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Carbondale resident Russ Andrews is one of six Republicans aiming to fill Congresswoman Lauren Boebert’s soon-to-be-vacant seat this year. Of his ideologically diverse opponents, Andrews says he is the one who “fill(s) Lauren’s lane.”
“Lauren, and I talk periodically, we're friends. You know, I, I have her same policy ideas and then some,” Andrews said during a Friday interview.
Andrews and the five other Republicans vying to replace Boebert, R-Silt, are part of the most crowded primary ever held in the state’s U.S. House District 3 (which includes all of the Roaring Fork Valley). Twelve Republican candidates registered to run; six made it to the ballot while the others were disqualified or withdrew.
Until this year, a six-way primary had only occurred once (a 1998 Republican primary in the the 6th District) in a Colorado federal election over the last 30 years.
Boebert, who won the CD3 seat in 2020 and 2022, announced in December that she would not seek reelection in the district in 2024. Instead, she has registered to run in the Republican primary for Colorado’s 4th Congressional District, located on the eastern plains. A six-candidate Republican primary also is taking place in CD4, where incumbent Congressman Ken Buck, R-Windsor, has announced he would not seek reelection.
The race to replace Boebert is a mad dash for one of Colorado’s few conservative-leaning districts. The winner of this year’s CD3 Republican primary will go on to face former Aspen Councilman Adam Frisch, a Democrat, in November. Frisch is running unopposed in this year’s Democratic primary after Grand Junction Mayor Anna Stout withdrew from the race in January. Boebert narrowly defeated Frisch in the November 2022 race for CD3.
Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District is the largest in the state, encompassing most of the Western Slope, the San Luis Valley, Pueblo and a portion of the eastern plains.
Andrews, a financial adviser and conservative radio host, has said in an interview that he embodies many of Boebert’s political views without her “abrasive” personality. Andrews has argued that Boebert could not have beaten Frisch in a rematch. With a less bombastic demeanor, he argued he could use Boebert’s same policy positions to earn appeal among a broader range of voters.
In an interview, Andrews said there are only two policy areas where he differs from Boebert — abortion and the 2020 presidential election. While Boebert holds that life begins at conception, Andrews believes abortion is acceptable until the fetus has a detectable heartbeat, usually around six weeks into a pregnancy (Andrews said he mistakenly believed that timeline was 12 weeks, and has since corrected his stance to six). And while Boebert believes fraud prevented former President Donald Trump from officially winning 2020 presidential election, Andrews said he hasn’t seen “definitive proof” for that argument.
Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to current President Joe Biden by 74 electoral votes. Trump also lost the popular vote by 4.5 percentage points.
“I'd say most everything else we agree on,” Andrews said. “Some things I've thought through a little bit more.”
Andrews said he supports “sealing” the U.S.-Mexico border, cutting federal aid to sanctuary cities and changing asylum laws so that applicants must receive asylum before entering the United States. Andrews also said he would “install a death penalty” for “drug dealers” selling synthetic opioids in the United States.
“I would … take those drug dealers and feed them to our new wolf population,” Andrews joked.
Trafficking in illegal substances resulting in death is not a crime currently eligible for the federal death penalty.
Andrews also is a gun owner and a strong supporter of citizens possessing firearms for self-protection.
“It’s not about hunting; it’s about safeguarding ourselves, our families, and our nation,” Andrews’s website reads.
In courting Boebert’s former voters, however, Andrews will have to get past hardline conservative Ron Hanks, R-Grand Junction, who entered the race in January after Boebert switched districts. Hanks has served as a state representative from 2021-23 and lost a 2022 Republican senatorial primary against Joe O’Dea, R-Denver, who went on to lose to current U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet.
Hanks shares Boebert’s absolutist stances on abortion and her suspicion of the 2020 presidential election. The former state legislator lived in Cañon City, which is outside of CD3, before moving to Grand Junction in January.
Colorado Politics has reported that Hanks was renting his Grand Junction housing from Tom Bjorkland, the Colorado GOP's treasurer, as of January.
In a 2021 advertisement for his Senate run, Hanks deposits a machine labeled “Dominion Voting Machine” at an outdoor shooting range and appears to destroy it by shooting it with a rifle. Dominion Voting Systems is a Denver-based company whose vote-counting technology was part of unsubstantiated claims of election fraud during the 2020 election. The advertisement ends with a frame of Hanks’s supposed bullet exploding the device, which appears to actually be a copy machine, into a cloud of dust and cartwheeling fragments.
Hanks participated in the riot outside of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, though he says he did not enter the building itself.
The Colorado Republican Party has already endorsed Hanks as its favorite to win CD3, breaking from their tradition of staying neutral during primary elections. Republican candidates Jeff Hurd, R-Grand Junction, and Stephen Varela, R-Pueblo, refused to fill out the party’s endorsement questionnaire, protesting the state GOP’s early endorsement. Andrews did fill out the questionnaire, though he also disagrees with the party’s move.
“I don't think any political party has any business playing in primaries,” Andrews said. Still, he congratulated Hanks on the endorsement.
Andrews said he is aligned with Hanks on most of his positions except abortion and the election, where his differences are similar to his divergences with Boebert. Similar to his comments about Boebert, Andrews stated that while his ideology is aligned with Hanks, his personal style is less confrontational.
“(Hanks) is less open to compromise, and our country was built on compromise,” Andrews said.
Andrews said one of his first priorities upon entering Congress would be to reach across the aisle for a bipartisan bill to remove beetle kill from national forests.
Despite their few differences, Andrews said Hanks once told him in a phone call that if Hanks ever “drowned in the Arkansas River,” Andrews is the one he would want to win the race.
Reached by email Saturday, Hanks confirmed that the conversation did take place, saying, “I then followed up that I’d start wearing a life jacket as I drove along U.S. 50 and would be keeping an eye in the mirror for a vehicle that wanted to play bumper tag.”
Both candidates seem to sit to the right of current fundraising frontrunner Hurd, a Grand Junction attorney who has earned a bevy of endorsements and a larger funding pool than all the other candidates combined. As of the March 31 reporting deadline, Hurd had raised just over $916,000 during his campaign. Roughly $44,000 of these funds came from PACs and other political campaigns.
By comparison, Andrews had raised about $367,000. Andrews personally contributed the bulk of his funds — about $261,000. Hanks, meanwhile, has raised only $9,130, having donated $5,000 to his own campaign.
Ernest Luning, a columnist and reporter at Colorado Politics, has described Hurd as belonging to “more centrist style of conservative Republican that once defined the party in Colorado.” Among Hurd’s endorsers is Scott Tipton, the Republican former congressman who lost the CD3 party nomination to Boebert in 2020 after holding the seat for five consecutive terms.
Andrews described Hurd as a “peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich without the jelly,” saying he was a nice guy and probably makes a great neighbor, but not a strong candidate on policy. Andrews said Hurd’s “refusal” to endorse Trump is one major difference between the two candidates. Hurd also has said he does not believe Trump won the 2020 election.
The Hurd campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Andrews made little mention of his other opponents during his Friday interview with the Aspen Daily News. Andrews pointed out that Varela was a registered Democrat at some point before entering the Republican primary, saying the Pueblo veteran “still thinks he’s a Democrat.” Varela, has raised $70,000.
Andrews did not mention first-time candidates Curtis McCrackin of Delta County and Lew Webb of Durango, who also are running in the primary. Webb has raised $150,000 and McCrackin has raised $63,000.
If he beats out Hurd’s money and Hanks’s party endorsement to win the primary, Andrews will take on Frisch. Like Andrews, Frisch has billed himself as a cool-headed (though Democratic centrist) answer to Boebert’s frequent public controversies and acerbic style, calling himself a “workhorse” while calling Boebert a “show pony.” Andrews praised Frisch’s description of Boebert’s behavior as “anger-tainment” in a September interview with the Aspen Times.
Both candidates have advertised their abilities to reach across the aisle and bring home tangible benefits for their district. Andrews, for example, said one of his first priorities upon entering Congress would be a bipartisan bill to remove beetle kill from national forests. He also wants to subsidize rural cellphone service.
In terms of fundraising, Frisch blows all the Republican candidates out of the water with $12.1 million collected during his campaign and $5.8 million on hand. Frisch is currently running the third-wealthiest House campaign in the country, behind Kevin McCarthy, R-California, and Hakeem Jeffries, D-New York.
Frisch lost to Boebert by only 546 votes in 2022. Boebert has said the prospect of another tight race was part of her decision to move districts. Several scandals, including Boebert’s ejection from a Denver theater in September, have also eroded the congresswoman’s standing in her district after the election.
With Boebert gone, some analysts say Republicans have a better chance of holding the district against Frisch. The Virginia-based Cook Political Report officially redesignated Colorado’s third district from a “toss-up” to “lean Republican” after her departure.
Andrews said that Frisch’s party will hold him back in a conservative district. Despite Frisch’s centrist positions — which sometimes lean slightly to the right (though Frisch is firmly pro-choice) — the Democratic Party will never let him err from the party line, according to Andrews.
“His party does not tolerate dissent. He's going to be forced to vote like Bernie Sanders,” Andrews said.
To win over fellow Republicans, however, Andrews may also have to push against the tides of his own party. Andrews said too many Republicans have “purity tests” for other Republicans, punishing their allies for slight differences in opinion.
“We are too divided,” Andrews said. “I'm going down to a place today where a guy tried to get in a fistfight with me three weeks ago because I am at six weeks on abortion, and he's zero weeks.”
Andrews believes Republicans should re-adopt former Republican President Ronald Reagan’s principle that the party should be a “big tent.”
“We need to have RINOs in our tent. And we need to have the Stephen Varela’s in our tent. We need to have the Ron Hanks’s in our tent. As left as they are and as right as they are, we need everybody in our tent,” Andrews said.
Otherwise, Andrews warned that Republicans will hinder themselves from winning important races.
“Republicans need to start winning elections,” Andrews said. “If you look objectively at what's going on, with this White House, with immigration, with inflation, with the wars all over the world, you know, when Republicans lose elections, bad things happen, in my opinion, so we need to start winning elections. And in order to do that, we need to band together.”