February 07, 2020 08:28 AM UTC

Trump/Gardner Revenge Tour: In Your Face, Colorado!

• 12 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: The Colorado Democratic Party responds via CBS4:

Cory Gardner’s a spineless yes-man who’s sold out Colorado to Donald Trump time and time again. Whether it’s their numerous attacks on Coloradans’ healthcare or raiding millions of dollars from Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, it’s no wonder they’re both so profoundly unpopular here in Colorado. We rejected Trump in 2016, and we’ll reject him and his enabler Cory Gardner at the ballot box this November.

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As the Denver Post’s Jon Murray reports, Republican morale is running high in the wake of President Donald Trump’s entirely expected acquittal on two articles of impeachment tried in the U.S. Senate–so high, in fact, that President Trump and America’s Most Vulnerable Senator™ Cory Gardner are set to headline a rally later this month (Feb. 20) in Colorado Springs at the 8,000-seat Broadmoor World Arena:

“Sen. Gardner is looking forward to joining President Trump to tout all the great accomplishments they have delivered to Colorado, including the BLM headquarters, Space Force, delivering clean drinking water to 50,000 Coloradans, record low unemployment and more,” Dobkin said. “Senator Gardner is hopeful both Democrats and Republicans will want to celebrate these successes.”

Gardner is up for reelection in November, too. The campaign of one of his Democratic rivals, former Gov. John Hickenlooper, seized on the rally announcement Thursday night by sending out a fresh fundraising appeal to supporters…

And as the Colorado Sun’s Jesse Paul reminds us, Trump is keeping a promise he made to Cory Gardner after Gardner came out early to endorse Trump for re-election in 2020–an endorsement that also could be considered a liability in a state where Trump is deeply unpopular:

Gardner has said he didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, but he offered the president an early endorsement for Trump’s reelection campaign this time around.

Trump vowed in December to visit Colorado often to rally support for Gardner. “We have a great senator in Colorado, we have to get him extended. I’ll be there a lot,” Trump said.

Polling has shown that both Trump and Gardner’s Colorado approval ratings are low.

We’ve thoroughly explored in this space the fundamental reason why Gardner is lashing himself tightly to Trump’s prow, even as the state’s increasingly blue election results make that appear politically counterintuitive. Without the Republican base, Gardner has no core constituency to build a majority coalition around. The “success” conservatives have enjoyed in peeling the Republican base away from credible information sources has created a political environment without wiggle room: either you stand with Trump and survive in the conservative information bubble, or you accept the narrative the rest of the world believes about Trump and Trump’s GOP spits you out.

In short, Gardner has cast his lot with the bubble. After Gardner’s (we honestly believe) sincere condemnation of Trump when he called for Trump to exit the presidential race in October of 2016, a shocking moral turnabout has been made here that Gardner has never been asked to explain. This is bigger than Gardner’s vagaries on abortion, bigger than Gardner’s long record of misinformation and broken promises regarding the Affordable Care Act. Gardner’s evolution into Trump’s loyal lieutenant in the last few years, for good or ill, is the defining characteristic of his career in the U.S. Senate.

We don’t think that’s going to end well for Gardner at the polls. Clearly, Gardner disagrees.