6th Congressional District.
Ex- state GOP chair House will run for Congress.
Brighton resident Steve House, a 58- year- old former Colorado Republican Party chairman and CEO, is an unlikely choice to be the face of “new Republicans,” but that’s exactly what House says he is.
“We’re kind of wrestling with the past,” he said in an interview. “In the present, we’re too focused on the past. I tell people, the new Republican has to look to the future and say, OK, what is every city, every town, every community going to look like and how are we going to be impacted?”
With a focus on technology and innovation, House is announcing Tuesday that he is running for Congress in Colorado’s 6th Congressional District, a backward Cshaped area that includes Denver’s eastern suburbs of Aurora, Centennial, Highlands Ranch and Brighton.
The 6th District was created in 1983 and represented by Republicans from that year until earlier this year. U. S. Rep. Jason Crow, an Aurora Democrat, beat Republican Mike Coffman in 2018 by 11 percentage points. House considers Crow’s victory to be a fluke — a statistical anomaly — despite the district’s increasingly blue hue in other elections.
“Look at the history of the seat,” House said. “I don’t think anyone could guess Mike Coffman would win this seat by eight, eight and a half points ( in 2016) and two years later lose it by 11. I don’t think that’s a fair indication of what’s going on.”
The Crow campaign and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee declined to comment on House’s announcement.
When asked what issues will make up the core of his campaign, House made no mention of President Donald Trump or immigration or the culture war topics that many Republicans prefer. Instead, he wanted to discuss health care innovation, technology and transportation.
“We have to cover pre- existing conditions. I’ve spent 35 years of my life in health care, I understand how it works. That’s an important piece,” House said. He’s a critic of socialism and single- payer health care, also known as Medicare for All, but Crow doesn’t support them, either.
House, who has six millennial children, talks a lot about technology.
“It’s time for the younger generation to step up and take hold of the innovation and say, OK, I think there should be storage lockers instead of truck- based deliveries during the day in Denver and there should be a way to go from an Uber to a scooter to transport me where I want, because it’s good for the environment, it’s good for traffic,” he said during an interview in downtown Denver.
House became CEO of the Colorado Republican Party earlier this year, after U. S. Rep. Ken Buck was elected chairman. House’s appointment brought assurance to Republicans concerned that Buck, splitting his time between Washington, D. C., and Colorado, couldn’t be a full- time chairman. House recently stepped down as party CEO to run for Congress.
House, who unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2014, will need to win a GOP primary before he can face Crow next November. Casper Stockham, a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for Congress twice in a different congressional district, is also running.
“The sudden announcement of Steve House’s resignation, after less than six months on the job, is disappointing news,” Stockham told supporters in an email last week. He said House’s maneuvering was disappointing to all who voted for Buck “and the team who were supposed to hit the ground running” at the Colorado Republican Party.