The first I heard of this was late this afternoon from TPM Reader EM. But even after EM shared a link verifying the story, I still couldn’t quite believe it was true. But it really does seem to be true. Not only have reporters from multiple local news outlets cover it, they also have pretty clear photographic evidence. Mailers going out in support at least of GOP House candidates Gabe Evans and Jeff Hurd are being sent and paid for by the Arizona Republican party.
So here’s the deal. The Colorado GOP appears to be under the control of one weird dude, Dave Williams, who spent most of the party’s money on preventing people from firing him as party chair, trying and failing to get himself nominated for a House seat and … oh yeah, one other thing, Lauren Boebert. Other Colorado Republicans tried to oust Williams but a judge ruled against them. El Paso Country District Judge Eric Bentley ruled against state party chair pretender Eli Bremer and confirmed that Williams is in fact the chair of the Colorado Republican Party. In any case, the point is that, for the moment, the Colorado GOP is basically the personal property of this guy Williams. Once that happened, Coloradans in at least two congressional districts started getting mailers for the local Republican candidate coming from the Arizona state Republican Party.
So what’s going on here? Why is the Arizona Republican Party, which has a contested Senate and presidential race, among others, funding campaigns in Colorado?
Here’s what appears to be happening.
First of all, the Colorado races being funded by the Arizona GOP appear to be in the 8th district in which Republican Gabe Evans is challenging Rep. Yadira Caraveo, and the 3rd district, currently held by Lauren Boebert, in which Republican Jeff Hurd is facing Democrat Adam Frisch. (Remember that the handsy Rep. Boebert realized her odds had become more or less hopeless in the 3rd district, which is basically a GOP-leaning swing district, and decided to run instead in the GOP-safe 4th district where Rep. Ken Buck was retiring.) After the judge ruled that Dave Williams was still the head of the state party and not pretender Eli Bremer, the NRCC (the national GOP committee for House races) basically said F— this, recognized Bremer as de facto head of the state GOP and started working with him. The website ColoradoPols (from whose reporting I’m getting almost all of this story) speculates here, almost certainly correctly, that the Arizona GOP’s role in this is part of the NRCC’s deal with Bremer.
And why bring in the Arizona GOP? Well, remember from my other reporting about mailers this year: it’s the mail rate. State parties get a legally-mandated super low rate on sending out mailers. That’s why all those mailers I was writing about a few weeks ago were going out nominally under the aegis of the state parties even though they were clearly being planned, funded and run by some other entity in the background. You get a much better mailing rate.
Now what the NRCC and the Arizona GOP is doing here is illegal or at least violates federal law. You can’t simply use the state party as a transactional pass through to get its preferential postage rate. You can donate to the state party and they can decide to send mailers. But at least in theory there needs to be some agency on the part of the state party. From my earlier reporting on those Trump mailers being sent to partisan Democrats, however, it’s also my understanding that this law is mostly unenforced and that’s it’s not uncommon for state parties to take what are essentially order to run different campaigns under their aegis.
That said, I wonder if this doesn’t break enough new ground that it could be an enforcement issue. A state party has an obvious interest in supporting its own candidates in its own state. The Arizona GOP’s interest in funding races in Colorado, while it’s trying to win multiple races in Arizona, is an absurd enough proposition that maybe it draws some regulatory scrutiny.
However that may be, that’s the story. The Arizona GOP isn’t satisfied trying to support Donald Trump, Kari Lake and other Arizona candidates. They’ve branched out into Colorado.
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