November 03, 2023 11:14 AM UTC

Deb Flora Runs For Congress And Nobody Cares

• 6 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Though you’d be excused if you missed it in the rush of news, yesterday in the immediate aftermath of Rep. Ken Buck’s formal announcement that he would not run for re-election in 2024 the first candidate announced in what’s expected to be a clown car of Republicans vying to succeed Buck in this safest of safe Republican congressional seats–Deborah Flora, who readers may remember, although again if you don’t we understand, was one of several 2022 GOP U.S. Senate candidates forced out of the primary at the GOP state assembly in April by state Rep. “Raging” Ron Hanks.

We never got to know much about Deborah Flora in the 2022 U.S. Senate race, overshadowed as she was by Hanks, eventual nominee and general election loser Joe O’Dea, and even Gino “Cool Dad” Campana who shared Flora’s fate at the state assembly. Even Flora’s radio show on 710 KNUS has failed to raise her profile as much as potential competitors in CD-4 like fellow host and serial election loser George Brauchler. In short, with everything Flora calls an asset, somebody else has been there and done that.

Unsurprisingly, yesterday’s campaign launch for Flora came and went with almost no news coverage whatsoever, with only two outlets mentioning her launch: an abbreviated puff piece from the Fort Morgan Times’ reliable Republican stenographer Brian Porter:

Flora, most recently, narrowly missed making the Republican primary ballot for U.S. Senate in 2022, when delegates supported Ron Hanks.

She is the founder of the non-profit Parents United America, an advocate for parental rights and educational freedom. She hosted The Deborah Flora Show on the Salem Radio Network and was a founding partner of Lamplight Entertainment. As a director of public policy, she has advocated and testified for issues impacting Colorado citizens and has also served on several national boards overseeing multi-million dollar budgets, her announcement reads. She was a President’s Scholar and National Merit Scholar, and a Summa Cum Laude graduate from Southern Methodist University.

And this somewhat less laudatory headline from Kyle Clark at 9NEWS:

Deb Flora is best known for fighting what she calls the “Marxist infiltration of our public schools.” Flora founded the group Parents United America. She sits on the board of the Conservative group Colorado Parent Advocacy Network. Both those groups are self-described parental rights organizations that claim that schools are indoctrinating children through sex ed or lessons in critical race theory. Flora has called for her parents in Colorado to pull all elementary and middle school-aged children out of the public school system and she recently made a documentary linking teachers to communists.

By comparison, CD-8 GOP candidate Rep. “Gabbin'” Gabe Evans’ campaign launch, an event with even less hypeable material to work with, was well-covered by most of the major Denver and northern Colorado news outlets. Even Heidi Ganahl, yet another potential primary opponent, managed to earn statewide media coverage from her campaign launch…though we concede quite a bit of it was the wrong kind of coverage.

And that segues into Flora’s larger problem. If CD-4 Republicans want a culture warrior to ferret out furries in the schools, they’ve got Ganahl. If they want to be fearmongered about crime in Denver in the state’s emptiest rural expanses, that’s George Brauchler’s lane. And for CD-4 Republicans still concerned with quaint issues like pulling down giant agricultural subsidies while pee-testing welfare applicants, Jerry Sonnenberg is the flaming hypocrite they know and love.

As David Bowie once said, “never be the first to do anything.” In political free-for-alls like this upcoming Republican CD-4 primary, first in means nothing–unless Flora is just the first to be written off.