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      Colorado Voters Share Sense of Unease After Court Disqualifies Trump

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      Whether for or against the decision, many voters said they felt unsettled by the prospect of a presidential campaign fought with legal briefs and court arguments.Underlying the celebrations and condemnations of the Colorado Supreme Court decision that struck former President Donald J. Trump from the primary ballot on Tuesday was a sense among voters in the state that it was only a prelude of the rancor to come.Whether for or against the ruling, many voters said they felt uneasy at the prospect of months of electioneering that would ricochet between the courts and the campaign trail.“I think it disenfranchises voters,” said Jeremy Loew, a longtime defense lawyer in Colorado Springs who described himself as a progressive who had never voted for Mr. Trump. “Our whole system is built around people running for office and letting the voters decide.”“We can’t just kick people off the ballot because they have been accused of something,” he added.In its 4-to-3 decision on Tuesday, Colorado’s top court ruled that Mr. Trump had engaged in insurrection leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol and was ineligible to contest the state’s Republican primary.For some left-leaning voters in the state, that outcome was welcome.Richard McClain, a 37-year-old repair technician living in Erie, Colo., who voted for President Biden in 2020, said he thought Mr. Trump “deserved it.”“He did an insurrection,” Mr. McClain said. “He clearly goaded those people.”Republicans in the state treated the decision with disdain, describing it as an undemocratic move by a court with a liberal majority.“I’m shocked. I’m really shocked,” said Chen Koppelman, 72, a retired attorney and teacher in Denver. “To decide that we don’t have the right to vote for whom we want for the president of the United States? Excuse me.”Randy Loyd, the owner of an audio video design company, called the decision “ridiculous.”“Our country’s a mess in so many ways,” he said at the Cherry Creek mall in Denver, as Christmas carols played in the background. “The only hope we have is to get Trump back in. It’s a totally political move that the Colorado Supreme Court did that.”But the decision also laid bare the deep divisions and turmoil in the state’s Republican Party.One of the petitioners in the case, a former Republican majority leader of the Colorado House and Senate, Norma Anderson, said in a statement on Tuesday that she was “proud” to have taken part in the case that disqualified Mr. Trump.“My fellow plaintiffs and I brought this case to continue to protect the right to free and fair elections enshrined in our Constitution and to ensure Colorado Republican primary voters are only voting for eligible candidates,” she said. “Today’s win does just that.”Before the ruling, Dave Williams, who presides over a state Republican Party that often seems at war with itself, had warned ominously about not being able to resolve differences through the ballot box. “It will be done in a civil war,” he said last month. “No one wants civil war.”On Tuesday, Mr. Williams said he was confident that the ruling would be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. Other voters said they were exhausted by partisan sniping and saw little to like from either camp.As he waited on a balmy evening for a table at a restaurant in Lafayette, Colo., Tyler Chambers, 27, made it clear that even before Tuesday’s ruling, he was not impressed by the current slate of candidates.“There’s got to be a better candidate than Donald Trump or Joe Biden,” said Mr. Chambers, a wildland firefighter who lives in the nearby Denver suburb of Westminster.The State Supreme Court’s decision was the first in the nation to find that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — which disqualifies people who engage in insurrection against the Constitution after taking an oath to support it — applied to Mr. Trump. Democrats cheered the notion that courts in other states might follow suit.At the same time, there was a widespread sense that Colorado would not have the last word on the matter.Erin Trendler of Louisville, Colo., anticipated that the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court would reverse the decision.Chet Strange for The New York TimesErin Trendler, a public school occupational therapist who lives in the Denver suburb of Louisville, said she was “100 percent” in support of Tuesday’s ruling. “Colorado has taken a stand,” she said. “I hope that other states will follow suit.”But she anticipated that the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court would reverse the decision.And Tuesday’s decision seemed to do little to ease the stress and apprehension that many voters said they felt about the election, now less than a year away.“I hope the country is strong enough to live through this crisis in our democracy,” said Arthur Greene, of Lafayette, Colo.Chet Strange for The New York Times“I hope the country is strong enough to live through this crisis in our democracy,” said Arthur Greene, 74.Kathi Patrick, a 55-year-old construction operations manager from Broomfield, north of Denver, took a moment after dining out with friends to say that the Tuesday decision changed little for her.“There’s so much anger in the country now that we’re all dealing with, and this just perpetuates all of that anger,” she said.“Nobody’s going to be happy.”Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs More

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      Read the Colorado Supreme Court’s Decision Disqualifying Trump From the Ballot

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      Martinez Law, LLC

      Esteban A. Martinez

      Longmont, Colorado

      Attorneys for Amicus Curiae Professor Mark A. Graber: The Paul Wilkinson Law Firm LLC

      Nelson Boyle

      Denver, Colorado

      Attorneys for Amici Curiae Kansas Republican Party, Delaware Republican Party, Michigan Republican Party, North Dakota Republican Party, Oklahoma Republican Party, West Virginia Republican Party, Wisconsin Republican Party, Wyoming Republican Party, Delaware Republican Party, Georgia Republican Party, Nebraska Republican Party, Maine Republican Party, Idaho Republican Party, and Rhode Island Republican Party:

      McGowne Law Offices, P.A.

      Christopher J. McGowne Hays, Kansas

      Attorneys for Amicus Curiae Professor Kurt T. Lash: Illingworth Law, LLC

      David W. Illingworth II

      Woodland Park, Colorado

      Attorneys for Amicus Curiae Professor Derek T. Muller: Covenant Law PLLC

      Ian Speir

      Colorado Springs, Colorado

      Attorneys for Amici Curiae Republican National Committee, National Republican Senatorial Committee, and National Republican Congressional Committee:

      Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, LLP

      Christopher O. Murray

      Julian R. Ellis, Jr.

      Denver, Colorado

      Attorneys for Amici Curiae States of Indiana, West Virginia, Alabama, Alaska, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North

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      Colorado Supreme Court Takes Up Trump’s Eligibility to Be President

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      A district court judge ruled last month that the 14th Amendment barred insurrectionists from every office except the nation’s highest. “How is that not absurd?” one justice asked of that notion.The Colorado Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday on the question of whether former President Donald J. Trump is barred from holding office again under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which disqualifies people who engaged in insurrection against the Constitution after taking an oath to support it.Several of the seven justices appeared skeptical of arguments made by a lawyer for Mr. Trump, including the core one that a district court judge relied on in a ruling last month ordering Mr. Trump to be included on the Colorado primary ballot: that Section 3 did not apply to the presidency. The Colorado Supreme Court is hearing an appeal of that ruling as part of a lawsuit brought by Republican and independent voters in the state who, in seeking to keep Mr. Trump off the ballot, have contended the opposite.“How is that not absurd?” Justice Richard L. Gabriel asked of the notion that the lawmakers who wrote Section 3 in the wake of the Civil War had intended to disqualify insurrectionists from every office except the nation’s highest.Section 3 lists a number of positions an insurrectionist is disqualified from holding but not explicitly the presidency, so challenges to Mr. Trump’s eligibility rely on the argument that the presidency is included in the phrases “officer of the United States” and “any office, civil or military, under the United States.” It also does not specify who gets to decide whether someone is an insurrectionist: election officials and courts, as the petitioners argue, or Congress itself, as Mr. Trump’s team argues.Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Scott Gessler, suggested on Wednesday that the lawmakers had trusted the Electoral College to prevent an insurrectionist from becoming president, and that they had known the Northern states held enough electoral power after the Civil War to prevent a Confederate leader from winning a national election anyway.Justice Gabriel did not seem satisfied, and neither did colleagues who jumped in with follow-up questions. Justice Monica M. Márquez asked why lawmakers would have chosen the “indirect” route of blocking someone only through the Electoral College. And Justice Melissa Hart asked whether Mr. Gessler’s interpretation of Section 3 would have allowed Jefferson Davis, the leader of the Confederacy, to become president.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Is Trump Disqualified From Holding Office? The Question Matters, Beyond Him.

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      State courts in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and elsewhere have so far declined to rule in favor of challenges asserting that Donald Trump should be disqualified from holding the presidency again under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. (Cases in Michigan and Colorado have been appealed.)Challengers assert that Mr. Trump is barred because, as stated in Section 3, he was an officer of the United States who, after taking an oath to support the Constitution, “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the country, or gave “aid or comfort to the enemies thereof,” before and during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.Mr. Trump and his campaign have called this claim an “absurd conspiracy theory” and efforts to bar him “election interference.” Some election officials and legal scholars — many of them otherwise opposed to the former president — have also been critical of the efforts.The Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, writes that invoking Section 3 “is merely the newest way of attempting to short-circuit the ballot box.” Michael McConnell, a former judge and professor at Stanford Law School, claims that keeping Mr. Trump off the ballot on grounds that are “debatable at best is not something that will be regarded as legitimate.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      Colorado Supreme Court Agrees to Take Up Trump 14th Amendment Case

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      A state judge ruled last week that the former president had engaged in insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, but allowed him to remain on the ballot.The Colorado Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to take up an appeal of a state judge’s ruling allowing former President Donald J. Trump to remain on the state’s primary ballot, in a nationwide battle over his eligibility to run for president again.Plaintiffs, citing Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, argued that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies anyone who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution after having taken an oath to support it.Judge Sarah B. Wallace ruled that Mr. Trump had engaged in insurrection with his actions before and during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. But she allowed Mr. Trump to remain on the ballot anyway on the narrow grounds that the disqualification clause of the 14th Amendment did not apply to the president of the United States.A spokesman for Mr. Trump, Steven Cheung, said in a statement after Judge Wallace’s ruling last week that it was “another nail in the coffin of the un-American ballot challenges.”The plaintiffs filed their appeal to the Colorado Supreme Court on Monday evening, and the court agreed to hear the case on an accelerated timetable. Mr. Trump’s lawyers must file a brief in the case by next Monday, and oral arguments are scheduled to begin on Dec. 6.Jena Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state and a Democrat, has previously said she would follow whatever ruling was in place on Jan. 5, 2024, the state’s deadline for certifying candidates on the ballot for the March 5 primary.Mario Nicolais, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said that the fast pace of the court schedule indicated that “the Supreme Court has taken this with the seriousness that it requires,” adding that “we are confident that we will come away from the Colorado Supreme Court with a victory and that he will be barred from being on the ballot.” More

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      in US Politics

      Trump appeals Colorado ruling that said he engaged in January 6 insurrection

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      Donald Trump appealed a ruling in which a Colorado judge said he could not be disqualified from the presidential ballot under the 14th amendment to the US constitution, even though he engaged in insurrection by inciting the deadly January 6 attack.The former president took issue with the finding that he participated in insurrection in connection with the attack on the Capitol staged by his supporters.“The district court ruled that section three [of the 14th amendment] did not apply to the presidency, because that position is not an ‘officer of the United States’,” lawyers for Trump said in a court filing, responding to the ruling last week.“The district court nonetheless applied section three to President Trump, finding that he ‘engaged’ in an ‘insurrection’. Should these findings be vacated because the district court self-admittedly lacked jurisdiction to apply section three to President Trump?”The group that filed the suit on behalf of six state petitioners, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), also lodged an appeal.It argued: “Section three of the 14th amendment, passed after the civil war, excludes from federal or state office those who engaged in insurrection against the constitution after previously taking an oath to support it.“Because the district court found that Trump engaged in insurrection after taking the presidential oath of office, it should have concluded that he is disqualified from office and ordered the secretary of state to exclude him from the Colorado presidential primary ballot.”The 14th amendment is otherwise generally known for extending equal protection under the law to all people in the US.Trump faces 91 criminal charges – 17 arising from attempts to overturn the 2020 election – and civil threats including a defamation trial arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.Nonetheless, he dominates polling regarding the Republican presidential nomination and challenges the Democratic incumbent, Joe Biden, in general election polling.The Colorado suit is one of a number seeking to use the 14th amendment to keep Trump off the ballot. Judges have also ruled against plaintiffs in Michigan and Minnesota. Experts are split over whether the amendment should prevent Trump from seeking office again.Speaking to the Guardian this month, Eric Foner, the pre-eminent historian of the post-civil war era, discussed “the most important amendment added to the constitution since the Bill of Rights in 1791”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe question of whether the president is “an officer of the United States”, key to the Colorado ruling, “hasn’t been decided”, Foner said.“It certainly seems the normal understanding of the term ‘officer’ is someone holding office,” he said. “The president certainly holds office. When the constitution was ratified, there was no president … so it’s unclear … But I don’t see how you can … exclude the president from this language.“If you take the whole of section three, I think it’s pretty clear that they are trying to keep out of office anybody who committed the acts that section three describes.”But though Foner said January 6, when Trump sent rioters to the Capitol to stop certification of his defeat to Biden in 2020, was “certainly [an attempt] to halt a constitutional procedure”, whether it was an act of insurrection or rebellion remained open to question.Most experts expect challenges to Trump under the 14th amendment to reach the US supreme court. As there is no case law on the question, Foner said, legal challenges to Trump will inevitably “take a long time”.“It would be weird if Trump is elected next fall,” he said, “then a year into his term of office he’s evicted because he doesn’t meet the qualifications. We saw how Trump reacted to actually losing an election. But now, if he won and then was kicked out of office, that would certainly be a red flag in front of a bull.” More

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      Colorado Judge Keeps Trump on Ballot in 14th Amendment Case

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      A district court judge ruled that former President Donald J. Trump “engaged in insurrection” but said the disqualification clause of the 14th Amendment did not apply to him.A Colorado judge ruled on Friday that former President Donald J. Trump could remain on the primary ballot in the state, rejecting the argument that the 14th Amendment prevents him from holding office again — but doing so on relatively narrow grounds that lawyers for the voters seeking to disqualify him said they would appeal.With his actions before and during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Judge Sarah B. Wallace ruled, Mr. Trump engaged in insurrection against the Constitution, an offense that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — which was ratified in 1868 to keep former Confederates out of the government — deems disqualifying for people who previously took an oath to support the Constitution.But Judge Wallace, a state district court judge in Denver, concluded that Section 3 did not include the presidential oath in that category.The clause does not explicitly name the presidency, so that question hinged on whether the president was included in the category “officer of the United States.”Because of “the absence of the president from the list of positions to which the amendment applies combined with the fact that Section 3 specifies that the disqualifying oath is one to ‘support’ the Constitution whereas the presidential oath is to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ the Constitution,” Judge Wallace wrote, “it appears to the court that for whatever reason the drafters of Section 3 did not intend to include a person who had only taken the presidential oath.”“Part of the court’s decision,” she continued, “is its reluctance to embrace an interpretation which would disqualify a presidential candidate without a clear, unmistakable indication that such is the intent of Section 3.”She added in a footnote that it was “not for this court to decide” whether the omission of the presidency was intentional or an oversight.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement: “We applaud today’s ruling in Colorado, which is another nail in the coffin of the un-American ballot challenges.” He added, “These cases represent the most cynical and blatant political attempts to interfere with the upcoming presidential election by desperate Democrats who know Crooked Joe Biden is a failed president on the fast track to defeat.”Mario Nicolais, one of the lawyers representing the six Colorado voters who filed the lawsuit in September, said he was encouraged by the narrow grounds on which they had lost — not on the substance of Mr. Trump’s actions, but on the scope of the amendment’s applicability. The voters will appeal to the Colorado Supreme Court within three days, but the United States Supreme Court will most likely have the final say.“The court found that Donald Trump engaged in insurrection after a careful and thorough review of the evidence,” Mr. Nicolais said. “We are very pleased with the opinion and look forward to addressing the sole legal issue on appeal, namely whether Section 3 of the 14th Amendment applies to insurrectionist presidents. We believe that it does.”Judge Wallace is the first judge to rule on the merits of whether Section 3 applies to Mr. Trump. Similar lawsuits in Minnesota and New Hampshire have been dismissed on procedural grounds, and a judge in Michigan recently ruled that the questions were political ones that courts did not have the authority to decide. The plaintiffs in Michigan have appealed that ruling.Judge Wallace’s assessment of Mr. Trump’s behavior before and on Jan. 6 was damning, and, notably, she rejected his lawyers’ argument that the First Amendment protected him. His words and actions, she wrote, met the criteria set by the Supreme Court in Brandenburg v. Ohio for distinguishing incitement from protected speech.“Trump acted with the specific intent to incite political violence and direct it at the Capitol with the purpose of disrupting the electoral certification,” she wrote. “Trump cultivated a culture that embraced political violence through his consistent endorsement of the same.”Referring to his speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, in which he told his supporters that they needed to “fight like hell” and that they were justified in behaving by “very different rules,” Judge Wallace said, “Such incendiary rhetoric, issued by a speaker who routinely embraced political violence and had inflamed the anger of his supporters leading up to the certification, was likely to incite imminent lawlessness and disorder.”Jena Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state, said she would obey whatever ruling was in place on Jan. 5, 2024, the state’s deadline for certifying candidates to the primary ballot. Ms. Griswold, a Democrat, is responsible for that certification, and the effect of Judge Wallace’s ruling was to order her to include Mr. Trump.But, while emphasizing that she was not saying whether the judge was right or wrong about the scope of Section 3, she said she found the notion that the presidency was excluded “deeply problematic.”“The idea that the presidency itself is a get-out-of-jail-free card for insurrection and rebellion, I think, is striking,” she said in an interview Friday night. Referring to Judge Wallace’s conclusion that Mr. Trump had engaged in insurrection, she added: “I think that court determination in itself is incredibly powerful for the country.”The decision followed a weeklong trial in which lawyers for the plaintiffs called eight witnesses to build their case for Mr. Trump’s disqualification, relying in particular on the testimony of two professors.Peter Simi, an expert on political extremism, testified that far-right groups routinely relied on implicit, plausibly deniable calls for violence, and that Mr. Trump had communicated with them in that way — an argument presented to rebut the defense that he never explicitly told anyone to storm the Capitol. And Gerard Magliocca, an expert on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, testified that at the time it was ratified, “engaging in insurrection” had been understood to include verbal incitement of force to prevent the execution of the law.Mr. Trump’s lawyers called one expert, Robert Delahunty, a law professor who testified that Section 3 was vague and that it should be up to Congress to define it. Their other witnesses included a former Defense Department official who said Mr. Trump had pre-emptively authorized the use of National Guard troops to prevent violence on Jan. 6 — followed by people who were at Mr. Trump’s rally on the Ellipse that day, who testified that they had not heard his words as a call to violence and that the crowd had been peaceful before part of it turned violent. More

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      Lauren Boebert, Facing Primary, Is Haunted by ‘Beetlejuice’ Episode

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      The “Beetlejuice” incident continues to haunt the once-unrepentant congresswoman from Colorado. The state’s old guard is lining up behind a primary challenger.At a casino bingo hall in southwestern Colorado, Lauren Boebert, the Republican congresswoman, bounced her 6-month-old grandson on her knee.“The election’s still a ways away,” she said, as the guests arriving for the Montezuma County Republican Party’s annual Lincoln Day dinner trickled into the room. “And in talking with people at events like this, you know, it seems like there’s a lot of mercy and a lot of grace.”The month before, Ms. Boebert, then in the midst of finalizing a divorce, was caught on a security camera vaping and groping her date shortly before being ejected from a performance of the musical “Beetlejuice” at the Buell Theater in Denver for causing a disturbance. The footage contradicted her own initial claims about the incident, and the venue’s statement that Ms. Boebert had demanded preferential treatment added to the outrage.The episode has proved surprisingly sticky for Ms. Boebert, a politician who more than almost any other has embodied the gleefully provocative, no-apologies politics of the party’s right wing in the Biden era. Several local Republican officials have since announced their endorsement of Jeff Hurd, a more conventional Republican challenging her for the nomination this year.Mr. Hurd’s candidacy has become a vessel for Republican discontent with the perceived excesses of the party’s MAGA wing. His backers include old-guard party fixtures such as former Gov. Bill Owens, former Senator Hank Brown, and Pete Coors, the brewery scion, former Senate candidate and 2016 Trump fund-raiser, who will soon be offering his endorsement, according to Mr. Hurd’s campaign.Other Hurd supporters are more narrowly concerned about extending the party’s recent run of defeats in the state, and some are one-time fans of Ms. Boebert who complain that she has been changed by her political celebrity.“That crap she pulled in Denver pissed me off,” David Spiegel, a 53-year-old road traffic controller and Montezuma party activist, told Mr. Hurd as he mingled with guests at the dinner, near where Ms. Boebert was sitting.Jeff Hurd, a moderate Republican who is challenging Ms. Boebert for the nomination this year, has received endorsements from several local Republican officials.Polls have not yet been released in the primary race, and the question of whether Ms. Boebert, whose political celebrity far exceeds her official influence in Congress, has actually fallen in favor among the party’s voters remains theoretical for now. In interviews around the district, it was easy to find supporters who still stood by her.“She’s aggressive, she’s young, she’s got better ideas than most of them,” said Charles Dial, who runs a steel fabrication and recycling business in deep-red Moffat County, which Ms. Boebert won by more than 59 points in 2022. He shrugged off the theater incident and compared the attention it generated to “what they’re doing to Trump.”But Mr. Hurd’s endorsements suggest a concern among some party stalwarts that if Ms. Boebert remains a spirit animal for the right, she may be a wounded one.In 2022, despite the solidly Republican lean of her district, she won re-election by just 546 votes. The near-loss established her as the most vulnerable of the party’s most base-beloved politicians, and has made her defeat this year a sought-after trophy for Democrats.Adam Frisch, an Aspen businessman and former city councilman who ran as a Democrat against her in 2022, is hoping to challenge her again next year, though he first faces a primary contest against Anna Stout, the mayor of Grand Junction. Mr. Frisch has pulled in nearly $7.8 million in donations, more than any 2024 House candidate besides Kevin McCarthy, the recently deposed Republican speaker, and Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader.Adam Frisch, a Democrat who is challenging Ms. Boebert, has pulled in nearly $7.8 million in donations: more than any 2024 House candidate besides Kevin McCarthy, the recently deposed Republican speaker, and Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader.In August, before the theater incident, a poll commissioned by Mr. Frisch’s campaign found him leading Ms. Boebert by two points.In a rematch with Mr. Frisch, “I’ll definitely vote for Lauren,” said Cody Davis, a Mesa County commissioner who switched his endorsement from Ms. Boebert to Mr. Hurd. “But at the same time, I don’t think she can win.”Ms. Boebert burst onto the political scene in 2020 after winning a primary upset in Colorado’s Third District, which spans the entirety of the state’s western slope and nearly half of the state’s area.Then a 33-year-old owner of a gun-themed, pandemic-lockdown-defying bar and restaurant in the small town of Rifle, she was an immediate sensation in the right wing of the party, which had transparently longed for its own answer to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the social media-savvy young left-wing Democratic congresswoman from New York.“She was a firebrand,” Kevin McCarney, at the time the chairman of the Mesa County Republican Party, recalled admiringly. Last year, Mr. McCarney defended Ms. Boebert in the media after she was criticized for heckling President Biden as he spoke about his son’s death in his State of the Union speech.Ms. Boebert burst onto the political scene in 2020 after winning a primary upset in Colorado’s Third District, which spans nearly half of the state. But her celebrity is far greater than her official power in Congress.For some Colorado Republicans, the primary contest for Ms. Boebert’s seat is a proxy battle in the ongoing conflict between an old guard of politicians and donors and the right-wing grass-roots activists that have come to dominate its state and county organizations.“I was still standing with her until her little escapade,” he said, referring to Ms. Boebert’s behavior during “Beetlejuice.”After that, Mr. McCarney endorsed Mr. Hurd.A 44-year-old attorney from Grand Junction, Mr. Hurd is, by his account, a lifelong conservative but a newcomer to politics. The son of a local medical clinic director, he attended the University of Notre Dame and was planning on becoming a Catholic priest when he met his wife, Barbora, at an American Enterprise Institute seminar in Bratislava. He went to law school instead.Soft-spoken and cerebral — he cites the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations” as his favorite book — Mr. Hurd holds similar policy views to Ms. Boebert on gun rights and conservative but less absolute views on abortion.He is presenting himself as a reprieve from the turmoil, tabloid headlines and Trump-centricity that Ms. Boebert has represented to her detractors.Mr. Hurd appears only peripherally in his first campaign ad, in which Barbora describes her journey to American citizenship after a childhood in Communist Czechoslovakia and warns that “we can’t take this freedom for granted” — a Reagan-revivalist pitch that also nods toward his concern about the risk of authoritarianism within his own party.Mr. Hurd is presenting himself as a reprieve from the turmoil, tabloids and Trump-centricity that Ms. Boebert has represented in the eyes of her detractors.Asked if he had voted for Mr. Trump in past elections, Mr. Hurd declined to answer, but then described a vision of the Republican Party where “we believe in, you know, the rule of law, the peaceful transfer of power in elections.”“When we as Republicans lose an election,” he went on, “we need to figure out how we go about winning the next one.”Ms. Boebert was early and vocal in promoting Mr. Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.For some Colorado Republicans, the primary contest for her seat has become a proxy battle in the ongoing conflict within the party between an old guard of politicians and donors and the right-wing grass-roots activists that have come to dominate its state and county organizations — a fight in which 2020 election denial is a major dividing line.Others are simply concerned that Ms. Boebert could easily lose to Mr. Frisch, a self-described conservative Democrat. “We all know what happened last cycle,” said Bobbie Daniel, a Mesa County commissioner who supported Ms. Boebert last year and is now backing Mr. Hurd. “There wasn’t a lot of room for error.”Mr. Frisch’s near-victory came as a surprise in a race that few in either party expected to be competitive. “We got blown off by everybody,” Mr. Frisch recalled. His campaign effectively ran out of money two weeks before the election, at which point his operation was “just me doing another couple of thousand miles in the pickup truck,” he said.He will not have that problem this year. Mr. Frisch and outside Democratic groups have already reserved $1.2 million in advertising for the race — more than any other 2024 House race so far and more than 100 times what Republicans have spent in the district, according to Ad Impact, a media tracking firm.Drew Sexton, Ms. Boebert’s campaign manager, noted that her campaign last year spent little time trying to shape voters’ impressions of Mr. Frisch, and argued that 2024 would be a different contest.“A lot of folks sat out the midterm election, whether it was apathy or a belief that there was a red wave and they didn’t need to participate, or just the fact that President Trump wasn’t on the top of the ticket,” he said. “Those folks are going to come back in droves this cycle.”On the stump, Ms. Boebert has worked hard to show supporters that she is not taking their votes for granted. In her speech at the Montezuma County dinner, she had only one applause line about investigating the Biden family and had many particulars about water policy. There was also contrition.“You deserve a heartfelt, humble apology from me,” she told the crowd.Many of her backers have accepted the apology, if not unconditionally. “Lauren’s made it harder for herself,” said Kathy Elmont, the secretary of the Ouray County Republican Party, who has supported Ms. Boebert since her first campaign. “But I look at it as a Christian.” She recalled the passage in the Gospel of John in which Jesus admonishes a crowd against stoning an adulterous woman: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”But Mrs. Elmont pointed out that wasn’t the last of the story. “He ended with, ‘And sin no more,’” she said. More