Republican candidate Gabe Evans won more than an endorsement this week from one-time rival Eric Joss, the former Libertarian nominee in Colorado’s most competitive congressional district.

In an online press conference, Joss declared that he was throwing his support behind Evans and would withdraw his name from the ballot, hoping to avoid “spoiling” the Republican’s bid to unseat Democratic U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo in the closely divided 8th Congressional District.

Spanning parts of Adams, Larimer and Weld counties north of the Denver metro area, the district is one of a handful of tossup seats nationwide that both parties agree could decide which party wins the House majority.

The surprise announcement — lauded as a “big deal” by the president of the largest super PAC devoted to electing House Republicans — is the culmination of an agreement worked out more than a year ago by Colorado’s GOP and Libertarian state chairs, who said they were forging a partnership aimed at dislodging the Democrats’ grip on state offices.

“Whatever our nominee can do to work with the Libertarian Party to help flip CD8 is welcomed news, and the State Party is happy to have laid the groundwork with the Libertarian Party last year to even make this a possibility,” Republican Chairman Dave Williams told Colorado Politics.

In order to secure Joss’s backing, Evans signed a heavily revised version of the “Pledge for Liberty” created last year by Colorado Libertarians, agreeing to uphold promises described as “the best way to make America a freer and more prosperous country.”

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“Republicans and Libertarians are joining forces to defeat Yadira Caraveo and her extreme, far-left agenda,” Evans said in a statement, adding that he and Joss were “united in our determination to rein in the size, scope, cost and corruption of government.”

Calling Joss’ decision a “strategic maneuver” intended to consolidate the anti-incumbent vote, state Libertarian spokesman Jordan Marinovich said the party hoped that the move would prevent Joss from splitting conservative-leaning voters with Evans and “(move) the needle toward more liberty in Colorado”

Two years ago, Caraveo confounded election forecasters when she won the newly created seat by one of the slimmest margins of any congressional race in the country, beating Republican Barb Kirkmeyer by 1,632 votes, or 0.69 percentage points.

At the same time, the district’s 2022 Libertarian nominee Dan Ward — a tattooed electrician and sound technician for a local heavy metal band — drew an unusually large slice of the vote for a third-party candidate, with 9,280 votes, or 3.9 percentage points, more than five times Caraveo’s winning margin.

The Libertarian Party, founded in Colorado in the early 1970s, is the state’s largest minor political party, and its nominees tend to punch above their weight on the ballot. Accounting for just under 1% of the state’s active, registered voters, Libertarian candidates typically receive around 2% of the vote. With roughly double the party’s customary share, however, Ward’s vote total prompted protests from Republicans that the Libertarian had siphoned off enough votes to throw the race to Caraveo.

In the aftermath of the Colorado GOP’s shellacking at the polls last cycle, in a midterm election that was supposed to be tough on Democrats — dubbed an “extinction level event” by a Republican legislative leader who lost his seat — Ward’s performance appeared to explain at least one high-profile GOP loss, even though Ward disputed that conclusion.

A former Green Party member who described himself as a libertarian socialist, Ward insisted that his voters weren’t primarily disaffected Republicans, pointing out that he campaigned heavily among district residents who told him they otherwise wouldn’t have voted.

An analysis of the district’s voted ballots supports Ward’s interpretation, showing that voters who picked the Libertarian were only slightly more likely to vote for the Republican in another, benchmark race on the same ballot.

“I don’t think there’s data to back up that there’s going to be a dramatic shift in ballots,” Austin Blumenfeld, a housing advocate and former longtime Democratic operative, told Colorado Politics this week.

Blumenfeld, who examined detailed 2022 ballot reports released by election officials in Adams and Larimer counties, found that Ward’s voters were nearly as likely to have voted for the Democratic as the Republican running for University of Colorado regent, a race commonly used to gauge generic partisan preference.

“It makes sense that it’s predominantly a protest vote, of people who were frustrated with both (Caraveo and Kirkmeyer),” he said, noting that before last cycle’s election, outside groups had spent more than $10 million flooding the airwaves with attack ads aimed at the two major party nominees. “Voters are going to be annoyed by both candidates after all that.”

Still, the narrative took hold that the Libertarian had snatched victory from Kirkmeyer, encouraging Williams, the Colorado GOP chairman, to reach out last year to Hannah Goodman, his Libertarian counterpart, to see if they could prevent the third party’s candidates from “spoiling” swing congressional and legislative races this year.

A handful of Republicans signed on to the Libertarians’ pledges earlier this year, though many of them didn’t make the general election ballot, including Janak Joshi, who lost the 8th CD primary to Evans by more than 50 percentage points.

When he launched his candidacy a year ago, Evans refused to join with the Libertarians, objecting to numerous provisions in the pledge the party proposed — including “immediately” pulling funding from Ukraine and working to abolish U.S. intelligence agencies — but this week Evans said he was happy to sign the updated draft he negotiated with Joss.

“We won’t agree on every issue,” Evans said. “But we found agreement on many issues and are united on a common mission: defeating Yadira Caraveo, a far-left extremist.”

A Caraveo campaign spokeswoman countered that it is Evans who had pegged himself as an extremist.

“For months Gabe Evans has claimed to be against the provisions in the Libertarian Party’s pledge,” said Mary Alice Blackstock, Caraveo’s campaign manager, in a written statement. “Now, at a time where it’s politically convenient, he’s made a backroom deal in an attempt to resuscitate his campaign and switched his position.”

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