For more than a decade, congressional town halls have been a partisan flashpoint in Colorado, though traces of that contentious history were nowhere to be found on a sunny morning this week in the crowded community room at a facility for active older adults in Brighton.

Instead of the chanting and angry questions that once routinely confronted members of the state’s DC delegation at their town halls, more than 60 community members, local officials and facility residents joined U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries for a spirited discussion mostly devoted to issuess important to seniors, including the future of Social Security and Medicare.

The harsh words instead landed outside the meeting, in a flurry of press releases from across the aisle that blasted Caraveo for sharing the spotlight with her party’s leader.

Caraveo was elected last year to represent Colorado’s new 8th Congressional District by a slim majority, and all indications are that she’ll face a difficult and expensive reelection bid next year in a seat pegged as a toss-up by election experts and both national parties.

The House majority could hinge on the results in the district, which covers parts of Adams, Weld and Larimer counties, stretching from the suburbs north of Denver though rural and exurban stretches to Greeley. Drawn by the state’s independent redistricting commission to be competitive, the district is nearly evenly split between Democrats and Republicans and boasts the highest concentration of Hispanic voters in the state.

With the assistance of Brighton City Manager Michael Martinez, Caraveo and Jeffries fielded questions for an hour at Eagle View Adult Center, covering topics ranging from the mental health crisis and gun violence to the role healthy food can play in combating the obesity epidemic.

“Back at home, I grew up in the cornerstone Baptist Church and had a Sunday school teacher who once said to me, ‘Jeffries, on the question of public speaking, always remember: be brief, be bright and be gone,” Jeffries said at the outset, drawing laughter and setting the tone for the event.

Serving his sixth term representing a district in Brooklyn, Jeffries stands to become the first Black speaker of the House if Democrats win the majority in the chamber in next year’s election.

It was a far cry from the tense town halls conducted by Colorado’s members of Congress during the early days of the Obama and Trump administrations, which regularly spawned front-page stories about lawmakers facing down hordes of unhappy constituents – if the lawmakers held town halls at all.

In an incident that drew national attention, Republican Mike Coffman, who represented the Aurora-based 6th Congressional District, ducked out the back of a library in early 2017. He cut short a scheduled town hall after protesters swarmed the event to let him know about then-President Donald Trump’s plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Coffman lost his bid for a sixth term the next year.

Republican Cory Gardner won his first term in the House in 2010 on a wave of discontent fueled by the tea party movement’s anger at town halls over then-President Barack Obama’s signature health care legislation. By the time Trump took office, however, Gardner was in the U.S. Senate and quickly put the regular town meetings he’d been holding on hold after left-leaning activists adopted the same tactics his supporters had used to pressure Democrats.

While he eventually gave in – barnstorming the Front Range to hold three traditional town halls in a single day in August 2017 – Gardner was met with steady criticism for the remainder of his term for declining to hold traditional town halls open to the public. He lost his bid for reelection to the Senate in 2020.

During this year’s August congressional recess, most of the Democratic members of Colorado’s delegation have scheduled a barrage of in-person town halls, though the state’s three Republican House members are instead showing up for appointments with various constituent groups in meetings that aren’t announced in advance or open to the public.

Caraveo, for instance, held a joint town hall in Northglenn with U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet that drew more than 300 people the night before the smaller gathering in Brighton with Jeffries. In addition this week, U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper had a town hall in Grand Junction, U.S. Rep. Jason Crow held a town hall at a senior residential facility in Arapahoe County and U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen held town halls at both ends of her district, in Arvada and Cañon City. U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse held town halls in Eagle and Grand counties this month and is planning to hold something he’s pioneered known as a service town hall – bringing together constituents to do something in the community, like trail maintenance or sprucing up a community center – next week in Fort Collins.

At their town hall in Brighton, Caraveo and Jeffries opened with pledges to protect Social Security and Medicare in the face of pressure from some House Republicans they said have been pushing to raise eligibility requirements or trim benefits.

“As a doctor caring for our community, I’ve seen firsthand how these programs protect our parents and grandparents,” said Caraveo, a Thornton pediatrician.

Her father, she noted, retired after working construction for 51 years but didn’t save much for retirement.

“He always said he had four piggy banks in the four kids that he put through college,” Caraveo said. “And so Social Security is something that he relies on every single day to have a dignified retirement, and he relies on Medicare for his health care.”

“So while there are always things that we can cut and adjust in the federal government,” she continued, “Social Security and Medicare benefits are not places to save money. They are places to make sure that hard-working families get the benefits that they have paid into for decades.”

Jeffries made a similar point.

“We believe that the great American dream is anchored in a pretty straightforward concept: that when you work hard, as all of you have done, and play by the rules, as all of you have done, you should be able to provide a comfortable living for yourself and for your families, educate your children, be there for your grandchildren, purchase a home and be able to retire with grace and with dignity. That’s the American dream,” he said.

“And an important part of that, particularly when it comes to retirement with grace and dignity, is Social Security and Medicare. And, notwithstanding the efforts by some in Washington to take away those hard-earned benefits from you, our promise – and your congresswoman is fighting to make sure – that we never let anyone take away your Social Security and your Medicare, not now, not ever. You’ve earned it, you paid into it, and now you deserve to be able to benefit from the fruits of your labor.”

After the town hall concluded and attendees lined up to have their pictures taken with Caraveo and Jeffries, Adams County Commissioner Lynn Baca, a Democrat and Caraveo ally, said she was satisfied with what she’d heard.

“I’m very pleased with the work that Congress is doing,” Baca said. “I know that there are some challenges working across the aisle, but I’m very confident in the delegation. They’ll get things done for our citizens.”

The Republican candidate already running against Caraveo, however, denounced the event before it happened.

“Caraveo’s willingness to campaign with a New York City liberal whose radical agenda would destroy the suburbs and small towns that make up CO-08 is exactly why she’ll be a one-term congresswoman next year,” Weld County Commissioner Scott James said in a statement released in advance of the town hall.

On the day Jeffries and Caraveo held the town hall, James’ campaign and the National Republican Congressional Committee, which has been berating Caraveo since she took office, amped up their criticism.

Seizing on remarks Jeffries made a day earlier at a roundtable on gun violence prevention with Neguse on the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus, the Republicans turned their attack to the Second Amendment.

Describing his determination to press for tougher gun control legislation while Republicans control the House, according to Colorado Public Radio, Jeffries said: “We got diabolical intensity on the other side. I say to folks back in Washington we have to be prepared to match and exceed that diabolical intensity with righteous intensity.”

The NRCC claimed in a release that Jeffries had called all gun owners “diabolical” and took umbrage over it.

“Yadira Caraveo continually cozies up to her radical party leaders, even if they attack a constitutional right,” NRCC spokeswoman Melanie Bomar said in a release. “Coloradans see her for what she is: an extremist.”

James’ campaign more accurately characterized Jeffries’ remarks as directed at conservative gun control opponents but nonetheless expressed outrage over the possibility the Democratic leader thought all gun owners were “diabolical.”

“While Democrats think sending a big New York City liberal like Hakeem Jeffries out to small town Colorado will save Yadira Caraveo’s political career, his comments yesterday have done the opposite,” James said, adding that the two Democratic lawmakers are “two peas in a far-left pod.”

Ernest Luning has covered politics for Colorado Politics and its predecessor publication, The Colorado Statesman, since 2009. He’s analyzed the exploits, foibles and history of state campaigns and politicians since 2018 in the weekly Trail Mix column.