October 16, 2024 02:16 PM UTC

Jinkies! The Unmasking of Gabe-ish Evans

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• by: Colorado Pols

After months of trying very hard to portray himself as “normal Republican candidate guy,” the real Gabe Evans is being revealed to the world just in time for voters to make their decision in CO-08.

Today in The New York Times, reporter Annie Karni highlights the Republican candidates for Congress across the country who are election deniers and right-wing extremists on a variety of social issues. The star of this story is Republican Gabe Evans, who is seeking to unseat incumbent Democratic Rep. Yadira Caraveo in the eighth congressional district. Karni begins with the origin story about how Evans earned his “Gabe-ish” nickname:

Back in January, three Republicans vying for their party’s nomination in a highly competitive Colorado congressional district north of Denver were asked for a yes-or-no answer about whether the 2020 election was “stolen from President Donald Trump.”

One hemmed and hawed before finally answering yes. The second offered a quick and decisive no. The third candidate — and the one who would emerge as the nominee for a seat that Republicans hope to flip next month in their drive to keep control of the House — equivocated.

“No-ish,” replied Gabe Evans, the 38-year-old state representative who is running to unseat Representative Yadira Caraveo, a first-term Democrat and the state’s first Latina member of Congress.

Mr. Evans is working to appeal to voters in this tossup district as a pragmatic Republican, calling himself a “common-sense” politician and in one ad proclaiming that “Yadira Caraveo is the real extremist.” But if he makes it to Congress next year, Mr. Evans will be part of a new class of Republicans who reflect the shift to the right that has been taking place within the party, even among those who represent purple districts.

House Republicans who have denied the 2020 election results or refused to commit to accepting the 2024 outcome, and who hold more extreme views on social issues, are running in critical congressional races throughout the country. They are poised to replace the mainstream conservatives who once formed the spine of the G.O.P. in Congress, and who have either left or been purged by a party that regards them as insufficiently hard-line or insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump. [Pols emphasis]

Acknowledging that Republican Donald Trump lost the 2020 Presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden is an incredibly low bar for politicians to clear, but it has nonetheless confounded hard-right MAGA Republicans like Evans who have been embraced by The Big Orange Guy. The reason for that continued denial now has more to do with 2024 and a potential second effort by Trump supporters to deny election results once again.

Mr. Evans has also continued to punt on the legitimacy of the 2020 election, saying, “These aren’t yes-no questions.” [Pols emphasis] And he has played down the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, comparing it to the racial justice protests that proliferated across the country after the 2020 murder of George Floyd. At last week’s debate, asked again about election denialism, he said, “We have to make sure every legal vote is counted, but yeah, I always accept the result of elections.”

After the last presidential election, 147 Republicans in Congress voted to overturn the results. Many of those who voted to certify the outcome have since left Capitol Hill. Congress enacted a law in 2022 aimed at averting a repeat of the Jan. 6 crisis and raising the threshold for objecting to a state’s electoral votes…

Because Evans has been so cagey about his belief in The Big Lie, it is important to continue to ask whether or not he would back the will of the voters in 2024.

These aren’t the only important questions, of course. As Karni writes in the Times:

…this year’s crop of Republican House recruits appears to include fewer truly fringe candidates than the party ran in 2022, when the group included three people who had been at the Capitol on Jan. 6. But what is considered “mainstream” for Republicans has shifted considerably to the right. [Pols emphasis]

Here are just some of the ways in which the real Gabe Evans is much different than the sanitized, moderate-ish version he has tried to present to voters in CO-08:

• Evans proved unable to answer one of the simplest questions you could ever be asked: “When is it okay to hit a child in public school?”
• Evans is fully onboard the “Venezuelan gangs killed everyone in Colorado” narrative. As we wrote this week, Evans is so far to the right on this issue that he’s practically in Kansas.
• Evans has tried to muffle his true position on abortion rights with glib comments and poor explanations about “exceptions.” He has also pretended not to remember how he voted on a failed 2020 ballot measure in Colorado that sought to restrict abortion rights.

As a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee told the Times, Gabe-ish fits the mold of other Republican recruits in 2024:

“National Republicans have elevated anti-abortion zealots, election deniers and fringe conspiracy theorists. These unserious recruits are no different from the so-called moderate House Republicans who have enabled unchecked extremism.”

It’s good to see that the true Gabe Evans is getting the proper amount of sunlight. The only thing left is for voters in CO-08 to say ‘No-ish’ to Gabe-ish.