A Republican candidate who supports the current federal background checks for guns and doesn’t want the government to prevent women from getting abortions is poised to turn Colorado’s Republican Senate primary into an ideological battleground next year.
Former Aurora City Councilman Ryan Frazier, who stepped down from his role as a political commentator for a local news channel last week to take “a close and serious look at the race” for Senate, would line up on the left-hand side of a GOP primary to take on Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet. But the 38-year-old African-American former Navy intelligence officer says he has the “unique profile” to beat the incumbent in a general election.
“As a father, a Navy veteran, a small business owner, a cofounder of a charter school in Colorado … I think I have a very unique profile,” Frazier said in an interview Wednesday. “I believe there’s some core issues that I really care about that have tremendous crossover appeal … I think I can appeal both to our Republican base, but also to independent and women voters who are ultimately going to decide the election.”
Frazier plans to decide whether or not to run for Senate in the coming days. If he does, he’ll join a field of Republican candidates already staking out conservative ground for the primary. Since national Republicans’ top choices to take on Bennet—Rep. Mike Coffman and District Attorney George Brauchler—turned them down, the contest has largely been a race to the right.