Just one Democrat has represented Colorado’s ultra-Republican 4th Congressional District in the last half-century, but that Democrat — former U.S. Rep. Betsy Markey — thinks lightning could strike again in the district that sprawls across the Eastern Plains.
“This is a tough hill to climb, but if Trisha has a solid get-out-the-vote campaign, and the top of the ticket performs well, she has a good shot at this,” said Markey, who represented the 4th District from for a single term, from 2009 to 2011.
Trisha is Trisha Calvarese, a 37-year-old labor activist and speechwriter from Highlands Ranch who has helped run political campaigns in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. She won the Democratic nomination for the 4th Congressional District in Tuesday’s primary and will face off against U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, who easily outpaced five other Republicans to clinch the GOP line on the Nov. 5 ballot.
Even facing Boebert, who switched districts but didn’t leave behind years of controversy that have made her a media fixture during three-plus years in office, political observers say Calvarese faces daunting odds at the ballot box. The 4th District has fewer than 100,000 registered Democrats, while Republican affiliations have topped 200,000.
“I don’t see the scenario where Trisha Calvarese can break through in this election cycle, against a candidate with that kind of name recognition,” said Ken Bickers, a political science professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Republicans are so energized about the presidential contest this time around that that’s going to carry several Republican candidates, including Lauren Boebert.”
Party identification and name recognition reign supreme in congressional elections, he said, with “everything else being in the noise.” With such a heavily Republican-leaning district in play and Boebert practically a household name in Colorado, Bickers said, Calvarese will need to pull a rabbit from her political hat to prevail.
But Markey sees a path to victory for Calvarese. Their races share a key dynamic: Markey, too, took on a polarizing Republican back in 2008, when she defeated three-term U.S. Rep. Marilyn Musgrave by a head-turning 12 percentage points, upending assumptions.
“Trisha needs to be visible in all parts of the district and demonstrate her commitment to rural Colorado,” said Markey, who was from Fort Collins. “Unlike Boebert, she has roots in the district.”
Boebert, who’s also 37, moved to the district earlier this year after deciding to forgo a challenging reelection bid in the largely Western Slope-based 3rd Congressional District, the more narrowly favorable GOP-leaning district she’s represented since January 2021. She entered the 4th District race in December, weeks after former congressman Ken Buck, a Republican, decided he wouldn’t run for a sixth term.
Highlands Ranch High grad
But Calvarese, who won a three-way primary race, is hoping to seize on misgivings about Boebert in the coming months.
She needs money and exposure. She had a fraction of the cash on hand that Boebert had for the campaign a few weeks ago — $53,000 to $681,000 as of June 5 — but hoped her nomination would begin to attract national money.
“We have a beautiful ad that we’d like to get on TV,” she said. “I’m going to call on (Boebert) to debate — constantly.”
Calvarese spent a few early years in Sterling, where her father was the city attorney, before her family settled in Highlands Ranch. She graduated from Highlands Ranch High School. While she calls herself a “product of the district” she is running to represent, she has spent much of her adult life in Washington, D.C.
She returned to Colorado last fall to care for her ailing parents, both of whom have since died.
Calvarese first worked as a press intern for independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and then wrote speeches for the U.S. National Science Foundation. There, she said she played a major role in crafting the messaging around the CHIPS and Science Act signed into law by President Joe Biden nearly two years ago.
The $280 billion bill is designed to boost American semiconductor manufacturing. Earlier this year, the Biden administration said it would provide $90 million from the law to improve a microchip plant in Colorado Springs.
“We’re in a global competition for talent and technology,” Calvarese said. “We’re in a new Sputnik moment — make no doubt about it.”
Calvarese also was a senior writer for Conservation International, a global environmental organization. Her approach to preserving nature, she said, is to never forget the people in the middle of it all — a position that dovetails with her involvement in labor advocacy and work as a speechwriter at the AFL-CIO.
“We’re not going to leave our fossil-fuel communities behind,” she said. “It’s (about) making sure it’s not being done off the backs of the working people.”
The 4th Congressional District encompasses a large portion of Weld County, which easily contains Colorado’s most productive oil and gas field. That’s an industry that Boebert wants to “unleash” on to the world market, said her campaign manager, Drew Sexton, who responded to questions on Boebert’s behalf.
“Voters of all backgrounds want Congress to secure our southern border, unleash American energy dominance, stop the reckless spending that has driven inflation to record highs, protect our ranchers and farmers from radical environmentalists, and provide our veterans with the support and benefits they have earned,” he wrote in an email.
Sexton, who did not mention Calvarese by name, promised that Boebert would “campaign relentlessly across every corner of the district.”
Running in a new district, the two-term congresswoman won a commanding 43.5% of the vote in a GOP primary field of six candidates, as of Thursday evening, including in the district’s population center of Douglas County. Her closest competitor was Logan County Commissioner Jerry Sonnenberg, who garnered little more than 14% of the vote.
In the Democratic primary, Calvarese won 45% of votes, while Ike McCorkle — who ran against Buck in the last two elections — had 41% and John Padora Jr. received nearly 14%.
A sign in special election blowout?
Even as the 4th District’s boundaries have shifted with redistricting, its baseline has been clear in Republican presidential nominees’ vote shares. Data from Western Washington University show former President George W. Bush, Mitt Romney and former President Donald Trump each notched between 56% and 58% in the 4th over the last 20 years.
The exception was in 2008, when Barack Obama made it close, coming within a percentage point of Republican John McCain there. It was a banner year for Democrats, when America elected its first Black president in a wave that helped propel Markey to victory.
In the 4th District’s 2020 and 2022 elections, Buck beat McCorkle by roughly 24 percentage points each time.
This year, an early test of Calvarese’s mettle came Tuesday, when she decisively lost to Republican Greg Lopez — by nearly 24 points — in a head-to-head special election to fill Buck’s seat for the rest of this term. Buck resigned his seat in late March, saying he could no longer tolerate the dysfunction in Congress.
Lopez, a mayor of Parker in the 1990s, will represent the district only until January, when it’s likely that either Boebert or Calvarese is sworn in for a two-year term. The ballot also may include Hannah Goodman, whom Libertarians nominated earlier this year, and other potential third-party and independent candidates.
Andy Boian, a Denver-based Democratic political strategist, said Calvarese’s loss in the special election wasn’t a good sign for a Democratic contender in such a red district. Luring unaffiliated voters, who make up the largest bloc of the district’s electorate, is “the only way Calvarese makes this a real race.”
But he isn’t hopeful.
“I’ve learned over 35 years in politics to never say never, not ever,” Boian said, but he’s skeptical Boebert is vulnerable in the 4th. “If I were a betting man, odds favor the congresswoman by a wide margin. Some sort of significant backlash to the MAGA right is really the only way Calvarese makes it in.”
And much has changed in the 4th District since Markey broke through there 16 years ago. Fort Collins is no longer part of the district, while all of Douglas County south of Denver has been added. Also, 2024 is not 2008.
“I think the 2024 presidential election is going to look a lot different,” Bickers said, underscoring the boost Trump is likely to give the ticket as the GOP presidential nominee. “Boebert has the vocal support of a presidential candidate who is going to be very popular in that district.”
But Calvarese still sees Markey’s disruptive, if short-lived, presence in the district as indicative of what’s possible in November.
“Lauren Boebert is beatable as long as we are laser-focused,” she said. “I think I can be the next Betsy Markey.”
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