Can Adam Frisch Really Turn Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District Blue?

On a brisk day in early January, Adam Frisch, the Democratic congressional candidate for Colorado’s 3rd District, is in Denver for an event at the National Western Stock Show and to see a Nuggets game—and to accept a moral, if anticlimactic, victory. He’s wearing a suit jacket with subtle Western stitching, a pressed blue button-down, and dark slacks accented by a red-and-white embroidered belt. There’s an American flag pinned to his lapel.

Today, Frisch isn’t wearing the cowboy boots so many Western Slope politicians favor and instead wears sporty blue dress shoes. After all, even though there are some ranchers in his family’s history, he’s not a cowboy. Frisch, in his own words, is a fairly successful, straight, middle-aged white guy from Aspen trying to become the first Democrat since 2010 to represent western Colorado in the U. S. Congress. He rides no horse, but he does drive a red Ford F-150. And despite the fact that he does not drink coffee, we’re sitting in a Cherry Creek cafe discussing his candidacy and the state of his race, in which, at the moment, he doesn’t have an obvious opponent from the Republican Party.

His energy, as it has been throughout his campaign, is frenetic. He speaks fast and waves his hands, picking things up from the table and gesticulating with them. At one point, he grabs my notebook and points to an imaginary spot on a blank page indicating the location of Montana’s Fort Peck Indian Reservation, where he lived for a few years after he was born. A few minutes later, we start talking about what the hell just happened a week ago.

“I’m a pretty humble person,” Frisch says. “But if it wasn’t for us, she’d still be there.”

“She” is U.S. Representative Lauren Boebert, the MAGA flamethrower who, in 2020, seemingly came out of nowhere to win Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District. Since then, her time in office has been marked more by theater than policy. She runs in the same circles as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, congressional firebrands whose stunts have made them household names. The difference between Boebert and those other representatives, though, is that she’s politically vulnerable. In 2022, Frisch nearly unseated her.

Frisch remembers it like this: In fall 2021, he heard the congresswoman say something boorish. He doesn’t remember the line precisely, but it was on-brand. “I thought, Oh, my goodness. Is there any way she can be defeated?”

He spent the next 12 months trying to answer that question. He drove 25,000 miles crisscrossing the district with his then 16-year-old son, Felix, winning the Democratic primary by 289 votes along the way. He and his family converted their old camper into a Beat Boebert Buggy and towed it to more than 100 campaign stops. They arranged Beat Boebert barbecues and Beat Boebert brewery events.

The now 57-year-old slowly caught the attention of mainstream Democrats, and by election night, politicos around the country were Googling his name. When polls closed on November 8, 2022, Frisch was winning. The race wouldn’t be decided for another 10 days, though, and Frisch ultimately lost by 546 votes in a race in which 327,132 were cast. When he called Boebert to concede, he says, she asked if he was going to “call off” the recount, which is mandated by state statute. “Then she made some snide remark, like, ‘You did a great job running as a Republican,’ ” he says.

By early 2023, as Boebert’s second term in the U.S. House of Representatives began, Frisch did what many political observers thought he’d do. He got back on the road and, this time with the backing of national Democrats, raised money at a record clip. By September 2023, around the time Boebert was ejected from a Denver theater for puffing a vape pen and groping a male companion, Frisch was polling two points ahead of the incumbent. Money poured in.

The answer to Frisch’s question was clear: Yes, Lauren Boebert could be defeated. And it appeared as if, yes, Frisch could do it. But another question quickly presented itself: Was it possible that he could beat her too soon?

The answer to that question was also yes. On December 27, 2023, Boebert announced that she would abandon her re-election bid in the 3rd Congressional District and move hundreds of miles east to run in the more conservative 4th Congressional District, an opening created when Republican Representative Ken Buck announced his intent to resign his seat early. Boebert set her eyes on a part of Colorado where she clearly believed her career could survive.

And just like that, the nemesis Frisch was campaigning against was gone. The news delivered some semblance of a political win—Frisch could take credit for chasing Boebert from the 3rd Congressional District—but it also created a very real problem for his campaign.

Frisch had spent two years arguing against extremism and casting himself as a “pro-normal” candidate, a “conservative” Democrat who cares deeply for rural Colorado and very little for the mudslinging that defines national politics. He was the anti-Boebert, the middle-of-the-road wonk whose message appeared to be resonating better than hers.

The news of Boebert’s surprising, and calculated, move is still fresh on that January day in Denver, but Frisch masks his concern with enthusiasm. He points out that he’s already done the work to build a coalition of Democratic, Republican, and unaffiliated voters in his home district. He argues that Western Slope communities know him and trust him with their concerns about issues like water, health care, and energy. Plus, he says, he’ll have a massive fundraising advantage over whatever Republican emerges in Boebert’s place.

Adam Frisch speaks during an appearance at the University of Colorado Pueblo on Sept. 28, 2022. Photo by David Zalubowski/AP Photo

Two months after we met in Denver, Frisch is in Pueblo, standing in the living room of former city manager Dave Galli and introducing himself to a crowd of about 30 voters. It’s Super Tuesday, and nobody is talking about what, at the time, looked to be a rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald J. Trump. Rather, the crowd wants to know what Frisch is all about—where he’s from, who he is, what makes him tick.

He talks about his upbringing: how his great-grandparents emigrated from Europe, how his dad worked for the Indian Health Service (which is why Frisch spent the first few years of his life on a reservation in Montana), and how his Jewish family returned to Minneapolis when he was five. He talks about being a ski racer as a kid, and how he moved to the West to ski while he was a student at the University of Colorado Boulder. He talks about injuring himself (he slipped on campus and broke his kneecap) and having to quit racing.

He talks about how he lived in New York City and waited tables after college before landing a job as a global currency trader. He talks about how, during the pandemic, he became a substitute teacher to help fill the educator shortage. He mentions that his political awareness began in high school and how his dad’s job as an OB-GYN who provided abortions led to the family being targeted by bomb threats. There are also some things he doesn’t mention: He neglects to note that his mom was a lawyer, that she helped advocate for an open education system in Minneapolis, and that his parents bussed him into the inner city so he would have a more diverse elementary school experience. He doesn’t talk about the 30 Bob Dylan shows he’s been to or say that he rises at 5:30 a.m. every day to exercise. He mostly sticks to his stump speech, and as he ramps it up, the doorbell rings. “Maybe that’s my wife looking for me,” he quips.

People laugh. Frisch grins. But as his family knows well, the joke reveals a difficult reality about campaigning in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District. After his events in Pueblo, he’ll return to Aspen for nine days—the longest stretch he’ll have been home in the previous two years. Unlike geographically small districts on the Front Range, Colorado’s 3rd is massive, roughly the size of Pennsylvania. “It’s one of the hardest districts in the country to campaign in,” says Morgan Carroll, who was chair of the Colorado Democratic Party during the 2022 election cycle. “There are dozens and dozens of small communities. They all expect to have a personal relationship.”

To help build those relationships, Frisch leans heavily on his family. Katy Frisch, Adam’s wife, has quietly laid the groundwork for the campaign, beginning in 2022 when state and national Democrats barely knew her husband’s name. “I was the one who planned the 105-stop route down to the minute,” Katy says. “He was late once, and it was his fault.”

Adam’s wife Katy. Photo by Daniel J. Brenner

When they met in Colorado in the early 2000s, Katy and Adam were recovering from a decade of investment banking and currency trading in New York City. Introduced by a mutual friend, they bonded over a shared love of skiing. (Asked who is the better skier, Katy declines to comment. Adam says, “Oh, come on now, why don’t you ask me about abortion?”) It wasn’t long before they married in the mountains near Vail. “We hung out on the Western Slope for a few years, and I said, ‘If we want to make a go of it from a business standpoint, I think we should move to the Roaring Fork Valley,’ ” Adam recalls.

They’ve lived for 20 years in Aspen, where they’ve raised two kids and have had a continuous impact on community life. Adam worked for the Aspen-Pitkin County Housing Authority before winning a City Council seat, which he held from 2011 through 2019. He ran for mayor in 2019, unsuccessfully. For the past 25 years, Katy has remotely led her family’s business, a telecommunications manufacturing company based in Syracuse, New York. She also served on the Aspen school board from 2019 through 2023.

Frisch knows what some people think—that he’s just a rich guy from Aspen—but the communities Frisch wants to serve in Congress are hardly homogeneous. If he wins the seat in Congress, he’ll represent one of the wealthiest counties in the state (Pitkin, where he lives) as well as some of the poorest (including those in the San Luis Valley near the New Mexico border). “Having a somewhat nontraditional background, from an Indian reservation to Minneapolis, to Colorado, to New York City and back, I’ve had a lot of life experiences,” he says. “That’s something you can’t buy. It just requires living in different communities with different people.”

Although the diversity of the district can be a challenge for candidates, Frisch sees its large number of unaffiliated voters as an opportunity. In 2022, Frisch considered running as an independent (he was an unaffiliated voter in Colorado for two decades) but determined that doing so would be a roughly $15 million proposition. He would need one of the major parties to support him, so he filed as a Democrat and made his case to voters across the district—only 24 percent of whom are Democrats. With 44 percent of the district’s constituents registered as unaffiliated, Frisch’s moderation resonated with voters when contrasted with Boebert’s far-right, MAGA positions on the issues.

In the Pueblo living room on this March evening, Frisch drives the point home. He says he doesn’t care whom people voted for in 2016 or 2020. He doesn’t care how they fill out the rest of their ballots in 2024. He knows Trump will win the district, but he stresses that both of the major national parties have left rural communities behind, and he wants to rectify that. “If there was a Get Stuff Done Party,” Frisch tells the room, “I’d be in the Get Stuff Done Party.”

It’s June 19 in Grand Junction, a hot, hazy day, and Frisch is booked straight through, starting with a tour of a community hospital and ending with a Juneteenth block party. It’s one week before the primary election that will determine his opponent in November. (Frisch ran unopposed on the Democratic side.) Polling suggests the Republican nominee will be Jeff Hurd, a longtime Grand Junction attorney and a moderate who is also taking credit for chasing Boebert out of the district. Then there’s Ron Hanks, an Air Force veteran, a former state representative from Cañon City, and an election denier who was in Washington, D.C., for the January 6 insurrection.

Around 11 a.m., in the basement of a Unitarian church, Frisch gives his stump speech again before opening the event to questions. The first, from a man near the back of the room, is a request: “Talk about your $100,000 ad campaign against Hurd.”

It’s a reference to a TV buy from the Frisch campaign attacking Hurd for ducking debates, hiding from voters, and taking out-of-state corporate money. Although Frisch denies it, the ads seem to make clear that he’d prefer a matchup against an extremist like Hanks rather than run against a moderate like Hurd. Already, he’s been accused by the National Republican Congressional Committee of meddling in the Republican primary. Frisch answers the question in a measured voice. “Jeff Hurd is a very nice man, great father, great husband,” he says. Frisch explains his campaign is just preparing for the general election, and he notes that the national Republican Party has been meddling themselves, emptying its chest to give Hurd the win.

An hour later, Frisch and I are sitting at a picnic table with his son, Felix, and Frisch deflects questions about which Republican he’d rather face in November. As they prepare to leave, Felix presses his dad into action: “If you have five minutes, you should say hi to the guy running that other food truck.” Frisch dutifully gets up and introduces himself.

Adam’s son Felix. Photo by Daniel J. Brenner

At 18, Felix is a senior adviser and driver of policy for the Frisch campaign. In 2022, when he was 16, he completed his junior year of high school remotely so he could campaign with his dad. Along the way, he built a network of 130 volunteers who made 700,000 phone calls.

By the time he returned to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, for his senior year, he was writing letters of recommendation for students who had worked on his dad’s campaign—including one for a college senior applying to Georgetown Law School. After graduating this past spring, he rejoined the campaign full time and deferred his own admission to the University of Chicago. “This is important to me. I’m learning a ton,” Felix says. “College and whatever is next will always be there.”

Felix isn’t just tagging along. He understands that to win in a place like western Colorado, you must shake as many hands as possible and listen to as many potential voters as possible, and, as he did with the food vendor, he’s making sure his dad doesn’t miss those opportunities. It’s a brand of retail politics that can close the gap in a district that has historically leaned Republican by nine points. It’s also a brand of politics Felix has seen work.

He remembers a night in the middle of the 2022 campaign season at a packed brewery in Grand Junction. They had to open all the doors to make space for everyone, and 20 or so people wearing MAGA hats walked in. They were there to listen to Frisch, who was winding up his remarks. “It was one of the best I’d seen him do,” Felix recalls. As he looked around the room, Felix saw one of the people in a MAGA hat applauding his dad, who was talking about his frustrations with national politics and how Democrats have failed to hear the concerns of rural America. “I remember feeling like, Oh, my God, we could actually win this thing,” Felix says.

It’s Tuesday, June 25, primary night, and Frisch is in Pueblo—again. For the first time since Boebert hightailed it to the 4th District, Frisch will finally know who he’s up against in November’s general election. His watch party at Walter’s Brewery is packed, and when he arrives a few minutes before polls close, he’s swarmed by supporters, media, and candidates for local office. Tonight, Frisch is wearing black cowboy boots, a red-and-white striped shirt, and a blue blazer with two lapel pins: an American flag and a cow painted in the colors of the Colorado flag, a gift he received at a Colorado Cattlemen’s Association meeting.

He’s pulled in all directions as he awaits results. “Pueblo still hasn’t reported?” he asks a campaign staffer in passing. Attendees sip discounted beers and discuss issues in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District when news trickles out: The Associated Press has called the Republican primary for Jeff Hurd.

Frisch now has an opponent—and with that opponent comes another question. In Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District, can a conservative Democrat lauded for his common sense beat a moderate Republican who is a self-described pragmatist? Conventional wisdom says no. “This dramatically lessens the possibility of [Frisch] being elected in the 3rd District,” says Dick Wadhams, a longtime Republican political consultant in Colorado. “His candidacy was so defined by Boebert. There was an expectation he was going to beat her. But a Republican like Jeff? I think the 3rd District will rally around him.”

The massive 3rd district in red. Map courtesy of Colorado.gov

National prognosticators had written Frisch off by midsummer. The Cook Political Report showed the district leaning Republican, and an election model from the Hill gave Hurd an 83 percent chance of victory. What’s more, Colorado’s congressional redistricting in 2021 gave Republicans an even greater advantage in the 3rd. That Frisch was expected to beat Boebert this year spoke to just how lousy of a candidate she’d become.

But Hurd is no Boebert, and Frisch’s path to victory is steeper than it was a year ago. Still, Democrats have hope. “With the down payment Adam made last time, he’s not starting over,” Carroll, the former state party leader, says. “I think the district is more open to the idea of a Democrat. But he has to pivot.”

While Frisch has built a broad coalition, even some supporters know it might not be enough. Bruce Noble, an unaffiliated voter from Grand Junction who retired from the National Park Service in 2019, notes that he’s seen more yard signs for Hurd than for Frisch in Mesa County. “I wish I was a little more confident. My fear is that Hurd is a more difficult challenger,” Noble says. “I could see Frisch pulling it off, but am I convinced that will happen? I’m not. But I didn’t expect him to run as well as he did in 2022, so hopefully he has some surprises up his sleeve this year, too.”

As primary night winds down, Frisch is still giving phone interviews. Then he’s in front of cameras. Then he’s hunched over a laptop editing a press release. When asked about Hurd’s victory, he’s cordial. “I think there’s some mutual respect between us. Some things we share in common,” he says. “There are some differences, and we’re ready to have those conversations.” The press release he sends out an hour later strikes a different tone. “The last thing our district needs is another corporate lawyer funded by corporate PAC money. My presumptive opponent won’t have the backbone to stand up to Washington interests.”

And there’s the pivot Carroll talks about. Frisch never got his rematch with Boebert, who is coasting toward an easy victory in Colorado’s 4th Congressional District. Instead, he got an opponent in Hurd who looks much less like a caricature of a MAGA politician and much more like him. If Frisch has one clear advantage, it’s his war chest. After setting fundraising records in 2022, in June his campaign reported nearly $14 million in donations this cycle—more than any congressional candidate in the country other than New York Democratic Representative Hakeem Jeffries. Hurd, by contrast, had raised less than a tenth of Frisch’s haul by the last reporting deadline.

Frisch understands all of the arithmetic. He knows most pundits doubt, despite his prodigious fundraising, that he has a chance. He also knows that Boebert leaving the race hurt him. “From a pure mathematical standpoint, would I rather be running against someone who was probably down by five or seven points in December? Heck, yeah,” he says. But Frisch also knows nobody gave him a real chance in 2022, either. “There weren’t enough humble pies made at Costco to serve everybody,” he says. “So, we’ll take the skepticism. We’ll take people who want to doubt us again.”

American political campaigns are marathons, not sprints. That is, for most candidates. In the five weeks following Colorado’s primary day, former President Trump survived an assassination attempt and President Biden dropped his re-election bid. Frisch’s profile rose over those weeks, too. When he released a video and wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post asking Biden to clear the way for a new candidate—he was one of the first Democrats with a national profile to do so—he landed himself on MSNBC and Fox News.

Regardless of November’s result, Frisch will long be remembered as the savvy politician who chased Boebert from the Western Slope. But there’s another side of him, as well. “There’s me, the father, the husband, and the small-business guy living here,” he says. “And then there’s this person, Adam, running for Congress. They’re kind of the same person, but I kind of look at it like it’s two different things.”

That compartmentalization helps him stay calm amid a hectic campaign and focus on what’s really important—and it also means he’ll still have a life regardless of November’s result. “I’m blessed to have a great family. I want to instill values and work ethic in my children,” Frisch says. “Besides that, I mostly just think about how I can spend more time following Bob Dylan around on tour.”

This article was originally published in 5280 October 2024.