Cory Gardner went to considerable lengths to lose his Senate seat. A wave of “anti-trump sentiment” alone won’t explain it. Democrats in Washington saw only one net gain of a duly elected Republican seat this year – and it was Gardner’s.

In the 1,460 days that Donald Trump was president, Cory Gardner dismissed opportunities to secure his re-election as quickly as they materialized. He was an unwavering yes vote for Affordable Care Act repeal, despite majority support among Coloradans to keep or improve the system. From there, national polls showed overwhelming lack of support for the massive $1 trillion transfer of public funds to corporations and the ultra-wealthy that the 2017 tax cuts provided. Gardner was an enthusiastic yes vote nonetheless. 

In 2018, with the long shadow of Colorado’s history of gun violence and mass shootings trailing behind – and despite soaring support for stricter gun safety measures – Gardner actively blocked universal background checks instead. And while he could have stayed away from the open sewage of wildly false claims of voter fraud in the midterms, he waded in, appearing on CNN to defend baseless accusations of “irregularities” in Florida.

And in 2019, nearly two years before the general election, Gardner was the first senator to endorse Donald Trump for reelection. Surely not a surprise, given their shared party affiliation. But Gardner saw no need to divulge his reasoning for how Trump – a person so repugnant to Gardner’s alleged principles in 2016 that he claimed he would write in “Mike Pence” – had now earned his vote. 

Throughout four years of choices made and votes cast, Cory Gardner could have blunted the growing anger of his constituents. Coloradans across the state were demanding accountability in the form of open dialogue. He could have held regular Q&A forums, open to the public and announced in advance. He could have done the hard thing. He could have faced his critics and explained himself. He didn’t. 

Instead, after a one-day blitz across three Colorado cities in August 2017, followed by a lone town hall in Pueblo on Nov. 20, 2017, Cory Gardner went into hiding.

Into the breach stepped a screen-printed foamboard cutout fashioned in his likeness – a cynically derivative, wholly partisan scrap of political theater. Yet the regular folks, working moms, established groups, and volunteer activists behind the cutout had relentless focus and drive. They built coalitions with each other and pierced the “activist bubble” to achieve local and national coverage again and again. They gave Coloradans a tool for articulating and sharpening their arguments against the senator who couldn’t find the time. 

With each year, each vote, and with Gardner’s casual invalidation of his own constituents, they ended up drawing the contours of the junior senator, and they wrote the narrative of his performance.

But let’s be clear: holding regular forums wouldn’t have been enough. The fact that Gardner couldn’t handle Q&As speaks to the bigger problem. His policies are unpopular in Colorado. He didn’t temper his votes to reflect that. And he didn’t make the case for those votes. Full steam ahead to the largest loss for an incumbent senator in Colorado in four decades.

It’s not just that Trump is unpopular in Colorado – he is. Corporatocracy, voter suppression, attempts to curtail basic civil rights like reproductive choice, while ignoring public safety and worker’s rights, are also wildly unpopular statewide. Gardner knew that. And he let us sketch him accurately by providing all the raw materials. Gardner’s loss should be an object lesson to a Colorado GOP who desperately needs to read their state better if they hope to win any statewide office or competitive election again.

Katie Farnan is a working mother of two, librarian, lead handler for Cardboard Cory, and dedicated to continuing the fight for progressive values in Colorado in a post-Trump era.