October 01, 2024 02:58 PM UTC

Arizona Republican Party Throws Down for Gabe Evans?

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• by: Colorado Pols

If you are a likely voter without a strong record of political affiliation, we don’t need to tell you that your mailbox is full of campaign advertisements. This is particularly true if you live in congressional district eight, which is home to the most visible 2024 race in Colorado between incumbent Democratic Congresswoman Yadira Caraveo and Republican challenger Gabe-ish Evans.

With that in mind, you’d be forgiven for not noticing a strange aspect of a recent mail piece in CO-08 in support of Evans:

The content of the mailer includes a fairly standard narrative — it even has that ridiculous grinning bobblehead image of Evans — but it’s the mailer’s origination that is weird: “Paid for by the Republican Party of Arizona. AZGOP.com.”

We’ve been following politics in Colorado for a very long time. Never before have we seen a piece of paid media for a Colorado candidate coming from ANOTHER state’s political party.

We haven’t received a good answer as to the legality of this mailer. It may well be perfectly legal for the Arizona Republican Party to be spending money to help a Republican candidate in Colorado, but it’s definitely weird. We won’t know the financial details until the Arizona GOP files its next financial report in mid-October.

It’s not ideal for a candidate to be receiving help like this from another state, but it’s entirely possible that the Colorado Republican Party has neither the means nor the ability to produce something similar for Evans. The Colorado GOP is being all but looted by Chairman Dave Williams and didn’t appear to spend a dime helping other Republican candidates in August. Even if the Colorado GOP had extra cash that Williams hadn’t hoovered up, his minions are too busy worrying about public school principals conducting sex-change surgeries to figure out how to send a normal mail piece.

This also brings up questions about the Arizona Republican Party. Do they have so much money that they can use funds to prop up candidates from other states instead of their own?

Much like Evans himself, all of this is quite strange.