The open-faced and earnest attorney wearing a tie in the strip mall headquarters of his congressional campaign office could nearly be a direct foil to the Colorado incumbent he’s hoping to replace.
Jeff Hurd, 44, seems unruffled just hours before voters will decide whether he gets the Republican nomination in the state’s 3rd congressional district, which has been launched to national prominence thanks to its sitting representative, Lauren Boebert.
“I think there was maybe a sense among the voters here that they were getting worn down by a kind of politics that’s really loud and in your face and aggressive,” Hurd, 44, tells The Independent. “Some like it; some will continue to like it. But I think, by and large, most rural Coloradans were ready to move on.”
While Hurd’s campaign has avoided mudslinging, his site slyly opines that “western and southern Colorado” deserve a representative focused more on “doing something than being someone.”
Voters, he tells The Independent, “are mostly focused on issues … like the cost of housing, the cost of food, the cost of gas, the cost of electricity.”
Hurd’s been getting a crash course on many of those issues since he announced his congressional bid in August 2023. The following month, Boebert’s long list of controversies broadened to include her ejection from a Denver theater after misbehaving on a date, and she dropped out of the race in December. The endorsements behind Hurd began to read like a who’s-who of state Republican old guard, and his campaign has leaned heavily on Hurd’s professional credentials.
“Democrats are really good at using lawfare to tie up our resources,” he says. “ Yes, I’m a lawyer – that’s not the most popular profession – but I’m also a fighter … let’s have somebody that’s smart and conservative and knows the law, cut through some of that bureaucratic nonsense.”
He concedes that, if voters want a rep who’ll “stand for five minutes, and give a speech for television, I’m not your guy.
“But if you’re looking for somebody that’s smart, and that can grill a bureaucrat or an agency on some issue of the law or some regulation, and cut through that BS, I’m your guy.”
Hurd says he made the decision to throw his hat in the ring after visiting with power plant workers in Craig – mothers and fathers also in their 40s with families – whose jobs were in jeopardy.
“One of them was late because he was coming in from a parent/teacher conference,” says Hurd. “And it occurred to me that these men and women are losing good jobs because of bad policy.
“And I felt like sometimes, as Republicans, we can be good about shouting about the issues – energy and protecting our energy economy – but nobody’s really doing anything about it. And when I was there, I thought, this is something that I could pull together legal, public sector or government and private threads, and help create economic opportunities.”
Among Hurd’s primary challengers is a more Boebert-esque candidate, Ron Hanks, a combat veteran who likes to remind voters of his presence in DC on January 6. Both Republican and Democratic PACs have been funding attack ads on Hanks, the latter in a bid to push voters in his direction, not Hurd’s – presumably because Hanks would be easier to beat in the matchup with Adam Frisch, the Democrat who nearly unseated Boebert in 2022.
Hurd, for his part, says he’s hearing from voters “frustration, anger, feeling left behind and ignored … a helplessness, for many.”
To combat that, he says, he’d fight for rural Colorado through “maybe not shouting, but effectively, behind the scenes, building coalitions, building political capital, and doing everything I can to help my future constituents.
“And hopefully, they’ll judge me on the results and that’s how they can hold me accountable.”
