CO-SEN: Colorado's Cory Gardner Struggles to Survive the Trump Effect

The pandemic precludes pressing the flesh, so Sen. Cory Gardner extends his elbow for a merry bump. He’s wearing a green Colorado State University face mask, and when he tugs it down, he’s grinning. He’s serious about protecting the elderly from Covid-19 “because there would be nobody left in the Senate but very few of us,” Mr. Gardner, 46, jokes as he addresses an audience of conservatives in this mountain resort 100 miles west of Denver. But Mr. Gardner’s humor and good cheer contrast with the bleak mood of his supporters, who seem terrified about what will happen if he loses his seat this November.

“I think it’s pretty simple,” Mr. Gardner tells me. “If we hold Colorado, we keep the Senate majority.” As he courts voters by Zoom, over the phone and in person, he’s observed “a level of concern for the country in their voice that I’ve never heard before. It is beyond just, ‘Man, you’re the person I want to win,’ to ‘We will be lost without you.’ And I don’t by any means take that as me, but if we lose the Senate, if we lose the country to the radical left.” Such alarm from voters is “something I’ve never experienced,” he says. “I did not experience this six years ago.”

Mr. Gardner faces a formidable challenger in former Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat with a reputation for governing as a moderate. He has hammered Mr. Gardner over Congress’s failure to approve more Covid-19 relief funding for small businesses and for voting “to repeal, defund, or weaken the Affordable Care Act.” The former governor touts his decision to expand Medicaid and set up a “successful state exchange.” Mr. Hickenlooper supports a national public option and says “universal coverage is possible—and necessary.” And he stresses that “people of color are more likely to die from Covid-19 than white Americans.”



https://www.wsj.com/articles/colorados-cory-gardner-struggles-to-survive-the-trump-effect-11600191638