May 16, 2024 10:21 AM UTC

"Raging" Ron Hanks Is Back And Jeff Hurd Should Actually Be Sweating

• 3 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

As expected, yesterday the Colorado Republican Party in the grip of self-dealing chairman and congressional candidate Dave “Let’s Go Brandon” Williams delivered another controversial endorsement in a contested Republican primary, throwing the party’s nameplate support behind former state Rep. “Raging” Ron Hanks in a race that should be safely off the table in terms of competitiveness in November: the Lauren Boebert-less CO-03 race.

Today, the Colorado Republican Party is proud to announce our endorsement of Fmr. State Representative Ron Hanks in the Republican Primary election for Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District. Our main criteria for choosing to endorse Ron Hanks is his higher likelihood of defeating the radical Democrat, Adam Frisch, in the general election… [Pols emphasis]

We were tempted to stop reading there, since the notion that Ron Hanks is better qualified than any other Republican candidate to hold the R+9 CO-03 seat is not supported by any rational metric—but read on as we did to understand the party’s stated pretext for endorsing this longtime friend of chairman Williams, and how this endorsement could affect this race moving forward:

Jeff Hurd’s original and problematic reason for running was to challenge conservative stalwart, Lauren Boebert, while promising to move the district in a leftward moderate direction.

Additionally, Hurd refuses to commit to voting for President Donald J. Trump in the 2024 general election, which is especially concerning with his ties to an open borders organization, Americans for Prosperity, that also raised 70 million dollars to defeat President Trump in the presidential primary. These issues combined with his refusal to gain ballot access through the grassroots caucus and assembly process makes Jeff Hurd a poor candidate to be our Party’s standard-bearer in CD3.

The failure of Jeff “You’ve Never” Hurd to affirm his support for Donald Trump, as we predicted, has manifested as a major problem for Hurd in the CO-03 Republican primary, and left Hurd wide open to attack from the newly primary-meddling state party. After the party’s central committee voted to endorse Trump back in January, support for Trump became the most basic of litmus tests, and Hurd’s failure to state clearly that he will at least vote for Trump makes him even more of a “squish” than CO-08 GOP candidate Gabe Evans–whose opponent Janak Joshi also received the party’s official endorsement in that race on Tuesday.

In both of these races, the presence of a hard-right primary challenger creates problems for the nominal frontrunners as measured by their fundraising numbers. Both Evans and Hurd would greatly prefer to pivot to a centrist message in order to position themselves better for the general election, but they can’t do that without conservative alternative opponents constantly forcing them off message. This situation is even worse for Jeff Hurd, whose whole original purpose in running was to, as Williams says above, provide a moderate alternative to Lauren Boebert. That niche has, at least within the Colorado GOP, not aged well.

Instead, Hurd is facing “Raging” Ron Hanks. Like Dave Williams himself, Hanks’ fundraising numbers are not good. Running as part of the Colorado Republican Party’s official ticket is basically the only advantage Hanks has in this primary, operating on the assumption that if Hanks wins the primary, national resources would arrive to prop him up for the real fight against Adam Frisch in November. In a primary where Hurd has not so far distinguished himself as an energetic campaigner, Hanks is counting on retail politics and word-of-mouth support to win.

This is the slate that Dave Williams built. Rescuing Lauren Boebert with Donald Trump’s help, and a second wind for Williams’ longtime MAGA allies Ron Hanks and Janak Joshi. For Williams and Boebert, June 25th is the limit of their safe-seat horizon. For Hanks and Joshi, June 25th is a chance to punch above their weight they haven’t thought past yet.

But Democrats have plotted these scenarios all the way out to November, and they are…cautiously optimistic.