Aspen (Colo)

BASALT, Colo. — Claudia Cunningham had never voted for a Republican in her life. She swore she couldn’t or her father would roll over in his grave. But ahead of the Colorado primary on Tuesday, she did the once-unthinkable: registered as unaffiliated so that she could vote in the G.O.P. primary against her congresswoman, Lauren Boebert.So did Ward Hauenstein, the mayor pro tem of Aspen; Sara Sanderman, a teacher from Glenwood Springs; Christopher Arndt, a writer and financier in Telluride; Gayle Frazzetta, a primary care doctor in Montrose; and Karen Zink, a nurse practitioner south of Durango.Driven by fears of extremism and worries about what they see as an authoritarianism embodied in Ms. Boebert, thousands of Democrats in the sprawling third congressional district of Colorado have rushed to shore up her Republican challenger, State Senator Don Coram. Their aim is not to do what is best for Democrats but to do what they think is best for democracy.Ms. Boebert speaking at a rally hosted by former President Donald J. Trump in Casper, Wyo., in May.Natalie Behring for The New York TimesIt is a long shot: Mr. Coram has raised about $226,000 in a late-starting, largely invisible bid to oust a national figure who has raked in $5 million.But as Mr. Arndt noted, anti-Trump Republicans have put aside stark differences with liberal policies and voted for Democrats since 2016. It is time, he said, that Democrats return the favor and put preservation of democracy above all other causes.The Colorado crossover voters are part of a broader trend of Democrats intervening to try to beat back the extremes of the G.O.P., in Georgia, North Carolina, Colorado, Utah and elsewhere.“The center has got to re-emerge,” said Tom Morrison, a lifelong Democrat in rural Pitkin County who voted for Mr. Coram, not only in protest of Ms. Boebert but also of what he calls a rising concern about his party’s leftward drift.A nascent infrastructure is supporting the trend. The Country First Political Action Committee, established by Representative Adam Kinzinger, an anti-Trump Republican from Illinois, has used text messages and online advertising to rally opposition against what the congressman has called the most “toxic” and partisan Republicans. Those include Representatives Madison Cawthorn, Republican of North Carolina, and Jody Hice, Republican of Georgia, who, with Donald J. Trump’s backing, tried to defeat Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, after he resisted Mr. Trump’s push to “find” the votes to nullify President Biden’s victory there.In Utah, rather than backing a Democrat in a strongly Republican state, 57 percent of the delegates to the state’s Democratic convention, including Jenny Wilson, the Salt Lake City mayor and the state’s most powerful Democrat, endorsed Evan McMullin, a former C.I.A. officer and an anti-Trump Republican. He is running an uphill independent campaign against Senator Mike Lee, a Republican who initially worked to challenge Mr. Biden’s victory.In Colorado, a constellation of small political groups have sprung up to oppose Ms. Boebert’s re-election ahead of next week’s primary, such as Rural Colorado United and the Better Than Boebert PAC, formed by Joel Dyar, a liberal community organizer in Grand Junction, and James Light, an affluent Republican developer who helped create the mega ski resort Snowmass in the 1970s.“Jan. 6 was the breaking point for me,” Mr. Light said. “I couldn’t get anywhere with the national party, so I got behind Don Coram.”Jim Light decided to support Don Coram after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesAdvocates for the strategy point to some success stories. In the Georgia secretary of state race, at least 67,000 people who voted in Georgia’s Democratic primary two years ago cast ballots in the Republican primary, an unusually high number. Mr. Raffensperger cleared the 50 percent threshold to avoid a runoff by just over 27,000 votes.More than 5,400 early or absentee votes cast in the western North Carolina primary that included Mr. Cawthorn similarly came from Democrats who had voted in their party’s primary two years earlier. Mr. Cawthorn lost by fewer than 1,500.In Colorado, voters can cast ballots in the Republican primary if they are registered with the party or as unaffiliated. In Ms. Boebert’s district, Democratic Party officials have tallied about 3,700 more unaffiliated voters in this year’s Republican primary compared with two years ago. They are largely concentrated in the Democratic hubs of Pitkin County, home of Aspen, where one can never be too rich or too liberal, and La Plata County, where Durango is filling with young people.Mike Hudson, a Durango activist who worked for Democratic luminaries like Hillary Clinton and Marian Wright Edelman before “disaffiliating” in January to go to work for Mr. Coram, said the number of independents from both parties mobilizing against Ms. Boebert was “grossly underestimated.”Ms. Boebert’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment. She remains a prohibitive favorite on Tuesday.Almost no one would say that the influx of Democratic voters into Republican primaries this year has been driven by an organized effort.“What did we do to reach out to Democrats? The answer is nothing,” said J.D. Key, Mr. Coram’s campaign manager. “This is completely organic.”Some Democratic officials have tried to stem the effort, worried in part that Mr. Coram will be the more difficult Republican to beat in November, and in part that the newly disaffiliated might not come back. Dr. Frazzetta has emailed patients, left literature in her office, even pressed the compounding pharmacists she works with to consider voting in the Republican primary. Among the blizzard of positive responses was one harshly negative reaction, she said, from a local Democratic Party official.Judy Wender is voting in the Democratic primary to ensure the best candidate will run against Representative Lauren Boebert in the fall.Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesA new map has made the district more Republican, but Mr. Trump won the old district with 52 percent of the vote in 2020, not a staggering total. Judy Wender, an Aspen Democrat who has resisted entreaties from friends to disaffiliate, said there was good reason to vote next week in the Democratic primary: Three very different Democrats will be on the ballot, and the right one could be a threat to Ms. Boebert in the fall.Howard Wallach, a retired high school teacher from Brooklyn who runs the Pitkin County Democratic Party with his wife, Betty, was similarly disapproving. The Republican primary ballot includes several candidates from Ms. Boebert’s wing of the party, including a Senate candidate, State Senator Ron Hanks, who marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6; a secretary of state candidate, Tina Peters, who was indicted in March on 10 charges related to allegations that she tampered with election equipment after the 2020 election; and a candidate for governor, Greg Lopez, who has stood by Ms. Peters’s false election claims and said he would pardon her if elected.Mr. Wallach asked: Will these voters new to Republican politics come prepared to choose in those races?Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterm races so important? More