Repetitive campaign ads — often lacking in accuracy or bloated with hyperbole — are a staple of any high-stakes campaign season. Front and center in the ad wars for this election is Colorado’s battleground 8th Congressional District race.
U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo, the Democratic incumbent, is running against Republican challenger Gabe Evans, a state lawmaker, and a poll this month showed the race in a deadlock.
Ad spending in the district, which runs from Greeley and Berthoud down to Denver’s northern suburbs, accounts for more than 75% of expenditures of this type across Colorado’s eight congressional contests, according to Axios Denver. Caraveo and her Democratic allies had a sizable edge in both money spent and ad time reserved through Election Day — $16 million as of mid-October, compared to $11.2 million spent or reserved by Evans and Republican groups, according to AdImpact data cited in the outlet’s reporting.
All those advertisements mean viewers have been exposed to messaging that often falls short of the truth. The Denver Post took a closer look at four recent campaign ads in the 8th District race to assess them for accuracy and context.
Blaming Caraveo for fentanyl crisis
Evans and the National Republican Congressional Committee are running an ad accusing liberals of having “opened the border, legalized fentanyl and let criminals out of jail.” According to the ad, one of those liberals is Caraveo, whom Evans says “voted for it all.”
The Republican ends the ad by saying his “new mission” is to “stop Caraveo’s fentanyl crisis.”
Fentanyl, a powerfully addictive painkiller that claims tens of thousands of American lives from overdoses every year — and hundreds in Denver alone — is a widespread phenomenon, involving multiple countries, Mexican drug cartels and U.S. citizens who do much of the smuggling across the border.
Yes, Caraveo voted for a bipartisan bill five years ago, when she was a state representative in the General Assembly, that reduced charges for people possessing small amounts of the drug from a felony to a misdemeanor.
But after overdose deaths continued to rise across the state — and critics attacked the 2019 charging reforms — the legislature revisited the law in 2022. It restored the tougher charge for fentanyl possession above 1 gram. Caraveo also voted for that bill during her last year in the legislature.
“So when we saw that the level was wrong for fentanyl specifically, we went back in and we fixed it,” Caraveo told The Post in an interview this month. “That’s what you do as a legislator — you see how your bills exist in the real world, and you come back and you adjust.”
During her term in Congress, Caraveo sponsored a drug-related bill that was signed into law by President Joe Biden. It directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology to focus on researching existing and emerging illicit drugs containing xylazine, or “tranq,” a powerful animal tranquilizer that’s potentially lethal when used by people.
Hitting Evans on gay marriage, abortion
The House Majority PAC, a political action committee that backs Democratic candidates for Congress, put together an ad attacking Evans for his positions on same-sex marriage and abortion. The ad claims that Evans thinks “gays and lesbians shouldn’t be allowed to marry.”
“He even compared gay marriage to incest,” the ad says.
Evans’ stance on same-sex marriage has evolved significantly. It has for many politicians, including former President Barack Obama, especially in the years leading up to (and since) the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage nationally in 2015.
In a recent interview with Denver7, Evans, a former Blackhawk helicopter pilot in the U.S. Army and a former Arvada police officer, said he had worked with gay and lesbian soldiers and cops.
“I would have taken a bullet for them, they would have taken a bullet for me,” he said.
As far as likening same-sex marriage to incest, that comparison was made 20 years ago in a published letter to the editor that Evans wrote when he was 17. Evans told The Post that he planned to vote for this year’s Amendment J, which would strip the now-defunct same-sex marriage ban from the state constitution.
The ad also claims Evans would make abortion illegal, “even in cases of rape or incest.” While Evans has taken a tougher position against abortion in the past, he has repeatedly said on the campaign trail this year that he would make exceptions for rape, incest and when the life of the mother is at risk; he says he does not support a national ban on abortion.
LEFT — State Rep. Gabe Evans, right, shakes hand with Wallace Tyron during a tour at Aurora Organic Dairy in Platteville, Colorado, on Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post) RIGHT — U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo greets supporters gathered at her campaign office to promote her reelection bid on Oct. 12, 2024, in Northglenn. (Photo By Kathryn Scott/Special to The Denver Post)
Attacking Caraveo on immigration
In an ad by Evans’ campaign, the Republican takes aim at Caraveo over her positions on border security and immigration. It cites rising crime and drug trafficking as consequences of lax border policies promulgated during the Biden administration, allowing for increases in crossings by migrants seeking asylum and immigrants entering illegally.
“And Yadira Caraveo is responsible for it all,” Evans says, looking into the camera while surrounded by law enforcement officials.
But Caraveo is just one of 535 votes in Congress and can’t possibly be blamed for everything going wrong at the U.S. southern border. She also took office less than two years ago.
The ad seizes on shifts in Caraveo’s stances on immigration and border control in recent years. As a state legislator in 2021, she signed a letter sent to both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, along with congressional leaders, requesting that Congress “divest from immigration enforcement agencies” such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Fast-forward to this past summer, when Caraveo backed a Republican-sponsored House resolution “strongly condemning” Harris for the Biden administration’s “failure to secure the United States border.”
It was a position criticized as politically expedient by her Republican foes and denounced as cruel by some Democratic allies.
The fact stands that U.S. immigration policy has been troubled for decades, and neither party has been able to solve it. Earlier this year, a bipartisan border security bill that was backed by the labor union for border patrol agents — which later endorsed former President Donald Trump this month — fizzled in part after Trump made clear that he was against it.
Tying Evans to Boebert and MAGA extremes
Caraveo’s campaign has run an ad that tries to tie Evans to conservative firebrand U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, the two-term Colorado congresswoman running for another term in a new congressional district this fall, as well as to Trump’s MAGA movement. That’s his mantra that’s short for “Make America Great Again.”
“He only cares about that Boebert stuff — banning abortion, invalidating gay marriages,” the ad declares.
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Those claims do not account for the candidate’s most recent positions (see above).
As for the MAGA references, Trump’s brand of Republican politics hasn’t played well in much of Colorado; the Republican nominee was behind Harris by double-digit margins in polls conducted in the late summer. And the 8th is Colorado’s most evenly divided congressional district, politically speaking.
Evans has expressed support for Trump and his repeat run for the White House, while receiving the former president’s endorsement in return.
Evans doesn’t back Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen; he’s said Biden won. He does add a caveat — he has said that there was interference in the run-up to the election related to attempts to suppress the story surrounding an abandoned laptop computer belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of the current president.
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