Deborah Flora is no stranger to competition, but the former talk radio host and Douglas County mother of two says she’s running in the 2022 Republican primary for Colorado’s U.S. Senate seat to bring people together, to reach “the common ground of common sense.”

Flora, 56, is the eighth and most recent entrant in the crowded field of Republicans who hope to deny Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet a third term in next year’s election.

She launched her campaign in mid-October with an appearance on The Steffan Tubbs Show on 710 KNUS, a few days after putting the Sunday afternoon show she’d hosted for about a year and a half on the same station on ice and stepping aside from her role as director of public policy for Salem Radio Denver.

“Now I’m taking everything I have gained through all of those conversations and taking it to the next level,” she told Tubbs. (Sometime in early October, the entire online archive of Flora’s shows vanished, including a podcast version that had been distributed on several popular podcast platforms. A spokeswoman for Flora said the radio network removed the shows because she’s a candidate.)

Born in Turkey while her father was stationed there, Flora spent her formative years in Colorado, the daughter of an airman who retired as a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force and was stationed at Lowry Air Force Base in Aurora. A President’s and National Merit scholar, Flora graduated with honors from Southern Methodist University’s theater program and later studied opera, flute and acting at Austria’s Mozarteum University Salzburg.

Competing in her mid-20s as Debbie Jane Riecks, Flora won the title of Miss Colorado – in the talent competition, she played “Shenandoah” and “Dueling Banjos” on the flute – and was the second runner-up in the 1990 Miss America pageant, taking home a $14,000 scholarship. She finished ahead of third runner-up Miss Illinois, Jeri Lynn Zimmermann, who later starred as Seven of Nine on the “Star Trek: Voyager” series under her married name, Jeri Ryan.

In addition to more than a dozen acting credits – including a recurring role on the NBC soap opera “Passions,” a 2003 Kaboom commercial and a series of infomercials for Haan steam cleaners, according to IMDB – Flora is a founding partner of production companies Lamplight Entertainment and whet?stone Media Group. Her husband and producing partner, Jonathan Flora, is an Army veteran and served in the Ohio National Guard.

After considering a run in the 7th Congressional District – the independent commission that configured the boundaries drew the seat west of Denver and into the mountains, instead of wrapping around the metro area to the south, where Flora lives – Flora said she decided to make a bid for the Senate after observing what’s been happening in the country in the last year.

“A lot of people have been asking me to run for office for quite a while,” she said in an interview with Colorado Politics. “The reality is I live where Coloradans live. I go buy the groceries, I go pump the gas. I see what’s going on with our kids in school, in public schools. And when I began to see what was happening in the last nine months, I just realized it’s time to stand up.”

Flora said she wants the spirit of her campaign to match the tenor she worked to achieve with her radio show – finding “the common ground of common sense.”

“We have a lot of people in politics that want to divide everyone, that want to get neighbors to look at neighbors as the enemy,” she said. “I really believe that the vast majority of us want exactly the same things. And it doesn’t matter whether you have unaffiliated, Republican or Democrats, for the most part – what do we all really want? We want to run our businesses. We want to pursue our dreams. We want to provide for our families, [we] want our kids to have a great education, we want safety and security on our streets. And when I’ve been seeing the disastrous policies that have been happening, I thought, you know what, it’s time.”

Flora said she was especially incensed by the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal this summer from Afghanistan, and by Bennet’s reaction to it.

Less than a year after burying her father, a career Air Force veteran, at Fort Logan National Cemetery, Flora said, “The only silver lining for that for me was he wasn’t alive to see what happened in Afghanistan, because he served in Vietnam and that troubled him until his last days, how that was handled. And then when I see – growing up in the military and my husband is an 82nd Airborne veteran – I see a policy that is absolutely disastrous and completely backwards. You always do non-combatants, then equipment, then the military. This was done in reverse. And then when I saw that Michael Bennett was on the Intelligence Committee, and he applauded Biden for what he did.”

She shook her head and interjected, “I’m just rolling,” flashing a grin and a glimpse of the fire she hopes to bring to the campaign trail.

“And when you see these policies that are causing rising inflation and putting all of these things out of reach for the real everyday Coloradans, I realized it was time to take a stand because Bennet votes with Biden 100% of the time, with Bernie Sanders 96% of the time. And that is far from the more all-inclusive, general policies that benefit everyday Coloradans. It’s really very out of touch.”

While Flora arrives in the GOP primary with one of the field’s highest profiles among the Republican Party’s base of voters, she acknowledged that it’s a steep climb to the nomination for a seat that will have been held for nearly two decades by Democrats.

“I think what people are looking for is someone with courage, someone who can communicate and someone who understands common-sense policies and can invite a lot of people into this tent,” she said.

“You don’t have to change your principles. I very much believe the principles of this country are incredibly sound because, really, they just simply say, ‘I trust you to live your life, raise your family, run your business, make decisions for yourself.’ So the principles don’t have to change. We just need candidates who can communicate and then go to D.C., not forgetting exactly what happens under these policies that are being forced down from this top-down, government control situation.”

She doesn’t veer from Republican orthodoxy, ticking off ways she wants to see a reduced role for government in the economy, businesses and the family – a particular concern for Flora, who founded the nonprofit Parents United America, which she described as “not overtly political, not overtly faith-based, but really just saying, ‘This is a universal right of parents to have a say in their children’s education.”

Flora said it’s that spirit that underlies her position on one of Bennet’s signature issues, the expansion of the child tax credit, which has been made fully refundable – making the credit available even to parents who don’t make enough to file taxes – and has been delivering monthly checks to parents since this summer. According to analyses cited by Bennet and other proponents, the program has cut the rate of childhood poverty nearly in half in a matter of months.

Flora said she’s seen polling that shows the program is “actually not a really popular thing with a lot of the parents,” including parents who tell her “they would rather, by the way, just have government get out of their lives when it comes to raising their children.”

“I think that’s what people can come together on,” she said. “I don’t think a lot of people are looking for government to give them more money or spend more money, because, ultimately, we know there’s no such thing as them spending their money – it’s our money, right?”

Added Flora: “Most people I talk to, most parents, most citizens, aren’t looking for the government to do more. They’re actually looking for the government to step back, to pull back. And I think that’s where we can all come together.”

Flora said she plans to continue traveling the state in the months ahead, doing what she did on the radio.

“You can’t really know that you can represent people unless you’re listening to them,” she said. “And that’s one of the things I love doing most – I love going and hearing from people.”

UPDATE AND CORRECTION: This story has been corrected to reflect that Flora was born in Turkey, not in Texas as Flora’s IMDB page erroneously states, and to note that she considered running in the 7th CD under an earlier version of the map. It’s also been updated with an explanation provided by a Flora spokeswoman for why the online archive of her radio shows disappeared.