Democrats in Colorado are employing a novel strategy as they seek to oust controversial Republican Lauren Boebert from her deep-red congressional seat.
"Claudia Cunningham had never voted for a Republican in her life. She swore she couldn’t or her father would roll over in his grave. But ahead of the Colorado primary on Tuesday, she did the once-unthinkable: registered as unaffiliated so that she could vote in the G.O.P. primary against her congresswoman, Lauren Boebert," The New York Times reported Wednesday. "So did Ward Hauenstein, the mayor pro tem of Aspen; Sara Sanderman, a teacher from Glenwood Springs; Christopher Arndt, a writer and financier in Telluride; Gayle Frazzetta, a primary care doctor in Montrose; and Karen Zink, a nurse practitioner south of Durango."
In North Carolina, there was a big push to get Democrats to temporarily re-register as "unaffiliated" to vote against Rep. Madison Cawthorn in his GOP primary. Cawthorn went on to be the youngest Republican to lose a primary.
"Driven by fears of extremism and worries about what they see as an authoritarianism embodied in Ms. Boebert, thousands of Democrats in the sprawling third congressional district of Colorado have rushed to shore up her Republican challenger, State Senator Don Coram. Their aim is not to do what best for Democrats but to do what they think is best for democracy," the newspaper explained.
Coram was elected to the Colorado House of Representatives in 2010 after Scott Tipton was elected to Congress. In 2016, he was elected to the state Senate and then in 2020, Tipton lost to Boebert.
"In Colorado, a constellation of small political groups have sprung up to oppose Ms. Boebert’s re-election ahead of next week’s primary, such as Rural Colorado United and the Better Than Boebert PAC, formed by Joel Dyar, a liberal community organizer in Grand Junction, and James Light, an affluent Republican developer who helped create the mega ski resort Snowmass in the 1970s," the newspaper reported. "More than 5,400 early or absentee votes cast in the western North Carolina primary that included Mr. Cawthorn similarly came from Democrats who had voted in their party’s primary two years earlier. Mr. Cawthorn lost by fewer than 1,500."
