Leading up to the big Club 20 weekend in Grand Junction, Republican U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton hammered home familiar themes Thursday on a long and wide-ranging conference call with reporters in which he consistently came back to his support for Colorado’s coal industry and his Democratic opponent’s coal-mine-killing policies as a state senator during former Gov. Bill Ritter’s administration.

But the broken-record bashing by the Tipton campaign of the Clean Air Clean Jobs Act and Ritter’s New Energy Economy came with a hint or two of nuance Thursday, including a full frontal assault on his opponent Gail Schwartz’s policy parallels with Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

“Given our choice, I’m going to support the Republican nominee over Hillary Clinton’s job-killing agenda,” Tipton said, coming as close as he ever has to endorsing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

“When I’m looking at the policies of Hillary Clinton coming out, with Gail Schwartz, saying she wants to kill coal jobs in our communities that need actual workers, when we’re looking at economic policies, when we’re looking at the impacts of what’s labeled as the Affordable Care Act that’s been nothing but for the people in the 3rd Congressional District in Colorado, I’m going to be with the Republican nominee, but we’ve got a role to be playing in Congress as well and that is not to be a rubber-stamp for any president in terms of policy,” Tipton said.

Then Tipton quickly circled back to the purpose of the presser: to talk about coal-mining job losses in the state’s North Fork Valley that he attributes directly to Schwartz during her eight years representing state Senate District 5, which includes Delta County.

“Gail Schwartz was elected to represent Delta County, but instead she sided with climate alarmists in Denver and in Aspen, pushing renewable energy policies that are directly responsible for the loss of over 1,000 coal-mining jobs and a 12 percent decrease in tax revenues in Delta County alone,” Tipton said, introducing a resident of Paonia in the heart of hard-hit Colorado coal country and promising a video release on the topic.

“Gail Schwartz, honestly, single-handedly helped in the decline … of the coal miners in the North Fork Valley, in my opinion,” said Rene Atchley, wife of a retired coal miner and mother of several children laid off from coal-mining jobs. “[Schwartz] claims to be a standup person, a fighter. All she has done is stand up and walk away from the people in her district after they asked her repeatedly to help us and she did not.”

Schwartz has consistently defended her clean energy policies in the state Legislature, pointing to the need to shutter coal-fired power plants on the Front Range for air-quality reasons, the fact that the vast majority of the coal being burned for electricity in Colorado was coming from Wyoming, not the North Fork, and the overall global collapse of coal brought on by market forces such as the decrease in demand from China and the abundance of cheap natural gas.

“It’s ludicrous,” Schwartz said in a phone interview with The Statesman Friday. “This is a national, international issue. China is closing a thousand coal mines, according to [global mining expert] Luke Danielson, who has just gotten back from a trip there on these issues in Mongolia. West Virginia, Wyoming, Kentucky, they don’t have renewable portfolio standards. They don’t have an environmental policy, and they’re closing coal mines.”

Schwartz said Tipton’s “do-nothing” GOP-controlled Congress has ignored those global economic forces and fought tooth and nail to save a dying, cyclical mining industry suffering from a glut of cheap natural gas and steadily decreasing renewable energy costs in Colorado and worldwide.

“You have an industry that is relying on shills like Tipton who they’re funding to point fingers when they know that market forces are what’s killing this industry, not Gail Schwartz,” she said. “It is really ludicrous to be trying to find a scapegoat and point fingers when you have these top-three [coal-mining] corporations in bankruptcy, Chapter 11, and they’ve written off billions in debt.”

Schwartz earlier in the week expanded on the do-nothing theme, accusing Congress of playing politics and dragging its feet on Zika virus funding since the beginning of the year.

“I have been following Congressional gamesmanship over an essential Zika bill with disappointment,” Schwartz said in a press release. “Any responsible legislative body would have passed a clean bill months ago. Congressman Tipton and his allies in Washington deserve blame for playing partisan games with peoples’ health and lives.”

Democrats have declined to pass a bill because of Republican riders blocking Planned Parenthood funding in Puerto Rico and lowering environmental standards for spraying. Pressed on the topic, Tipton said it’s time to get something done soon.

“I support funding Zika and cast a vote to be able to do that,” Tipton said. “I think we can come to a conclusion this week in terms of funding procedure. This is a definite and real threat to our families and young families that are trying to get started and so we will come to resolution on that and that’s something I’ll continue to support.”

When Schwartz first launched her campaign in May, she came out firing at Tipton, holding her own teleconference to accuse him of direct monetary links between his campaign and oil and gas companies seeking more favorable federal drilling regulations in the Thompson Divide area near Carbondale. Tipton also has received significant donations from the coal industry. Asked about that Thursday, Tipton turned the tables.

“If she wants to look at her own donor record, [former Democratic Speaker of the House] Nancy Pelosi, who does not fit with the 3rd Congressional District, is maxed out to [Schwartz], held fundraisers for her,” Tipton said. “That can go both ways.”

But Friday, Schwartz accused Tipton of selling out the energy sector, whether its coal, oil or natural gas.

“This guy [Tipton] is screaming on behalf of his special interests, knowing that he is lying to those communities and those constituents to make them think they actually have a future [in coal mining] as opposed to doing the hard work to shore up those communities with alternatives, new industries, new investment, broadband connectivity – all the things that will be sustainable,” Schwartz said.

And then she fired back on his failure to condemn the rhetoric coming out the Trump campaign.

“[Tipton’s] inability to denounce the statements of Donald Trump and his divisive rhetoric, the bigotry, the insults to different groups, to disabled groups, is so egregious. And then to go after a military family,” Schwartz said. “That’s what Donald Trump has done. That’s what [Tipton] has aligned himself with.”