Colorado Politics

Liberal advocacy group that pestered Cory Gardner relaunches with focus on Lauren Boebert

A left-leaning advocacy group that badgered Republican Cory Gardner in the 2020 election cycle is back, this time with a focus on Lauren Boebert, the GOP incumbent seeking reelection in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District.

Rocky Mountain Values, a nonprofit that spent millions hammering Gardner on health care and other issues, relaunched on Monday under the direction of some of the state’s top Democratic strategists and campaign operatives, vowing to “spread the word” about how Boebert’s votes affect her constituents.

The organization kicked off its return by co-sponsoring a press conference in Durango featuring national groups and local residents.

“In the coming year, Rocky Mountain Values will hold Representative Lauren Boebert accountable for siding with the most extreme voices in Washington over her constituents in Colorado’s 3rd District,” the group’s executive director, Justin Lamorte, who managed U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet’s successful reelection campaign last year, told Colorado Politics in an email.

“From her votes against expanding healthcare for veterans and against support for farmers and ranchers to her threats to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits that are crucial to Colorado seniors and families, Boebert’s extremism is endangering the people she is supposed to represent.”

Lamorte said the group, which isn’t required to report its donors or expenditures, plans to mount a well-funded campaign including events throughout the district, paid advertising and research.

The group’s other staffers include communications director Amber Miller, who held same position on Gov. Jared Polis’ successful reelection campaign last year, and field organizer Kathryn Stewart, the political director for the Colorado Democrats’ 2022 coordinated statewide campaign.

Boebert won election to a second term representing the Republican-leaning district last year by just 546 votes in what turned out to be the closest congressional race in the country. The Democrat she defeated, Adam Frisch, is already running again for the seat, as are a handful of other Democrats.

The sprawling 3rd District covers most of the Western Slope and southern Colorado, including Pueblo County and the San Luis Valley. Once considered a swing district, its voters haven’t elected a Democrat since three-term U.S. Rep. John Salazar lost a bid for reelection in 2010.

On Monday, the House Democrats’ campaign arm included Boebert on a list of targeted GOP incumbents considered vulnerable by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

During a stop of left-leaning advocacy group Courage for America’s national Back Off Our Benefits bus tour at a park in Durango on Monday, Colorado-based health care advocate Laura Packard called on Boebert to support raising the federal debt ceiling without cuts to Social Security and other benefits.

“House Republicans, including Rep. Boebert, are risking a major global economic crisis and major perusal crises for millions of Americans across the country that depend on these benefits,” Packard said. “So we’re here to ask Rep. Boebert a final time to promise her constituents to back off our hard-earned benefits and stop playing politics with our livelihoods.”

A spokesman for Boebert’s campaign told Colorado Politics that Packard and the others have their facts wrong, pointing to the congresswoman’s support for a House Freedom Caucus proposal to balance the federal budget without cutting Social Security or Medicare.

According to the plan, the conservative group of lawmakers say they will “consider voting to raise the debt ceiling” this summer contingent upon a number of sweeping changes to federal spending, including canceling President Biden’s proposed $400 billion student loan forgiveness program, recouping unspent COVID relief funds and reversing “billions of wasteful climate change spending” approved in the 2021 Inflation Reduction Act.

In addition to other cuts, the Republican group is also demanding a cap on discretionary federal spending for the next decade, which its members claim will result in $3 trillion in savings by cutting “the wasteful, woke, and weaponized federal bureaucracy.”

Lamorte said the press conference was “the first of many Rocky Mountain Values will organize to lift up Coloradans’ stories in hopes Boebert will start listening to them, instead of the loudest voices on cable news.”

Laura Packard, executive director of Health Care Voter, speaks during a Colorado stop on left-leaning advocacy group Courage for America’s national Back Off Our Benefits bus tour at Buckley Park in Durango on Monday, April 3, 2023. Packard and others called on U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert to support raising the federal debt ceiling without cutting Social Security and other benefits.
(Courage for America livestream via Facebook)
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