Overview:
GOP organizers are focusing on unaffiliated voters as Republicans try to expand support ahead of November.
Dean Flanders had a spreadsheet for the Republicans gathered at a Sept. 10 meeting in Denver. At the bottom, he told them, was the group he particularly wanted them to find: voters marked “U” for unaffiliated.
“I’ve passed out a number of copies of everyone in HD1 that’s an R and a U, and you’ve got those in Excel,” said Flanders, who serves as a Republican co-captain for the district. “On the bottom of the thing, you’ll notice that’s where the U’s are. So you can go to that and click on that U, and boom, up comes all the U’s in HD1.”
The exercise offered a window into one strategy Denver Republicans are using ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm election: identify unaffiliated voters and try to persuade them to support Republican candidates.
It is a sizable group. As of Sept. 1, about 2.03 million active Colorado voters — 50.8% of the electorate — were unaffiliated, compared with 987,582 registered Democrats and 887,577 Republicans. In Denver, unaffiliated voters also make up roughly half of the electorate, while registered Republicans account for less than 10%.
That arithmetic gives local Republicans an obvious place to look for new support. The discussion about how to win over those unaffiliated voters took place during the Denver Republican Party’s monthly Colorado House District 1 meeting at Lakewood Vineyard Church, where organizers talked through candidates, ballot measures and ways volunteers could reach voters before Election Day.
Some candidates discussed at the meeting included gubernatorial nominee Victor Marx and Christy Peterson, the Republican candidate for Colorado’s 1st Congressional District. Marx narrowly won the Republican primary in June, while Peterson is challenging Democratic nominee Melat Kiros in the Denver-based congressional district.
“If you have any questions, just vote all Republican,” Flanders said. “That way, you probably get some good people for a change in this place.”
The push for unaffiliated voters was paired throughout the meeting with criticism of Democratic leadership, which organizers presented as part of their case for changing how those voters cast their ballots.
“Oh my God, (Pat) Schroeder and then (Diana) DeGette, those were total wastes of space,” said Donald Hildmann, an attendee of the HD1 meeting. “(DeGette was) a very poor representative in the sense that she didn’t listen to anything except what the party told her.”
Hildmann’s criticism echoed a broader theme at the meeting: attendees repeatedly described themselves as poorly represented by Democratic elected officials and argued that unaffiliated voters might share some of those frustrations.
“We’re living in a democratically controlled House and Senate here in Colorado, which has certainly not done much for cost of living, energy production, lowering taxes or any kind of economic growth,” Flanders said. “We see a failure, especially on the state highways and some major roads here in the city and county, as well as the metro area, the general cost of living, and the depreciation of what’s happened in downtown Denver.”
Frustration with the current Democratic representatives is one of the biggest motivators Republican organizers are capitalizing on to gain more votes in the November election.
“This whole program of the Dems and the Socialists are to extract all your money,” Flanders said, “and that gives them the power to distribute it any way they want to.”
A voting guide was also passed out and discussed as a way to unify the vote within the Republican Party around candidates, propositions and ballot measures. The discussion included ballot propositions Propositions 134 and 135, two statewide measures concerning transgender people.
Proposition 134 would require school-based athletic teams from elementary school through college to be designated male, female or coeducational and generally require students to compete on teams matching their biological sex. Proposition 135 would prohibit surgeries on minors that alter biological sex characteristics as treatment in response to a minor’s perception of sex or gender, with specified exceptions.
“I mean, this is just crazy stuff,” Flanders said while explaining the propositions to attendees. “The amount of transgenders that we have running the street should be zero or one.”
The conversation eventually returned to the congressional race, where some attendees wondered whether the unaffiliated candidate Shimon Blau could affect the contest between Peterson and Kiros.
“I’m kind of figuring that he’s probably going to split the Democrat (vote) out a little bit because I think with Democrats, having someone who’s basically an antisemitic Communist running as a Democrat is kind of a little unsavory towards them,” one attendee said during the meeting. “If we can get enough Republican votes, we may be able to take advantage of that.”
The discussion underscored why organizers kept returning to unaffiliated voters. With neither major party representing a majority of Colorado’s electorate, attendees described those voters as people they still might be able to persuade rather than a fixed bloc.
“I think unaffiliates basically haven’t made up their minds,” said attendee Roy Johnson. “So I think if the Republicans concentrate on trying to convince the unaffiliated first … I think a lot of them can sway.”
Johnson said that persuasion should begin with voters doing their own homework rather than simply following a party label.
“Do a deep dive into the issue and get as much information as you can,” Johnson said. “Look at what the proposals are and what the impacts are and look past the next problem and see what the long-term thing is.”
