Bent County Republican Pamela Kuhn-Valdez said she’s getting ready for the Santa Fe Trail Parade on Friday, where U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert and several other GOP candidates for the competitive 4th Congressional District (CD4) primary are expected to show up.
“We’re going to have a county Republican Party float or car, and we will have a booth with information on all candidates,” she added.
Mike Benson, chairman of the Sedgwick County Republican Party, said he’s not a fan of Boebert, whom he regards as a carpetbagger.
Boebert is a two-term representative from the Western Slope’s 3rd Congressional District (CD3), where she unseated incumbent Republican Scott Tipton in 2020. But she barely survived the 2022 race, winning by just over 500 votes.
In December, she announced she was leaving the 3rd District so she could run for election in the 4th.
“She is not my first, second, third, or fourth choice, but if she wins the primary, I will support and vote for her,” Benson said. “My first choice is [CD4 GOP candidate]Jerry Sonnenberg – a very solid guy who walks the talk.“
Steve Brown, chair of the Phillips County Republican Party, said Boebert has been “doing fine,” with her campaign manager coming to Holyoke, her attending a candidate forum, and a mailer sent to voters.
Composed of eastern Plains counties, plus parts of the Front Range, CD4 is reliably Republican. The Cook Political Report rates the district as the most Republican in Colorado, with Republicans enjoying a 13% voting advantage over the Democrats. No Democratic candidate has earned more than 40% of the vote in the 4th District, since 2010.
A Democrat Could Win
Despite this, a March Gravis Marketing poll, which became public this week, shows that a Democrat could win the seat this year, if Boebert becomes the GOP nominee in June.
As reported Monday by Newsweek, the Gravis poll was conducted March 27-29 for Democratic CD4 candidate Ike McCorkle, and found that McCorkle would beat Boebert 38 – 31%.
An earlier February poll, by Kaplan Strategies, found that 32% of district voters would cast ballots Boebert, 49% were undecided, and 19% would vote for her Republican primary opponents, none of whom broke into the double-figure range.
But lest one think that these Newsweek reports are all good news for McCorkle, there’s a big caveat.
The Gravis poll found that Jerry Sonnenberg, a Logan County commissioner and CD4 candidate, would beat McCorkle 24 – 18%. Sonnenberg, a former state senator, has been endorsed by three former Colorado U.S. senators – Hank Brown, Wayne Allard, and Cory Gardner – all of whom were Republican representatives for the 4th District.
Newsweek also reported that Boebert’s fundraising has declined in 2024, compared to 2023. The slower pace of fundraising took place after her December announcement that she was abandoning her 3rd District seat in favor of running in the more reliably conservative 4th District. According to Boebert’s Federal Election Commission filing for the first quarter in 2024, she raised $388,805. For the first quarter in 2023, she raised $562,988.
McCorkle’s first quarter fund-raising total was $786,260 — more than twice the amount raised that quarter by Boebert.
Boebert, a MAGA firebrand, has been endorsed by former President Donald Trump.
U.S. Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) quit his 4th Congressional District seat in Congress last month.
Buck explained previously he was disenchanted with the divisiveness in Congress and the difficulty in getting anything done.
In addition to Boebert and McCorkle, other CD4 candidates are Sonnenberg, former talk radio host Deborah Flora, and state lawmakers Richard Holtorf and Mike Lynch. McCorkle retired from the Marines as a captain in 2014, after 17 years. He ran unsuccessfully for the 4th District seat in 2020 and 2022.
Important dates in the 4th Colorado Congressional District: The primary election is June 25; general election is November 5.
