Working Class Weekly: Costs, Corruption, And Our Campaign To Win Colorado

Last week, we shared how our research with working class voters informed our paid strategy in Mississippi — where Democrats have a longshot Senate race, but one of their best there in decades. Now, we’re putting those lessons to work in Colorado.

This week, American Bridge launched our campaign to win in Colorado — targeting Republican Congressman Jeff Crank in the fifth district.

Colorado, despite being reliably Democratic in presidential races for the last 20 years, has an 8-member congressional delegation that is split 50/50 Democrat and Republican. The result is that three of them are now competitive this election cycle.

And it’s a big reason Colorado is the latest investment in our multi-million dollar campaign targeting working class voters in nearly 20 key races where we’re aiming to expand the battleground by putting traditionally safe Republican seats — including districts rated R+3 or higher — in play this November.

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COSTS AND CORRUPTION

Our research last year with working class swing voters in Colorado revealed a deep disillusion with politics. These voters believe the system is broken and have lost trust in politicians whom they view as corrupt. Compounding this cynicism are the kitchen table issues we’ve heard from working class voters across the country.

Jeff Crank embodies these frustrations. A former congressional staffer and state director for the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity Colorado, Crank has spent his career as a political insider and his time in Congress taking money from special interests while voting to raise Coloradan’s costs. Last year, as Republicans advanced their budget plan, Crank assured constituents that there would be no major cuts to Medicaid. He then voted for the Big Beautiful Bill, which included the largest cuts to Medicaid in history, raising healthcare costs, threatening health coverage for more than 150,000 Coloradans — including 23,000 in his own district — and putting the state’s rural hospitals at risk of closure. Crank has raked in thousands of dollars in contributions from the healthcare industry.

That is precisely what working class voters despise about politics and why they believe the system doesn’t work for them: politicians pocketing special interest money, then voting against the needs of their own constituents to appease those interests. Our focus groups consistently show that messaging that ties higher costs to Republican corruption, especially around healthcare special interests, is highly effective at moving voters.

We’re running the same playbook on energy costs, another issue where our focus groups show corruption messaging lands effectively with working class voters as their energy bills continue to climb. Crank took half a million dollars from corporate PACs and special interest groups before voting to gut clean energy tax credits and let companies raise electric and gas bills. Projections show the cuts Crank voted for will drive up household energy costs in Colorado by $170 a year by 2030, and $310 by 2035.

Voters in Colorado are being squeezed, and Crank’s corruption is impacting their own bottom line. We’re leaning aggressively into this in our paid program, relentlessly pressing Crank’s pattern of self-dealing and explicitly tying it to the cost pressures Coloradans are facing.

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Jeff Crank is cashing in on corruption in Congress

Working class voters are feeling the economic strain, and it’s only getting worse under Republican leadership. It’s getting harder and harder for the working class to get ahead; meanwhile, they’ve watched their Republican congressmembers only get richer and richer at their expense. These conditions are precisely what makes Republicans like Jeff Crank all the more vulnerable this cycle.

Voters are fed up with the costs and corruption — and if Democrats can tie these threads effectively, and capitalize on the specific Republican vulnerabilities we’ve heard from working class voters in our quantitative and qualitative research, they have a shot at making real gains this November. That’s exactly what we’re doing in Colorado. We’re weaving all of these vulnerabilities together into one message: that Jeff Crank betrayed Coloradans, and they’re paying the price for it.