October 17, 2024 12:49 PM UTC

Arizona GOP Involvement in Colorado Congressional Races Gets National Attention

• 3 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

For a few weeks now, we’ve been tracking the bizarre story of mailers showing up in two Colorado congressional districts — CO-03 and CO-08 — that are paid for by the Arizona Republican Party.

This is a strange tactic that we had never seen before in Colorado until recently. We’re not sure it’s legal, and neither is Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, who picked up the story on Wednesday evening:

The first I heard of this was late this afternoon from TPM Reader EM. But even after EM shared a link verifying the story, I still couldn’t quite believe it was true. But it really does seem to be true. Not only have reporters from multiple local news outlets cover it, they also have pretty clear photographic evidence. Mailers going out in support at least of GOP House candidates Gabe Evans and Jeff Hurd are being sent and paid for by the Arizona Republican party.

So here’s the deal. The Colorado GOP appears to be under the control of one weird dude, Dave Williams, who spent most of the party’s money on preventing people from firing him as party chair, trying and failing to get himself nominated for a House seat and … oh yeah, one other thing, Lauren Boebert. Other Colorado Republicans tried to oust Williams but a judge ruled against them. El Paso Country District Judge Eric Bentley ruled against state party chair pretender Eli Bremer and confirmed that Williams is in fact the chair of the Colorado Republican Party. In any case, the point is that, for the moment, the Colorado GOP is basically the personal property of this guy Williams. Once that happened, Coloradans in at least two congressional districts started getting mailers for the local Republican candidate coming from the Arizona state Republican Party.

As to why this is happening, Marshall agrees with our take (and is kind enough to give us a nod)

The website ColoradoPols (from whose reporting I’m getting almost all of this story) speculates here, almost certainly correctly, that the Arizona GOP’s role in this is part of the NRCC’s deal with Bremer.

We’ve come to the conclusion that this is likely happening because of a combination of factors, namely because 1) Political parties can send out direct mail at a lower rate, thus saving money for Republican candidates Jeff Hurd in CO-03 and Gabe Evans in CO-08, and 2) The Colorado Republican Party is too dysfunctional to do this job for Republicans in our state. Our guess is that former sorta temporary GOP Chair Eli Bremer worked out the details with the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) while the official State GOP Chair, Dave Williams, was busy suing everyone in an effort to hold onto power.

The question that we still haven’t answered is whether or not this is all legally acceptable. As Marshall opines, it may not be:

Now what the NRCC and the Arizona GOP is doing here is illegal or at least violates federal law. You can’t simply use the state party as a transactional pass through to get its preferential postage rate. [Pols emphasis] You can donate to the state party and they can decide to send mailers. But at least in theory there needs to be some agency on the part of the state party. From my earlier reporting on those Trump mailers being sent to partisan Democrats, however, it’s also my understanding that this law is mostly unenforced and that’s it’s not uncommon for state parties to take what are essentially order to run different campaigns under their aegis.

That said, I wonder if this doesn’t break enough new ground that it could be an enforcement issue. A state party has an obvious interest in supporting its own candidates in its own state. The Arizona GOP’s interest in funding races in Colorado, while it’s trying to win multiple races in Arizona, is an absurd enough proposition that maybe it draws some regulatory scrutiny. [Pols emphasis]

Meanwhile…

We are now aware of at least FOUR mail pieces in support of Evans in CO-08 that have come from the AZ GOP (in addition to at least one mailer for Hurd in CO-03). Here’s a mailer that arrived on October 11:

And here’s a mail piece that showed up on October 15: