GLENWOOD SPRINGS — As he met with a few dozen constituents at a library here last week, U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd kept returning to a set of votes he cast during his first term in Congress: ones in opposition to President Donald Trump.
The Grand Junction Republican — staring down a more-difficult-than-expected reelection bid — highlighted his vote to extend health insurance subsidies offered as part of the Affordable Care Act. He also talked about his votes to override Trump’s veto of a water bill affecting southeastern Colorado and to reverse Trump’s tariffs on Canadian imports.
“Hopefully you’ve seen me as somebody that’s been a voice of independence,” he told an unaffiliated voter skeptical of his record. “I lost the president’s endorsement because I was willing to take that stand on tariffs. If I just wanted to stay in the president’s good graces, I never would have taken that tough vote.”
While the three other Republicans in Colorado’s congressional delegation are running for reelection this year in part or in whole on their ties to the president — including U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans, running in the state’s most competitive district — Hurd is going in the opposite direction. He’s running away from the president and wearing the attacks he’s drawn from Trump like a badge of honor as he seeks reelection in the 3rd Congressional District, which spans the Western Slope into Pueblo and southeastern Colorado.
The congressman believes his streak of disagreeing with Trump will help him withstand what he calls national headwinds — like the high cost of gasoline and housing — that voters may be associating with the White House and thus Republicans as a whole.
“I trust that the voters see me as somebody that’s independent and willing to stand up, even when it’s not popular within his own party,” he said in an interview.
The full picture is a bit more complicated.
Trump reendorsed Hurd in March after being persuaded that Republicans couldn’t afford to lose his seat. And Hurd’s “yes” vote on the Trump-championed One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the massive Republican tax and spending bill passed last year, is an easy line of attack for Democrats seeking to link the president and congressman together.
“Jeff Hurd sold Coloradans out by voting to gut their health care to pay for tax cuts for billionaires,” Lindsay Reilly, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in a written statement recently.
At the Glenwood Springs meet-and-greet event, Hurd was confronted by a woman who was with her 45-year-old son Chris, who has a developmental disability. She complained that her family’s Medicaid stipend had gone down, blaming the reduction on the One Big Beautiful Bill’s effect on state tax revenues, which in part prompted Medicaid cuts.
“I’m very disappointed in your voting for the big, beautiful bill,” said the woman, Renee McCullough.
Hurd argued that any Medicaid reductions in Colorado — so far — aren’t the result of the measure, since its work requirements for people on the healthcare safety net program haven’t taken effect.
“If we want to preserve Medicaid for those who need it, we need to make sure that we’re spending dollars not on able-bodied adults who are otherwise able to work,” Hurd told McCullough. “But we should be spending dollars on people like Chris.”
Suddenly on the map
At the beginning of this year’s election cycle, Hurd appeared to be cruising toward an easy reelection. National Democrats weren’t focusing on the race and nonpartisan prognosticators thought the congressman was on sturdy political ground.
After all, in 2024, Hurd beat Democrat Adam Frisch, a former Aspen city councilman who also ran in the district in 2022 and nearly won, by a solid 5 percentage points.
But as Trump’s approval ratings have cratered nationally in recent months, suddenly the 3rd District is back on the map.
Hurd’s Democratic opponent this year, former Aspen City Councilman Dwayne Romero, released an internal poll showing him statistically tied with Hurd in the district. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee then added the district to its list of “districts in play.”
Hurd brushed off the survey as nothing more than an attempt by Romero to drum up fundraising.
“There are folks that don’t agree with a number of the decisions that we’re making in Congress,” he said. “They don’t agree with a number of the decisions that I’m making. But I trust that, at the end of the day, they’ll see that my heart is here in the third district, and I’m going to stand with the people that I represent.”
Some leading Democrats in Colorado have credited Hurd for his work across party lines. U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, for instance, has lauded Hurd for helping secure money from the Trump administration to complete the local purchase of some highly coveted Colorado River water rights.
“I’ve got to give a lot of credit to Jeff Hurd who managed to get that done,” Bennet told a group of voters earlier this summer. “Trump wasn’t exactly returning my phone calls on that.”
But there are signs Republicans are taking the threat seriously as they battle to keep control of Congress.
For one, the National Republican Congressional Committee came to Hurd’s defense when the DCCC began targeting the district.
“Congressman Jeff Hurd is a commonsense leader who fights for western and southern Colorado, delivering real results. Rural Coloradans have no interest in electing a far-left liberal who pushes the Democrats’ radical agenda and will re-elect commonsense conservative Jeff Hurd this fall,” NRCC spokesman Zach Bannon said in a written statement.
Even Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters, a top Trump ally, embraced Hurd’s decision to distance himself from the president.
“That’s who Jeff Hurd is,” Gruters said in an interview during a recent trip to Colorado. “You can’t change who he is. He needs to represent his district. He knows how to do that better than anybody in D.C.”
Hurd on separation of powers
One of the more interesting exchanges during the meet and greet came when Hurd was asked about recent news of the apparent proof of Trump’s retaliation toward Colorado over the imprisonment of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters.
An email revealed as part of a lawsuit Colorado has filed against the Trump administration shows the White House called a meeting with federal leaders in December to discuss “immediate actions that your department or agency can take with respect to Colorado,” according to The Denver Post. It was sent just hours before Trump posted on social media about Peters.
The ensuing backlash included Trump’s refusal to approve disaster funding after floods and fires in Hurd’s district, as well as hundreds of millions in cuts to planned programs and grants.
Joyce Jenkins, a 79-year-old retired lawyer and Democrat who lives in Glenwood Springs, wanted to know how Hurd planned to push back.
“Fundamentally, using the power of the federal government to coerce a state and to direct the retaliation for a state’s failure to implement some policy objective of the federal government is wrong,” she said. “This feels like this is something on a different level. And if that’s the case, then first of all, we need to understand exactly what happened, and we need to stop and prevent it from happening again.”
Hurd struggled to explain exactly how he would respond as a congressman should the courts confirm that Trump retaliated against Colorado over Peters’ prison sentence.
“Part of it is doing our job as Congress under Article 1 of the Constitution,” he said, citing the separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government. “The erosion of Congress’ control is something that I think we’ve seen not just in the past few years, but in decades.”
In an interview with The Colorado Sun and Colorado Public Radio, Hurd said that as a junior congressman, there’s not always much he can do publicly to push back on the Trump administration. But he argued there’s a lot he’s doing behind the scenes.
“I’m working hard to push back and make sure that we are rightsizing the balance of power not only between the executive branch and the legislative branch, but also between the federal government and the state government,” he said.
Hurd added: “In the same way that I don’t think a Democratic president should play politics with a disaster declaration, I don’t think a Republican president should either.”
Jenkins said she didn’t like Hurd’s answer enough to commit to voting for him. She also didn’t commit, however, to casting her ballot for Romero either.
Colorado Public Radio reporter Bente Birkeland contributed to this report.