March 19, 2025 12:31 PM UTC

Gabe Evans Inexplicably Follows Bad Cory Gardner Playbook

• 1 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

When the 2026 General Election comes around, it will mark 12 years since the last time that a Colorado Republican was elected to a major statewide office (Republican Heidi Ganahl won a statewide race for CU Regent in 2016, but that doesn’t fit under our definition of “major”). That drought is not likely to end 18 months from now.

Colorado’s subsequent blue state shift, combined with the sheer lunacy of the modern Colorado Republican Party, makes it difficult to even suggest that Republicans could make a serious statewide challenge in 2026. But let’s go back in time to 2014, when Republican Cory Gardner completed a swift political ascent from state representative to U.S. House of Representatives (CO-04) to the U.S. Senate, defeating Democratic Sen. Mark Udall by a narrow margin (1.9 points). Gardner was one of the GOP’s rising young stars when he entered the Senate in 2015, with talk of a future Presidential run on the minds of he and his top advisers.

By 2020, Gardner crashed back to earth and was out of politics.

Gardner played a significant role in ramming through a handful of right-wing Supreme Court Justices that ultimately led to the overturn of Roe v. Wade, but a combination of being unable to figure out how to govern — Gardner had risen through the ranks as a right-wing rock thrower who never learned how to actually accomplish things — while also capitulating to the whims of Donald Trump led him to a 9-point loss to Democrat John Hickenlooper in 2020.

Gardner hasn’t really popped his head up in Colorado ever since that 2020 beatdown, spending most of his time in Washington D.C. overseeing large Republican PACs and lobbying for the cryptocurrency industry. Gardner’s legacy is not lost on modern-day Colorado Republicans, however. In 2022, Republican Senate nominee Joe O’Dea took a bunch of pages out of the Gardner campaign manual and used them to light himself on fire before ultimately losing to Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet by more than 14 points.

For some completely inexplicable reason, freshman Rep. Gabe Evans (R-Adams County) is also now following the Cory Gardner Playbook. We had noticed some of the similarities between Evans and Gardner in mid-November; Evans has only added to the comparison in the two months he has been in Congress.

In a nutshell, this is the Cory Gardner Playbook:

1. Stand around and smile stupidly
2. Ignore your constituents at all costs
3. Make strong statements that are demonstrably false
4. Dodge reporters when asked to explain

Evans hasn’t made it to Playbook Item #4 quite yet, though he’s moving in that direction. He has already mastered items #1-3, however.

Evans shows up here and there for low-calorie photo ops to make it look like he’s doing things in his district, but while Democrats are hosting town hall meetings with thousands of people, Evans has yet to make himself available to the people who elected him in 2024. National Republican leaders have advised Members not to hold town hall meetings, in large part because they have nothing good to talk about, but this is a very slippery slope; Gardner’s decision to stop holding town hall meetings eventually led to the creation of the iconic “Cardboard Cory” character that came to define the Senator from Yuma as the worst stereotype of an indifferent politician.

Gardner was also known for straight-faced claims that were outright nonsense, such as his 2014 canard that “there is no federal personhood bill.” Gardner had been on the record as an anti-abortion Republican, which was a position he tried to duck as often as possible given that Coloradans have consistently demonstrated their support for abortion rights. Evans has now fallen into a similar trap by painting himself into a corner on supporting a Republican budget that would decimate Medicaid and CHIP funding; roughly 1 in 5 residents of CO-08 rely on Medicaid/CHIP, including 1 in 3 children in the district.

Evans seems to think that his best option now is to simply lie about proposed Medicaid cuts — a falsehood so preposterously ridiculous that it will follow him everywhere he goes for the rest of his political career:

“To say that those $880 billion are going to come from Medicaid or even from health care is a complete falsehood because the committee has jurisdiction over pretty much the rest of the U.S. economy. So there’s a wide range of places where those cost savings can be found.”

How is Evans going to defend this nonsense when he is a member of the very committee that will be tasked with approving massive Medicaid cuts in order to meet the demands of the House Republican budget championed by Speaker Mike Johnson?

Quite simply: He can’t.

If House Republicans are going to meet the obligations required by their own budget, Medicaid funding MUST be cut by a significant amount. Medicaid funding accounts for 93% of the funding under the jurisdiction of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, of which Evans is a member. If Evans doesn’t approve Medicaid cuts that jeopardize the health care coverage of 1.3 million Coloradans, it is functionally impossible to come up with enough money to meet the demands of the GOP budget proposal that he voted for already.

We won’t be surprised if Evans advances to #4 on the Cory Gardner Playbook after today’s round of stories about his Medicaid lie. Once Evans starts diving into closing elevators in order to dodge reporters, he will be well on his way to completing the Full Gardner…which ends with an inevitable re-election loss in 2026.