Since the creation of Cardboard Cory in the spring of 2017, Indivisible leader Katie Farnan wrangled the 5-foot-tall, nearly life-size cutout of Colorado’s outgoing Republican senator, Cory Gardner, around the metro area and across the state.

A rough version of the cutout showed up to take questions at a town hall organized by Farnan and other progressive activists at Byers Middle School in Denver just a month into the Trump administration. Soon after, Farnan and fellow organizers decided to make a more life-like version. With the help of ProgressNow Colorado, she printed multiple Cardboard Corys – eventually there were nine – and distributed them throughout Colorado to serve as senatorial stand-ins, inviting constituents who couldn’t meet in person with Gardner to share their thoughts with the cutout.

Profiled on national news shows and in a documentary released online in July, Cardboard Cory’s travels were documented on social media and became a rallying point for Coloradans opposed to Gardner’s positions on numerous issues.

Farnan, a 41-year-old mother of two, lives in Boulder County and is a leader of Indivisible Front Range Resistance. She works for a philanthropic nonprofit and has a background as a librarian.

Colorado Politics: Where did the idea for Cardboard Cory come from?

Katie Farnan: It started with the town hall we did in February 2017 at Byers Middle School. We had been planning to just have an empty podium at the front. It wasn’t until the planning was well underway, maybe a week out from the town hall, that I was talking to Ian (Silverii) at ProgressNow and he showed me the cutout at his office – there was this sad half of a man, just the torso cutout of Gardner. It was kind of fuzzy and grainy and had duct tape dangling off of it – and Ian was like, ‘Here, we could use this.’ So we did that – we taped him to the podium. That’s where the idea was seeded. People thought talking to the cutout was pretty funny.

Then my friend Kristen, who I met through doing activism that year, was tossing ideas around in the spring of 2017 and she said, what if we got a cutout and just went down to the 16th Street Mall and just let people come up and talk to it? I said that’s a great idea, what if we made events on Facebook, and we could have our friends join us. From there, Manny from ProgressNow said, ‘What if we got a bunch of them and sent them across the state?’ Kristen and I personally didn’t have money, so our ideas were small – but ProgressNow basically said, ‘We can help you.’ The cutouts were $100 a pop; we got seven of them at first. Alan Franklin got the body from (a stock photo service) – ‘average man in a business suit.’

CP: What was your political experience before the creation of Cardboard Cory?

Farnan: I’ve always been politically active, but I never led a group or was responsible for a campaign or anything like that. I canvassed for Obama in 2012, and then I went radio-silent and had kids for four years and kind of ignored politics. It was that complacency – that I didn’t do anything until Trump won, that really hit me hard after the election. I found the “Indivisible Guide,” and it was very concrete: ‘You can do this, you can actually make a difference.’ That spoke to me.

CP: During Cardboard Cory’s existence, did people approach you for advice about doing the same thing elsewhere?

Farnan: Folks have asked me, and I have written down some bullet points about why it worked here. First of all, you need one or more people to say, ‘I’m going to commit to taking this on.’ Over four years, it was my thing. And people got to know me for that.

But it doesn’t work for everybody when people try it with other cutouts. Like the Ed Perlmutter cutout [toted to campaign stops by Perlmutter’s 2020 Republican challenger, Casper Stockham]. Ed is easy to find. He was always doing supermarket town halls.

The final thing is – usually you have a cutout to make fun of it – ‘Look at this guy,’ and treat it like an effigy. But Cardboard Cory was the opposite. He was the anti-Gardner, he was the fill-in, so we were able to put everything into him, we were able to articulate what it was that frustrated us about Gardner. And when we got really good at that, it was easier to bring more people in, because you’ve been practicing week in and week out, talking to Gardner through a cutout. So we were able to have a sounding board.

CP: Did it surprise you that the real Cory Gardner didn’t start holding regular town halls after all that?

Farnan: Yes. He could’ve sucked all the wind out of this. The reason we wanted town halls was we wanted the dialogue, it’s because we wanted him to explain his terrible votes in person so we could dialogue about that. But he never did that. And that would’ve been easy.

I said a million times, and I really believe this, leadership is about facing your harshest critics, and if you can’t do that, I don’t really understand how you can be a leader. It’s not something that’s going to be easy – you are going to feel bad, you will get yelled out, but if you wait for years, imagine the pent-up anger over that, especially when your policies are unpopular, and you know it – health care, immigration, the environment, just generally Trump in this state – it’s indefensible, and if you know it’s indefensible and you’re not going to defend it, good luck in your attempt to get re-elected. It’s very transparent what happened: A leads to B.

CP: What’s next for the grassroots progressive movement here in Colorado? Where do you see it going?

Farnan: There’s redistricting, which I’m worried about because by the looks of the application process, you would have to be retired or independently wealthy to participate. As such, they reported they have a lack of diversity and a lack of diversity probably across income levels. That will change the map in Colorado. So to the extent we can do anything about that, that’s something we should be keeping our eyes on.

I like to think of steps immediately, so in 2021, we need to build a bench on the Democratic side. We have a lot of good people, but people often forget the municipal races, school board races, and those are happening this coming year.

Where the movement is headed, that is a big question, post-Trump. What can we do in the fallout of the Trump era to blunt the power of anti-democratic factions? What can we do to lessen that as much as possible?

CP: What’s going to happen to the Cardboard Corys?

Farnan: I have two cutouts in my garage. The backside of one is filled up already with messages to (John) Hickenlooper. The photos are very interesting too, because of instead of someone standing there with Cardboard Cory and his face, you have an outline, of somebody new, and we’re filling it up with our hopes and dreams. This is no longer Gardner. We’re looking to the future – this is opportunity and hope.

This isn’t over just because we got Gardner out. He was horrible. But we have accountability to the immigrant community, to the disability community, to other people we organized with. They’re going to continue to need people with them, and I hope that other people like me show up, people that are able and employed and not direct targets. I hope that those people continue to show up.