It's the last day of campaigning in Colorado for Lauren Boebert and Trisha Calvarese in 4th Congressional District
Voters in Colorado's 4th Congressional District will know soon who will represent them in Congress for the next two years. It could be either Republican primary winnner Lauren Boebert or Democratic primary winner Trisha Calvarese. The two candidates will be doing their last day of campaigning before heading to election night parties in the evening.
Polls on Election Day close at 7 p.m. across the state and in CD4. The district consists of most of Colorado's Eastern Plains and it includes Douglas County in the southern part of the Denver metro area and the city of Loveland in Northern Colorado.
CD4 is one of three districts in the state with an open seat. It was vacated by Rep. Ken Buck, who left office before his term was up last spring. In June a special election was held and Republican Greg Lopez soundly defeated Calvarese with 58% of the vote. Lopez is the current CD4 representative through the end of the term and is not seeking election for the next two years. Calvarese also ran for the Democratic primary in June and was more successful there, defeating two other Democrats with 45% of the vote.
Boebert currently represents Colorado's 3rd Congressional District but decided late last year to run in the slightly more conservative 4th. That decision followed an announcement a year ago by Buck that he wouldn't be running for re-election in part because he felt his party was "obsessed with re-litigating the last election" instead of focusing on important issues. A few months later Buck abruptly left his post, leaving an empty seat for a few months. Boebert didn't handily win her primary for the CD4 election -- she didn't even get 50% of the primary vote. But in a crowded field, simply receiving more votes than her peers was all she needed to lock in her candidacy.
Calvarese says in her campaign literature that she's a former director of Speechwriting & Publications at the AFL-CIO and is a member of the Federal Civil Service with the U.S. National Science Foundation. She says she is a proponent of infrastructure and American energy legislation and she supports capping many prescription costs, an effort she says Boebert previously voted against.
One of the biggest differences between Boebert and Calvarese is on immigration. Boebert is a hard-liner who has called for mass deportations and Calvarese favors a pathway to citizenship.
CBS News Colorado Political Specialist Shaun Boyd recently spoke with Boebert and with Calvarese and both candidates in their sit-down interviews were asked about immigration.
"I just want to point to the bipartisan border bill right that could have passed as a bipartisan consensus. Lauren Boebert blew it up because she was told to from an outside influence," Calvarese said. "I'm going to work with my partners across the aisle to secure the border. Listen to the people who are doing the job to secure our border -- Customs and Border Patrol -- saying, hey, we need more resources here, and making sure they have that. And fighting for a pathway to citizenship. Because you know what? It hurts everybody when you're competing against people who can be exploited because of their immigration status."
"Our southern border is a mess," Boebert said. "We have an invasion. There's at least 10.6 million illegal aliens who have come into our country, and many of them are expedited in their processes. We are seeing numbers upwards of 13,000 who are criminal aliens who are coming into our country, and that is hurting every American. We are funding them being present in our nation, in our state and in our communities. And this is a problem. We have a legal process for those who want to come and help our farmers and our ranchers and agriculture industry. We have visa processes. That's not what's happening at the southern border. I believe that many issues with our visa processes need to be addressed, but we have to start with securing the southern border before we go into reforming any sort of visa program that we offer. I understand that that work is valuable and necessary, but it's not supposed to be indentured servitude; break our nation's laws, come into our country, work here and then you can obtain some sort of residency or legal status."
