Grand Junction Mayor Anna Stout, a Democrat, ended her 3rd Congressional District bid Wednesday, clearing the field for former Aspen City Councilman Adam Frisch to get another shot at winning the seat in November.
Stout was Frisch’s only Democratic opponent in the race, which was scrambled in late December when the incumbent, U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, announced she was switching congressional districts.
Stout cited Boebert’s move to run in the 4th Congressional District, on the other side of Colorado, in announcing the end of her campaign.
“When I entered this race, my objective was to continue my service to the hardworking people of western and southern Colorado and give them a serious homegrown candidate to represent them, rather than the continuous embarrassment we have experienced for the past three years,” Stout said in a news release announcing her decision. “Boebert’s decision to run in a different congressional district altered the landscape of this race. I got in this to remove Boebert from office, and while this wasn’t the way I expected to do that, she is no longer the 3rd Congressional District’s problem.”
Stout, who entered the race over the summer, didn’t endorse Frisch in her exit from the race.
The 3rd District, which spans across the Western Slope into Pueblo and southeast Colorado, leans 9 percentage points in Republicans’ favor. There’s little evidence to suggest a Democrat can win in the 3rd District if Boebert isn’t the Republican nominee. The district hasn’t sent a Democrat to Congress since 2008. And when redistricting happened in 2021, the 3rd District was made more favorable to Republicans.
Boebert is the variable that best explains why the reliably GOP district moved into the competitive column. Democrats’ messaging in the district has been anti-Boebert, not anti-Republican — and there’s a big reason for that.
If you exclude Boebert’s 546-vote win over Frisch in 2022, the closest 3rd District race since Republicans took control of the district in 2010 happened that year, when U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton beat incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. John Salazar by 4 percentage points.
That was before the district’s boundaries were redrawn in 2011 ahead of the 2012 election cycle and made more favorable to Republicans.
Frisch, who has been one of the best U.S. House candidate fundraisers in the country this year, has continued to run a race focused on Boebert, even though she’s no longer in the race. His fundraising emails are almost always framed around replacing her.
The GOP candidates running to represent the district include Grand Junction attorney Jeff Hurd, who is supported by a number of big-name Republicans, including former Colorado Gov. Bill Owens and former U.S. Sen. Hank Brown.
Stephen Varela, a state Board of Education member from Pueblo who ran unsuccessfully for a state Senate seat in 2022, is also running to represent the district, as is former state Rep. Ron Hanks, who ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in 2022.
Colorado’s congressional primary elections will be held June 25.