The last presidential candidate's rally in Aurora was Obama's final Colorado campaign stop | TRAIL MIX | Columnists

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Donald Trump plans to campaign in Aurora before ballots go out next month to Colorado voters, the Republican presidential nominee said this week at a rally on Long Island in New York.

"In the next two weeks I'm going to Springfield and I'm going to Aurora," Trump said on Sept. 18, naming the Ohio town and Colorado suburb where the former president had vowed days earlier to start the "largest deportation" of undocumented immigrants in the country's history, if he wins election in November.

"You may never see me again but that's OK. I've gotta do what I gotta do," Trump added.

Trump first mentioned the two cities in tandem during his Sept. 10 presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, when he falsely asserted that Haitian immigrants were eating dogs and cats in Springfield and amplified claims that Venezuelan immigrants were "taking over the towns, they are taking over buildings"

While Aurora officials concede that members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua have been responsible for criminal activity at a pair of run-down apartment buildings — whose out-of-state owners first sounded the alarm about the gang, known as TdA — police say the gang's spread is limited and maintain they've arrested nine of the 10 TdA gang members they've identified in the city.

Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman, a former Republican congressman, said in a statement that he welcomes the chance to clear up Trump's misconceptions about the city of 400,000.

“I’m very excited that the former president wants to visit our city to see for himself that the narrative that we are being overrun by TdA gang members is false and for our police chief to have the opportunity to brief the former president on our successful efforts to identify and arrest TdA gang members," Coffman said, including ones pictured in a viral video of gunmen barging into an Aurora apartment.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, rejected Trump's depiction of the city.

“The reality is, Donald Trump continues to tell economically damaging and hurtful lies about Aurora,” Polis said in a statement, adding that Aurora has "people from all over the world who contribute every day to making it the dynamic, amazing place that it is.”

Trump took aim at Polis this week during his remarks on Long Island.

"We've got to save our country. Our country’s going down," he said. "If you look at what’s happening with the Venezuelans taking over, they’re taking over large pieces of real estate in Colorado. You have a Democrat governor who’s petrified of them. He’s afraid. I’ve never seen anything like it. He doesn’t want to talk about it. They’ve taken over your buildings and your land. You got to do something about it."

Polis responded that Colorado has secured millions in funding to improve public safety, and he hopes Trump "doesn’t bring a lawless or criminal element with him that could set us back.”

If Trump makes the trip to Aurora — city officials and state Republican Party sources told Colorado Politics they hadn't heard any concrete plans — it would be his first campaign event in the state's third-largest city, after making nearly a dozen stops elsewhere in Colorado in his two previous runs.

Trump visited Colorado just once during his 2020 reelection bid, filling an arena in Colorado Springs just weeks before the coronavirus pandemic swept across the country. But in 2016, when Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton both campaigned heavily in Colorado, the Republican held 10 rallies — three in Colorado Springs, two in Denver, and one each in Pueblo, Loveland, Grand Junction, Golden and Greeley.

So far this cycle, with Colorado considered solidly in the Democrats' column, Trump has touched down just once in the state, for a private fundraiser last month in Aspen. Harris' campaign hasn't announced any events in Colorado, though her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, also attended a fundraiser in August, in Denver.

The last time a presidential candidate rallied supporters in Aurora was late on a near-freezing night two days before ballots were due in 2012, when then-President Barack Obama spoke to a shivering crowd of about 20,000 packed into the quad at the Community College of Aurora's Lowry Campus, in the final Colorado stop of the Democrat's reelection campaign.

It was Obama's 13th visit that year to a state both parties agreed could determine whether Obama or his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, would carry the Electoral College. As it turned out, they were right — for the second presidential election in a row, Colorado was the "tipping point" state, with its nine electoral votes pushing Obama past the 270 needed to win the presidency.

Following an acoustic set performed by Dave Matthews and speeches from Colorado politicians and a grassroots campaign organizer, Obama took the stage close to midnight, nearly an hour later than planned — his flight from Ohio, another swing state that year, was delayed — asking the crowd if they were "fired up" and "ready to go vote," slightly modifying his trademark slogan.

Obama opened his remarks by comparing the previous week's devastation of Hurricane Sandy to the shooting at a nearby Aurora movie theater that summer that left 12 dead and 58 wounded.

"As a nation, we mourn those who were lost," he said. "And unfortunately, the people of this town understand what it means to grieve better than most, because the wounds of that terrible shooting are still fresh in people's minds. But just as you've begun to heal as a community, we're going to help our friends on the East Coast heal, as well. We're going to walk with the people whose lives have been upended, those who've lost loved ones — we're going to walk with them every step of the way in the hard road ahead, because that's what we do as Americans."

A little over three months earlier, Obama had landed in Aurora and spent nearly four hours meeting with victims of the shooting and their families — “not so much as president … as a father and as a husband,” he said — at the nearby University of Colorado Hospital. Before departing, he spoke briefly about his visit.

“I confessed to them that words are always inadequate in these kinds of situations," Obama said. "But that my main task was to serve as a representative of the entire country and let them know that we are thinking about them at this moment and will continue to think about them each and every day, and that the awareness that not only all of America but much of the world is thinking about them might serve as some comfort."

Most of Obama's 25-minute speech at the Aurora rally on that cold night focused on what he described as a choice "between two visions of our country ... between returning to the top-down policies that crashed our economy — or a vision of our economy that grows from the middle class out, from the bottom up."

Nearing his conclusion, Obama put it simply.

"So, Colorado, we know what real change is. We know what the future requires. And, by the way, we also know it won’t be easy."

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The last presidential candidate’s rally in Aurora was Obama’s final Colorado campaign stop | TRAIL MIX | Columnists

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