Democrats Target Colorado 3rd District in Primary Push

The wind off the Uncompahgre Plateau doesn’t just cut; it strips. It takes moisture, it takes heat, and if you’re a politician in this district, it takes your margin for error.

Alex Kelloff stands in that chill, talking about gas prices like they’re a weather pattern you can predict. Dwayne Romero, leaning on decades of local political muscle, talks about the same thing but frames it as a failure of representation. They are the two faces of the Democratic challenge in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District, and they are betting everything on the idea that the folks in Grand Junction, Aspen, and Pueblo are done waiting for the national mood to shift. It’s a bold bet. The district has been red since 2011. It got redder in 2024. But right now, with the June 30 primary looming, the narrative is simple: Trump is the problem, and Jeff Hurd is the guy who let him in.

Here’s the thing though: the math is brutal.

The 3rd District isn’t just a slice of the Western Slope. It’s a sprawling beast that stretches from the northwestern corner of the state all the way east to Pueblo. Roughly half the registered voters here are unaffiliated, which usually means they swing. But lately, they’ve been swinging Republican. In 2022, Lauren Boebert held on by a razor-thin 546 votes against Adam Frisch. By 2024, when Boebert moved on, the margin widened. Hurd beat Frisch by nearly 20,000 votes. That’s not a fluke. That’s a realignment.

Kelloff, whose family has been on the Slope for more than 130 years and who co-founded Armada Skis in 2002, argues that locals aren’t just complaining about inflation — they’re angry at the source. Voters “understand what their gas prices are,” Kelloff says, “they understand what their grocery prices are and they’re not unaware of who is responsible for that.” He’s tying Hurd directly to the White House, painting the current congressman as a passive observer rather than a fighter.

Romero, a former U.S. Army Ranger and Aspen City Council member, takes a slightly different angle. He doesn’t just say Hurd is weak; he says Hurd is absent. Hurd has “failed to push back” against Trump, Romero claims, and in doing so, has “failed to represent the needs, and frankly, the concerns, of constituents in his district.” It’s a critique of presence as much as policy.

Both men are running on the same three pillars: reversing healthcare cuts, protecting public lands, and standing up to what they see as White House corruption. They’ve been hammering Hurd’s vote on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the legislation that passed much of Trump’s second-term agenda. They argue that the tax cuts and deficit increases in that bill came at the expense of the very people who keep this economy running.

But can they close the gap? The district favors Republicans. It always has. And while national polling shows Democrats with a slight edge for control of Congress, that’s a national picture. Local elections are local beasts. The voters here don’t care about the national midterms as much as they care about whether their property taxes are going up or if the highway gets plowed in January.

Hurd, meanwhile, is facing his own primary challenge from former state lawmaker Ron Hanks. So the Democrats aren’t just fighting the incumbent; they’re betting that the Republican base is fractured enough to let a Democrat slip through. It’s a high-wire act without a net.

Picture a kitchen table in Paonia. A farmer looks at the price of diesel. He looks at the news on the TV. He sees Trump. He sees Hurd. He sees the same face, just in a different tie. If Kelloff and Romero can convince him that the tie changed, they might just flip the seat. If not, the wind keeps blowing.