Democrat Adam Frisch raises $2.6 million in 2nd quarter for 2024 rematch against Lauren Boebert

Posted on July 8, 2023 by Charles Jay

Democratic challenger Adam Frisch has raised more than $2.6 million in the second quarter for his rematch against MAGA Republican extremist Rep. Lauren Boebert in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District. Frisch almost pulled off one of the biggest upsets in the 2022 midterms when he lost to Boebert by a mere 546 votes in what surprisingly turned out to be the closest House race in the country.

Frisch’s campaign, in a statement released Thursday, described the second-quarter fund-raising haul of more than $2.6 million as “shattering the record for the largest quarterly fundraising for a U.S. House challenger in the year before an election, excluding special elections and self-funded campaigns.”

The campaign said the average donation was just over $32 coming from over 81,000 individual donations from all 27 counties in the district and all 50 states. He is not accepting donations from corporate PACs.

In the statement, Frisch, a businessman and former Aspen city council member, thanked everyone who had donated to his campaign “to give the people of Southern and Western Colorado a representative who will take the job seriously and work across the aisle to find solutions to the problems facing the district.”

“Boebert continues to vote against the interests of her constituents while devoting her time to ‘angertainment’ antics that do nothing to help CO-3," Frisch said. "We can do better than Boebert, and thanks to our generous supporters, we will defeat her in 2024.”

Honored and humbled. Thank you to everyone of you who has donated, RT'ed, messaged, and joined this growing coalition. We are just getting started! pic.twitter.com/HxdsZVQ6c6
— Adam Frisch for CD-3 (@AdamForColorado) July 6, 2023

So far this year, Frisch has raised $4.4 million which is nearly two-thirds of the $6.7 million he raised for the 2022 campaign, much of which came in during the final weeks of the campaign after polls showed the race to be competitive.

In the first quarter of 2023, Frisch’s campaign brought in nearly $1.75 million compared to just over $763,000 for Boebert. Boebert has not yet reported her second-quarter fund-raising totals. She raised $7.85 million for the 2022 campaign.

Frisch filed his paperwork for a 2024 rematch with Boebert on Feb. 14.

“People want the circus to stop. They want someone to focus on the district, not on themselves,” Frisch said. He added that the issues in CD3, such as water, mental health, agriculture, and the importance of domestic energy, are not “red and blue."https://t.co/5ghBlqTIwu
— Adam Frisch for CD-3 (@AdamForColorado) February 16, 2023

Boebert is considered the most vulnerable of the big-name MAGA Republican extremists in the House, most of whom represent deep-red congressional districts. Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District is rated as +9 GOP.

By contrast, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene won reelection by a 66% to 34% margin over Democrat Marcus Flowers in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District even though part of Democratic-leaning Cobb County was added to her district as a result of gerrymandering to give Republicans a bigger advantage in neighboring districts. Flowers raised more than $15.6 million in a totally noncompetitive race.

In 2022, both national parties mostly ignored Colorado's Republican-leaning 3rd Congressional District, which was considered solidly Republican by nearly all election forecasters.

In April, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee listed Boebert as among the Republican incumbents it considers most vulnerable. House Republicans have also put Boebert on their list of most vulnerable incumbents.

At the time, DCCC spokesperson Tommy Garcia told the website Colorado Politics in an email:

“Lauren Boebert is more obsessed with catching headlines and being the token MAGA extremist than actually working for everyday Coloradans. Between her dangerous conspiracies and outright racist bigotry, CO-03 voters can see that Lauren Boebert is an unserious member of Congress, unwilling to go to bat for them on issues facing Colorado. Her time in Congress is ticking down.”

A poll released in April by a Democratic firm showed that Boebert and Frisch were in a dead heat in the 3rd Congressional District, Colorado Politics reported.

The Global Strategy Group's Mountaineer poll, conducted March 29-April 2 in partnership with liberal advocacy group ProgressNow Colorado, found Boebert and Frisch tied at 45% each among likely voters, with the remaining 10% split between voters who are undecided and those who say they plan to vote for someone else. Cook Political has shifted the district to Leans Republican from Safe Republican.

Despite her razor-thin victory margin, Boebert has done little to tone down her extremism in the new Congress. Boebert was among about 20 extreme right-wing House Republicans who opposed Kevin McCarthy’s speakership bid until the very end. She also pushed for the House to vote on a resolution to impeach President Joe Biden—a move that McCarthy dismissed as “premature.”

Frisch still has his work cut out for him. This time he doesn’t have the advantage of surprise, and turnout will be greater in a presidential election year. As a national figure, Boebert can raise lots of funds from MAGA Republicans across the country.

The last Democrat to represent Colorado’s largely rural 3rd Congressional District was three-term Rep. John Salazar, who lost his bid for reelection in 2010.

Freedom Caucus members are turning on each other

Republican disarray is somehow, miraculously, getting worse

C-SPAN’s cameras have been enjoying free rein and the American people are better off for it

Posted on January 7, 2023 (Updated January 8, 2023) by Walter Einenkel

This past week Americans experienced something that has not happened for 100 years: The House of Representatives took more than a couple of days—and no fewer than 14 votes—to agree upon a speaker. It has been something of a fiasco for the Republican Party because there is no ideological division here. It is simply a power play by the most outspoken oligarchs in the party to force its establishment dinosaurs to concede an extraordinary amount of control to a very small group of fascists.

Something else historic has also happened this week: Americans have had a chance to watch and see so much more of the in-chamber processes that go on when voting gets messy in the modern American legislative branch. The old Saturday Night Live joke in the 1980s was that whenever you had to watch something political on C-SPAN the coverage came through the single camera the network owned. Not this week. This week, C-SPAN has been freed up to give new angles throughout the proceedings of the House voting process.

This has made the entire process so much more interesting to watch and follow than it might normally be.

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Of course, the only reason this has been happening is that there is no official majority party making rules for Congress this session. Usually, the party in control creates specific views of what C-SPAN cameras can cover and broadcast and what they cannot. C-SPAN is operating under the rules established by Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the opening day of the 118th Congress in 2022. Of course, back then, Speaker Pelosi was able to get the confidence vote of her political party without days of theatrics. It has been a game changer in loosening up some of the stodginess of the political process.

Showing the entire chamber and the many interactions that go on or do not go on is an evolution of what the media gets to see. As CNN reports, when cameras were first allowed onto legislative branch floors, in the 1980s and 1990s, folks like Republican Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia used the limited visibility they offered to pretend to be big men when, in fact, they were simply pretenders.

When cameras were first allowed, they became a potent political weapon. In the 1980s and early 1990s, congressmen such as Republican Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia – later the House speaker – would give speeches criticizing Democrats meant only for the TV cameras. There would be few people in the chamber, and since lawmakers could speak on any subject, it seemed as if there were no answers from the other side.

There have been all kinds of moments showing the various group-ups different sets of representatives had during the many failed votes. Many of those meet-ups included political theater major Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida.

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There was this moment between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Paul Gosar where AOC showed her patience with a man very few people can stand to be around for more than a minute or two. Reportedly the two discussed the possibilities of a deal where Democratic representatives might throw enough votes McCarthy’s way to give him the Speaker position.

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Now we get to see things like Florida man Matt Gaetz having half of his political party walk out on him while he was speaking.

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Then there was the tragically comedic moment where the incompetent and lying Republican from New York, George Santos, wasn’t even able to do the single job he had.

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All good things must come to an end and at some point, I’m sure the Republican Party will make sure that the cameras in the House stick tightly to a very narrow view. It isn’t that the conservatives in the party do not want Americans to see how they actually act on the floor of the House; it is that they don’t want the American people to become at all interested in what they actually do on the floor of the House.

House Republicans overwhelmingly stood behind Trump after he incited white supremacist insurrection

Posted on January 14, 2021 by Ashton Lattimore

The House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald Trump for a historic second time on Jan. 13, and in the process confirmed that even after he incited a white supremacist insurrection at the Capitol building, an overwhelming majority of Republicans see still no problem with Trump’s conduct. While it is technically correct that the 10 Republican votes in favor of impeachment made it “the most bipartisan one in history,” as described by the The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, and others, that’s an extremely low bar to clear. In fact, the vote numbers don’t suggest bipartisanship in any meaningful sense, but rather paint a stark portrait of a political party that has almost unanimously aligned itself with white supremacy and the white backlash to BIPOC political ascendancy. As if to drive home the point, GOP representatives even booed Rep. Cori Bush for denouncing white supremacy during the hearings. Rather than rushing to lionize the handful of Republicans who momentarily broke with the party—and did so only after their own sense of safety was threatened—news coverage needs to reflect these realities.

There are 211 Republicans in the House of Representatives, only 10 of them voted in favor of impeachment. That means over 95% watched as insurrectionists broke into the Capitol with Confederate battle flags held high and white supremacist symbols adorning their bodies as they apparently searched the building for government officials to execute, and decided, “This is fine.” Of course, the overwhelmingly white Republican caucus may have correctly surmised that they weren’t the ones in mortal danger on Jan. 6. Rather, Democratic members of Congress—especially women and Black and brown members—represented the primary targets of the mob’s ire, as newly emerging details have revealed.

The same day the impeachment vote was taken, the Boston Globe reported that as Rep. Ayanna Pressley and her staff barricaded themselves in her office to keep safe from the intruders, they discovered all of the panic buttons in the office had been torn out. On Instagram Live the evening before the vote, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that during the attack she “had a very close encounter where I thought I was going to die.” Both Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez are part of The Squad, an outspoken group of progressive Black and Latina Democratic representatives elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 and 2020, which also includes Bush and Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Jamaal Bowman. As highly visible avatars of women and BIPOC’s growing political and demographic power, members of The Squad have long been on the receiving end of racist rhetoric and right-wing death threats. The events of Jan. 6 suggest at least some people had designs on carrying those threats out, possibly even with help from members of Congress who graciously offered “reconnaissance tours” to the insurrectionists.

The attempted coup also posed a significant risk to a great many Black and brown people who aren’t lawmakers. The residents of Washington, D.C. itself—a largely Black city—along with Congressional support staff and Capitol building custodians had to contend with the trauma of being descended upon by a white supremacist mob, and afterward, were left to clean up the mess that same mob left behind. Overly credulous news coverage praising “principled” Republicans not only threatens to miss the racial realities of where most of the party stands, but also the narrowly circumscribed and race-specific extent of its support for the working class.

With the looming threat of more insurrectionist violence in the coming days, it is of the highest moral and political significance that so many House Republicans condoned and aided the racist incitement that put the republic, fellow Americans, and the lives of their own Congressional colleagues in serious peril. And because the animating impulses behind the Capitol insurrection won’t wane with the dawn of the post-Trump political era, it’s imperative that we in the media don’t close our eyes to what the impeachment vote actually has to tell us about race, politics, and power in the United States.

Ashton Lattimore is the editor-in-chief of Prism. Follow her on Twitter @ashtonlattimore.

Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places and issues currently underreported by our national media. Through our original reporting, analysis, and commentary, we challenge dominant, toxic narratives perpetuated by the mainstream press and work to build a full and accurate record of what’s happening in our democracy. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Cartoon: A blast from the not-so-distant past: Vindman’s Ukraine

Posted on July 10, 2020 by Mark Fiore

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Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman announced he was retiring from the military this week so I thought it would be a good time to reprise this “classic” animation. It now seems like forever ago, but remember Vindman? He was the decorated Army officer who helped blow the lid off President Trump’s Ukraine quid pro quo that led the House to impeach our corrupt president.

Vindman has suffered through a White House “campaign of bullying, intimidation and retaliation” and sees no future for himself in the military. Here is your blast from the not-so-distant past . . .

With Democrats increasing the impeachment pressure, of course President Trump and his supporters would go after a decorated combat veteran who was a refugee. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman was more concerned with his Commander-in-Chief pressuring another nation to go after a political rival than falling into the required Trumpian lock-step.

Surely the Ukraine expert in the White House must be a spy because he speaks Ukranian and fled the country when he was three — you know, to begin his life as a double agent laying in wait for the Very Stable Genius. We shouldn’t be surprised that Trump and crew go after someone who has literally shed blood for their country. Just ask the McCain family or Khizr Kahn.

As the Democrats vote for impeachment and the process heats up, Trump and his supporters are going to get more and more extreme, more nuts. I just hope impeachment happens before the nuts go too far. Enjoy the cartoon, which you would have already seen — along with behind-the-scenes goodies — if you were one of my Patreon supporters!