Lauren Boebert’s replacement will deliver voters’ verdict on the grassroots MAGA brand

Khaki sleeves rolled up and safety goggles adjusted, Ron Hanks stares into the sight of a high-powered rifle before pulling the trigger on Colorado’s arid plains – ostensibly blowing up an office copier disguised as a voting machine in a video political campaign ad.

The attention-grabbing clip vaulted Hanks into headlines during his unsuccessful Senate campaign two years ago; now he’s followed it up with equally hard-nosed, gun-themed and solemn campaign ads – as the combat veteran vies to fill the seat being vacated by MAGA firebrand Rep. Lauren Boebert.

“I’m the only conservative in this race,” former Republican state representative Hanks tells The Independent. “And I’m the only conservative with a proven legislative record … look at my time in the state house, when I fought for the Second Amendment and I fought for election integrity and I fought for the unborn.”

This is the candidate endorsed by the central committee of the state GOP in the race to replace Boebert in a district she nearly lost to a Democrat two years ago – and a district she’s fled for a better shot at a seat across the state.

The brash congresswoman’s antics and increasingly outrageous scandals were largely blamed for her waning support among both CD3 Republican and unaffiliated constituents. Instead of endorsing a less controversial candidate upon her departure, however, the Colorado GOP has thrown its weight behind a veritable Boebert 2.0; Hanks is a self-described “pro-Trump warrior,” election denier and proud attendee of the Jan. 6 rally in DC. (He says, however, that he did not enter the Capitol.)

Boebert may have upped sticks to seek greener pastures eastward, but the brouhaha she’s left behind is following her same fractious brand of rhetoric, drama and polarization … and that’s just within her own party.

Despite the GOP endorsement of Hanks, the more staid establishment candidate – a Grand Junction attorney named Jeff Hurd with a slew of Republican old-guard endorsements – is polling far ahead. Both men’s campaigns are gleefully attacking each other as the clock counts down to next week’s primary.

And not to be outdone, the Democrats are accused of meddling after a series of PAC-funded reverse–psychology ads declared Hanks too conservative – in an attempt to appeal to the ultra-right base, secure Hanks the nomination and ultimately give Frisch a better shot in November. The strategy is presumably banking on the fact that the same voters who turned against Boebert will also find Hanks to be a distasteful choice.

Colorado’s third congressional district, thrown headlong into the national spotlight four years ago when political neophyte Boebert unseated five-term Republican Scott Tipton in the primary, has been on a political rollercoaster ride ever since. Boebert made constant headlines – heckling the president at the State of the Union; getting groped in a theater; divorcing and then fighting with her ex-husband in public – before capping the drama with a surprise constituency switch.

Days after the December announcement that Boebert would now be running in CD4, Hanks threw his hat in the ring for her Western Slope seat. A combat veteran with 32 years of service, he doubles down on the same far-right views as Boebert but delivers them with expressionless solemnity, not finger-pointing shouts. Like her, he plays up his common-man roots.

“When I wasn’t working for the Air Force, I fracked in North Dakota, and I hammered iron and drove trucks with blue-collar America,” he told constituents one week before the primary in a Tuesday night zoom town hall.

“I’m telling you, we can fix all of the ills on the backs of blue-collar America: the pipefitters, the welders, the cement men … you know, these are the people that are going to rebuild this country.”

Hanks ran unsuccessfully for Congress in California in 2010 before the failed Colorado Senate campaign, but served as a state representative in Colorado’s House for District 60, encompassing his home in Fremont County — which is not in CD3.

He, like Boebert, is carpet-bagging.

Hanks not living in the district didn’t seem to matter to voters The Independent spoke with, particularly those who were sad to see Boebert go.

“I don’t think the Republicans here care one way or the other, as long as we get the representation,” Roxie Geigle, wearing a red-white-and-blue cowboy hat and matching boot-shaped earrings, tells The Independent of Hanks’ district switch.

Hanks says that, while he may not hail originally from CD3, he won the district during his Senate attempt – and was quickly fielding phone calls asking him to run when Boebert bowed out.

Ten days before the primary, his supporter Geigle is sitting in the Grand Junction offices of the Mesa County Republicans, a space kitted out with Charlie Kirk pamphlets, Trump mugshot mugs for sale and “God, guns and Trump” paraphernalia.

“A lot of people want Lauren Boebert back, but we’ve got to move on, and so we’re trying to find the best candidate to fill that position,” she says. “I do worry about somebody replacing her enthusiasm in Congress … that they won’t match it. And the closest one I found is Ron.”

Geigle, a 72-year-old retiree, volunteers with the party and is a Republican district captain but is speaking in her personal capacity as a voter. This is the first year the state GOP committee has broken with precedent and actually endorsed candidates, further stoking tensions and resentments within the party; it also put out a heavily Trump–leaning candidate questionnaire.

Party chairman Dave Williams, who is himself running for the congressional seat in yet another Colorado district, and another officer recused themselves from the endorsement choice, according to the statement – leaving the decision to just three other officials, it seems. Williams did not respond to a request for comment from The Independent.

“It’s not a surprise to see a split in the party between old-guard conservatives and more MAGA types; we’ve seen that in a lot of places and a lot of states,” Seth Masket, director of the University of Denver’s Center on American Politics, tells The Independent. “But Wiliams is really sort of ramping up his power as state party chair to try and influence races … that’s really unusual.”

Warring factions within the GOP – both in official ranks and on the ground – have made people unwilling to talk about politics even within their own circles, say Geigle and office manager Karen Kulp.

“We have families that are split; we have people that have been friends for years [disagreeing] .. all kinds of things happening,” Kulp tells The Independent. “It’s been going on over here for a long time. You have your ‘Never-Trumpers, and then you have us.”

Hanks, according to the GOP committee’s endorsement last month, “will secure the border, cut out-of-control taxes and spending, protect the unborn, defend the Second Amendment, and enthusiastically support our 2024 Republican Presidential nominee, President Donald J. Trump.”

There are plenty of Republicans who don’t embrace the Hanks style of conservativism, however – and the support behind Hurd would indicate that their numbers are significant. He has outpaced Hanks in both fundraising and the polls.

“A lot of the older generation is supporting kind of your Ron Hanks and America First movement, whereas young people are more, ‘Let’s take a step back, let’s re-evaluate,” says Mesa County Republican Austin DeWitt, 23, who supported Boebert in two elections but felt she spent too much time on national issues, not local.

“Right now, I know a lot of young Republicans like myself … they’re saying the same exact thing: Ron Hanks just doesn’t really have a young person’s interest, and it’s more grassroots, America First, more going along the lines with the state party.

“My priorities are, obviously, let’s put the West Slope first.”

He said he was supporting Hurd, who’s “put a plan forth” and is “not really engaging in any of the mudslinging.”

Heavyweights like former Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, a former Colorado secretary of state and state treasurer, and two of Boebert’s predecessors have also publicly given support to Hurd, labelled “an empty suit” by Hanks.

“We know who’s running him: It’s the old retread establishment Republicans that are no longer in office that are looking for influence,” Hanks tells The Independent.

The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, in a scathing editorial last month, took aim at the state GOP shenanigans.

“This is ludicrous,” the paper wrote. “The state party shouldn’t be endorsing at all – allowing its party members to draw their own conclusions about who is best qualified. Instead, the party is endorsing candidates whose views most closely align with the MAGA-loving state party chairman … Ever since Lauren Boebert announced she wouldn’t run to represent the 3rd CD for a third time, we’ve looked forward to a potential matchup between Adam Frisch and Jeff Hurd on the prospect that voters would have a choice between two qualified moderates.

“The state GOP would rather see a matchup between Hanks and a Democrat,” it wrote. “It should be careful what it wishes for.”

The strategy, it warned, could see the seat flip to Democrat for the first time since 2011 – and that matchup does seem to be exactly what the Left wants … if the TV ads they’re funding are anything to go by. National Republican leaders, at least, are up in arms about them.

Accusing Frisch of “gutter politics,” the National Republican Congressional Committee has complained that Frisch was spending $115,000 in media markets ad that Rocky Mountain Values, “a group bankrolled by the same donors as House Democrats’ nonprofit, has already spent $636,000 meddling in the primary.”

One RMV-funded ad, for example, highlights how Hanks wants to crack down on immigration and laments: “Ron Hanks and Donald Trump are just too conservative” before finishing with a stark: “Too conservative for Colorado.”

“When you have a Democrat start meddling in Republican elections and start paying all this money into a primary to support a certain candidate, that tells me right there that they believe he is the weaker candidate – in November, he could lose,” voter DeWitt tells The Independent.

Rocky Mountain Values did not respond to a request for comment from The Independent.

Hanks, meanwhile, has been the target of attack ads funded by fellow Republicans, according to him. The advertisements call him “a bullseye for liberals” and a “misfire for Colorado,” accusing “Democratic mega donors” of “propping up his campaign.”

One week before the primary, Hanks huffed on Facebook about Speaker Mike Johnson and the CLF PAC ads “to foolishly attack my 2A and pro-Trump creds.”

“I was AT Jan 6th,” he added, also highlighting his pro-Second Amendment legislative efforts in the Colorado House.

In a zoom town hall later that night, Hanks directly addressed the divisions within the GOP and the attack ads, visibly annoyed.

“If it sounds like a raw nerve, it’s because you thought you had some allies somewhere in your own damned party,” he said. “And we don’t; we are largely here alone.”

Just days before the election, Hanks tells The Independent that he feels there is a fight afoot “for the heart and soul of the party,” not just in Colorado but nationally.

“This is now a fracture in the Republican Party between grassroots, who want limited government, and the establishment, who want a seat at the Democrats’ table,” he says. “And so this is the election to break this wide open. And Trump is doing that by being in the race.”