COFFMAN, CROW VIE FOR HOT SEAT IN COLORADO POLITICS
All work and no play has kept him in office — so far
The 6th Congressional District is a hotly contested area in this state. Dive into incumbent GOP Rep. Mike Coffman’s record and meet his rival, Democrat Jason Crow.
U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, Raurora, doesn’t have a personal life.
A veteran of both Iraq wars, Coffman frequently works 18hour days and packs nearly every hour of every weekend with festivals, job fairs and constituent meetings. Former staffers divided up his public appearances because none of them had the time or energy to attend every event. The only personal hours on Coffman’s calendar are morning pushups and church with his mother on Sunday mornings.
“Mike has tirelessly made himself into a congressman that people know and trust,” said former Colorado GOP chair and Republican strategist Dick Wadhams.
That dogged dedication to retail politics has kept the Aurora Republican in Colorado’s 6th Congressional District seat even as the number of registered Democrats continues to grow. The suburban district, which arcs around Denver to the north, south and east, voted decisively for both Hillary Clinton and Coffman in 2016.
Coffman’s supporters in the 6th — especially those in Aurora’s immigrant communities — say they split their ballots because the congressman shows up, listens and works on their problems. But the big question on everyone’s mind is whether all that work will be enough to stem the tide against what could be a wave election for Democrats.
“Mike Coffman is probably the only
Republican I can think of who could hold on to this seat the last two election cycles,” Wadhams said. “But the political environment is so much different in 2018 than it was in 2014 and 2016.”
Trump makes his job harder
President Donald Trump is unpopular in Coffman’s suburban Denver district, and a majority of his constituents tell pollsters they want Democrats to control the U.S. House. That dovetails with historical trends. Presidents with midterm approval ratings below 50 percent typically see their party lose seats in the House of Representatives. Under President Barack Obama, Democrats lost 63 House seats in 2010 and 14 seats in 2014.
Democrats need to unseat 23 Republicans to win control this year, and Coffman’s name is high on their list.
“Every single cycle there’s been talk about him being down …,” Coffman former campaign spokesperson Cinnamon Watson said. “The thing that’s pretty remarkable about Mike is he is candidate that puts his head down and works. He has this ability to block out all that noise.”
Coffman has never lost an election, and he’s been through 11 of them. He served in the Colorado House, as state treasurer and secretary of state before running for Congress in 2008.
Those who have known him since his early days in Colorado politics say late nights and long hours are in Coffman’s DNA. He has no children and recently divorced Cynthia Coffman, the state attorney general. The only breaks in Coffman’s public record came when he left office twice to serve in both Iraq wars.
On a recent Sunday afternoon, Coffman visited a Korean church, a Hindu temple, a Spanish Mass and a meal to break the fast of Ramadan at a local mosque. A few weeks later, Coffman spoke at a job fair before lighting a ceremonial bonfire at an Ethiopian religious event called the Meskel Festival.
“We’ve supported a number of candidates,” Ethiopian community organizer Neb Asfaw said. “Our experience has been we campaign, we help and as soon as they get elected they disappear. We’ve done massive voter registration drives, but we’ve never had someone who has been consistently showing up and listening to the community and championing our cause until Mike.”
Ethiopians are the district’s secondlargest immigrant group, and the majority live in Aurora. Asfaw calls himself a lifelong Democrat who also supports Coffman.
Asfaw remembers sitting in the House gallery back in April when Coffman’s resolution condemning human rights violations in his country passed. It wasn’t an easy vote. Coffman brokered three meetings between Ethiopian and House Republican leaders, persuaded colleagues to ignore lobbyists hired by the Ethiopian government and assuaged fears that the country would refuse to be a partner in the continuing fight against terrorism.
“People were screaming. The crowd broke into applause, and some were crying,” Asfaw said. “Making noise in the gallery is not allowed, but people forgot the rules for a brief moment. They couldn’t help it.”
That’s why it’s not unusual to spot Coffman’s picture on the walls of businesses and tucked inside the visors of cab drivers in the 6th district. Ethiopians are a growing part of Coffman’s district, but the largest minority group is Latinos — a fact that Coffman and his 2012 campaign staff noticed when the district’s boundaries changed substantially that year.
“He had to introduce himself to 50 percent of the district,” said Owen Loftis, Coffman’s 2012 communications director. “It went from being super conservative to moderate.”
And so did Coffman.
The year before Colorado’s Supreme Court approved the new district maps, he coauthored a bill to repeal requirements that voting ballots be offered in languages other than English.
“Since proficiency in English is already a requirement for U.S. citizenship, forcing cashstrapped local governments to provide ballots in a language other than English makes no sense at all,” Coffman told The Denver Post in August 2011.
He also took hardline positions on immigration that would align closely with Trump’s policies today. He welcomed support from Tom Tancredo, who held the 6th district seat when it was still heavily Republican, and he openly supported a bill to strip naturalborn citizenship from children of undocumented immigrants.
“I realized how incredibly diverse (the district) was, and so I began reaching out to different immigrant communities,” Coffman said. “I got to know them and their issues.”
A political makeover
And that started to change how he thought. The immigrants he met and broke bread with reminded him of his own mother, Dorothy Coffman, who moved to the U.S. from China as an adult to marry Coffman’s father.
“My mother was really without a nationality, which became a problem when it was time to leave China,” Coffman said.
Her parents were Jews from Iraq and England who never registered her birth in China. No country wanted to give her a passport. The couple eventually convinced the Iraqi Embassy to give her a temporary passport and exit visa with the caveat that she surrender it on arrival in San Francisco.
“What I noticed growing up was my mother was always more appreciative of being an American than my friends’ parents,” Coffman said. “I see that in a lot of these communities.”
Coffman learned Spanish. He supported bills to give children brought into the country illegally a path to citizenship — especially if they served in the U.S. military. He criticized Trump for separating families at the border, and called on Trump to fire his adviser, Stephen Miller, for his role in that policy. He pushed to extend a program called Temporary Protection Status or TPS, which gave temporary legal status to people fleeing their countries because of natural disasters, armed conflicts and civil wars.
“He put district above party, his state above the party,” Loftis said. “I think he really looks at his job as a congressman to be a representative of his district, and that’s why I think he’s been so successful.”
But Coffman’s transformation into a moderate hasn’t been smooth sailing.
In May 2012, he apologized after being caught on tape saying that Obama “in his heart, he’s not an American.” In August, he had to explain why he said Trump “probably has a more generous plan for DACA than I would.”
And he has gotten an earful — especially since the deadly school shooting in Parkland, Fla. — about his “A” rating from the NRA and the $30,000 the group gave to his campaign in 2016.
Jason Crow, his Democratic challenger, calls Coffman’s change of heart political pandering. He has spent a lot of time and money trying to tie Coffman to the president, pointing to data that shows the congressman votes for Trump policies 96 percent of time. Coffman says he breaks with the president on issues that matter to his district like immigration and net neutrality, but he supports Trump on policies like his tax cuts.
“Mike will do and say whatever he thinks you want to hear,” said Jonathan Ormes, a resident of Highlands Ranch. “You can tell by his ads.”
Ormes is working to elect Crow in a part of the district that Coffman usually wins by 20 percent or more. And he’s trying to flip voters by telling them the country needs a Democratic House to hold Trump accountable.
Ethiopians at a religious festival in Lowry Park seemed optimistic about Coffman’s chances this year.
“We’re likely to trust our own experience,” Asfaw said. “A lot of people are interested in the photo op. This is not a campaign effort for Mike Coffman. This is every weekend for him.”