a board of elections, rather than a secretary of state, oversees elections, while in Utah and Alaska, the lieutenant governor is the chief elections officer.

Johnson’s organization has sketched out a way to reduce, if not eliminate, partisanship from election administration by forming a bipartisan state election board that includes members with legal and election expertise.

“Our elections officials are elected in partisan elections — no other democratic country in the world does that,” Johnson said. “The reason no other country does that is it leads to conflicts of interest.”

In a  at the University of Colorado Boulder, released in January, just 52% of Coloradans surveyed thought elections across the country would be run “fairly and accurately” in 2024. The numbers improved when respondents were asked about the state’s upcoming elections — 68% felt they would be fair and accurate.

But there was a stark partisan split, with 88% of Democrats saying Colorado’s elections would be run fairly and 63% of independents saying so. Only 54% of Republicans felt that way.

CU political science professor Anand Edward Sokhey, who oversaw the survey, said he found “the partisan gaps on electoral confidence concerning.” But tracing the exact causes of such disparities in sentiment is difficult, he said, if not impossible.

Eyeing higher office?

Former state GOP party chair Dick Wadhams, like Griswold, is no fan of Trump. He also disagrees with Republican attempts to recall or impeach Griswold.

But he has tough words for the secretary of state.

“In many ways, I think she is as irresponsible as the stolen election conspiracy crowd on the Republican side,” Wadhams said. “She should be restoring trust in the process.”

Griswold, he said, is so baldly partisan that she has disrupted the long, staid tradition of secretaries of state in Colorado, where the function of the office largely took precedence over who was leading it.

Not that all her predecessors were quiet bureaucrats. Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler ran into ethics problems and raised Democratic hackles during his tenure a decade ago — even launching an unsuccessful 2014 bid for governor.

But in Wadhams’ view, Gessler was a “rank amateur compared to Jena Griswold” in terms of partisanship. He surmises that a desire for higher office could be behind Griswold’s approach.

Asked if she had future political ambitions, Griswold said she was “locked in and focused on this election cycle.”

Gonzalez, the Jeffco clerk, said Griswold brought substantial improvements to Colorado’s election system, such as expanding access to voting for eligible voters — with more drop boxes and voting centers, heightened security and a statewide ballot-tracking system.

“I ran for this office because I wanted to protect the right to vote,” Gonzalez said.

Griswold, she said, also has been front and center when it comes to extending protections to county clerks who had come under fire during the tumultuous aftermath of the 2020 election. She championed a bill two years ago that made it a crime to threaten election officials or publish their personal information online.

Griswold said she wouldn’t back down in the face of criticism, noting that she was reelected by voters by a comfortable margin in 2022. She will be term-limited in 2026.

“We are only here because Donald Trump lost the election in 2020. He refused to accept the result and tried to steal the election from the American people,” she said. “There’s no mistaking what he did — we all watched it unfold on Jan. 6. And I can’t be silent when the future of our democracy is at stake.”

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Four years ago, Colorado voters could have seen a wide array of Democratic contenders in the flesh in the weeks leading up to the March 2020 primary, including Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, Mike Bloomberg and Tulsi Gabbard, while Joe Biden hit up donors in Denver. Several campaigns had paid staff on the ground here for weeks or months.

Even then-President Donald Trump stopped by for a visit just weeks before the primary, landing in Colorado Springs for a rally at the Broadmoor World Arena.

“This election is not going to be confused with past presidential primaries in Colorado,” said Eric Sondermann, an independent political analyst. “This year strikes me as a going-through-the-motions exercise.”

Ahead of Haley’s rally in Centennial, her campaign on Monday announced her “Colorado state leadership team” — a list of prominent supporters who will try to build support as primary voters return their ballots in the next week. Among them are former U.S. attorneys Troy Eid and Jason Dunn; Tom Norton, a former state Senate president and a former Greeley mayor; Todd Chapman, a former diplomat and U.S. ambassador; and Wendy Buxton-Andrade, a Prowers County commissioner.

But in terms of paid staff, Haley, a former South Carolina governor who served as United Nations ambassador in the Trump administration, has a minimal state operation, with one staffer on the ground.

The reasons for Colorado’s quiet campaign season begin with the slate of candidates on the Republican side being effectively winnowed down early to a David-and-Goliath battle between Haley and Trump. And despite polls showing that voters have concerns about of 81-year-old President Biden, who’s less than four years older than Trump, no serious Democratic contender has arisen to take him on.

The other major reason is that as Colorado has continued to drift to the left — fully shedding its status as a swing state — candidates can’t afford to waste time or money in a place where their political prospects are already evident.

“Nobody should be spending money in Colorado when all those other swing states need to get their infrastructure built,” said Ian Silverii, a longtime Democratic strategist, referring to Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and other states likely to be in play in November. “A Biden win in Colorado is all but guaranteed — the question is by what margin.”

Biden bested Trump in 2020 by 13.5 percentage points.

Sheena Kadi, a spokeswoman for the state Democratic Party, said she was not aware of a campaign office or a state director for Biden’s reelection effort in Colorado. The same goes for Dean Phillips, a Minnesota congressman who’s the best-known Democrat taking on the president.

Biden was last in Colorado in November, when he promoted recent economic investments at a wind tower factory in Pueblo and attended a private fundraiser in Cherry Hills Village.

“Not speaking for either campaign — campaigns take three finite things: time, money, and resources,” Kadi said. “They are making the best decisions they can with the information they’ve got.”

If Trump wins the nomination, whether he will build the kind of multifaceted general election campaign organization he assembled in Colorado in 2016, during his first presidential run, is yet to be seen.

“Biden and Trump are pretty confident where they are in the presidential primaries,” said Dick Wadhams, a former chair of the Colorado Republican Party.

Colorado allows unaffiliated voters to participate in the party primary of their choosing. Those voters received mail ballots for both parties but may return only one of them.

Wadhams said perhaps the most interesting thing about Colorado’s March 5 primary is the “noncommitted delegate” option at the bottom of the listed Democratic candidates on the ballot. While Kadi, with the state Democratic Party, said that option was added to the ballot because “Democrats are the party of choice, the party of empowering people,” others see it differently.

“It will allow voters who are concerned with Biden’s physical and mental state to vote for someone else,” Wadhams said. “It’s a potential embarrassment for Biden if that gets a significant number of votes.”

Kristi Burton Brown, another former chair of the Colorado GOP, called the uncommitted line a potential “protest vote” for disaffected Democrats.

“They’re trying to gauge how much dissatisfaction is out there,” Brown said of the Democratic Party.

Fellow Democrat David Skaggs, who represented Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District in Washington, D.C., for a dozen years, wrote in a column in The Post last week that had cast his ballot for “uncommitted.”

“It is the ballot option that could lead to an open convention, where Democrats can pick a ticket that could more assuredly save the nation from the disaster of a second Trump administration,” he wrote.

������ showed Biden with the lowest approval ratings of his presidency. But Silverii said that whatever headwinds Biden is facing nationally, he won’t lose Colorado in November.

That’s because of the state’s large contingent of unaffiliated voters, who broke hard for the president in 2020.

“Unaffiliated voters have proven twice now that they will not vote for Trump — and in increasing numbers,” he said.

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The state party central committee’s vote Sunday night happened before Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses on Monday. Requiring ballot access fees and endorsing a candidate ahead of an open, contested primary election appeared to be unprecedented in Colorado. But the GOP became at least the second state party to endorse Trump this cycle, following a Dec. 1 vote by .

Colorado’s presidential primary elections are March 5. Fifteen also hold their presidential nominating contests that day.

“On the eve of the Iowa Caucuses, the Colorado Republican Party wanted to give President Donald J. Trump a big send off by enthusiastically endorsing him for President in November,” GOP Chairman Dave Williams said in a statement after the vote. He also accused Democrats and judges of engaging in “election interference by weaponizing our justice system” to stop Trump from winning.

The Trump endorsement was supported by 65% of central committee members who took part during the special meeting, the party reported.

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled last month that Trump is ineligible for Colorado’s primary ballot because he violated the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause during the events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot. But it allowed Trump to remain on the ballot while the U.S. Supreme Court considers the untested provision.

The Colorado Republican Party joined that case in opposition to the lawsuit, arguing that keeping Trump from the ballot would rob voters of the chance to choose their preferred candidate.

In a filing in that case, the party’s lawyers noted that “according to the Colorado Republican Committee’s bylaws, no candidate for any designation or nomination for partisan public office shall be endorsed, supported, or opposed by it, acting as an entity, or by its state officers or committees, before the Primary Election.”

In a separate filing, the party also cited bylaws requiring candidates to pay a nonrefundable filing fee of $40,000 — or $20,000 if they host a fundraiser or visit Colorado — to appear on the Republican ballot. The party raising more than $100,000 from Republican candidates through the end of November.

Williams wrote in a text message that the pre-primary endorsement wasn’t unprecedented, citing the party’s endorsement of Trump in 2020, when he was the incumbent Republican president and faced only nominal opposition. He won the state primary with more than 92% of votes. This year, Trump is running in a contested primary election.

Williams also cited another section of policy for the state party allowing for candidate preference. The filing fees, meanwhile, are used to demonstrate a candidate’s viability, he said.

Former Republican Party chair Dick Wadhams said he was unaware of the party’s central committee ever breaking its neutrality rules around party primaries in its 100-plus year history. He said the primary ballot access fees — which he called “political extortion of presidential candidates” — were new.

The Colorado Sun that the state GOP charged candidates a $5,000 ballot access fee to participate in the Republican caucus process in 2012, before the state switched back to presidential primaries.

Colorado Democratic Party chair Shad Murib compared the Trump endorsement to Williams’ recent announcement that he will run for Congress while serving as state party chair.

“Corruption is the name of the game for the Colorado GOP, so I’m not surprised that they’re endorsing an indicted loser like Donald Trump,” Murib said in a statement.

Trump holds a commanding lead over the rest of the Republican field . None of the other most serious contenders — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy — returned requests to their campaigns for comment Monday about the state party’s endorsement.

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