In one of the most unexpectedly close midterm races in the country, 55-year-old ‘commonsense’ Democrat Adam Frisch failed to boot Colorado firebrand Lauren Boebert from Congress in November’s election by a mere 564 votes.
While the next House election isn’t until 2024, Frisch is looking forward to trouncing the ‘angertainment’ circus leader out of office.
‘She didn’t even win her home county’ Frisch said incredulously. ‘Only a small handful of members of Congress lose their home county.’
While the next House election isn’t until 2024, Adam Frisch is looking forward to trouncing the ‘angertainment’ circus leader out of office
Frisch speaking with voters in Colorado
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) blamed other Republicans on the ballot fore why she didn’t get more votes in the November midterm elections. ‘I don’t know if there wasn’t enough enthusiasm for our top ticket candidates for governor and Senate or what happened there.’
When asked to explain why Boebert, who lives in Garfield County, didn’t get more votes, she shifted the blame to other Republican candidates.
‘I don’t know if there wasn’t enough enthusiasm for our top ticket candidates for governor and Senate or what happened there,’ Boebert opined to the Wall Street Journal in December, ‘but there was a lot of shifting in the votes.’
While many voters in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District held their nose to vote for Boebert, Frisch claims the national Democratic Party held him back in the midterms by ‘abandoning’ rural America and putting forth pie-in-the-sky climate goals and incohesive energy policies.
‘We just went to every nook and cranny, town and community we could, and a lot of times we were the only candidate has ever shown up, the only Democrat who had ever shown up.’
The former Aspen City councilman was practically a newcomer to politics. ‘It’s mostly moms and dads standing up,’ he said of the wealthy ski enclave’s council. ‘I was the first person probably ever that has taken a city council seat and kind of gone to do other things in politics.’
Born on a Native American reservation in Montana to parents who were practicing healthcare and raised in Minneapolis, Frisch first came to Colorado by way of ski racing for the University of Colorado at Boulder.
He got injured before he even started racing for the team and eventually found his way to New York City – where he went from waiting tables to working over a decade in international finance, spending time all across Asia and London.
‘After 9/11 I went to a lot of funerals. I figured it would be a time to reset, came out to spend the winter in Colorado in 2001-2002, ended up meeting the proverbial girl next store and the rest is history,’ he said. Frisch and his wife Katy have two children and live in Aspen.
The couple have been in Aspen for nearly two decades, where Frisch has made a living in the homebuilding and construction business.
Katy now serves on the school board. ‘She and I believe that the kids need to be in school, almost at all costs.’
During the Covid-19 pandemic, a teacher shortage prompted Frisch to get his substitute teaching license and taught pre-K and Kindergarten a few days each week.
His self-described ‘vagabond’ lifestyle has fit him with views that are skeptical of party politics.
‘I always tell people if there was a get-stuff-done party I’d be that party,’ he said, adding that he saw himself on the Problem Solvers’ Caucus if he gets to Congress.
‘I’m not going to spend my time on some Oversight Committee yelling and screaming at tech executives about why don’t have more Twitter followers,’ he said, referencing Boebert and the Oversight Committee’s Big Tech censorship revenge tour.
Frisch’s self-described ‘vagabond’ lifestyle has fit him with views that are skeptical of party politics
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) and former President Donald Trump enjoy a strong political connection, especially after announcing his third presidential bid in November
Frisch criticized his opponent as ‘not focused on the job but focused on herself.’
‘There’s an agriculture bill every six years and she doesn’t want to work on that. She doesn’t want to be on the Agriculture Committee, she wants to be on the Oversight Committee.’
‘All you see of her is, you know, the ghosts and goblins committee.’
‘The amount of heads that shake kind of despondently at the Chamber of Commerce’s and more right-leaning communities because they know it. They know that she’s an embarrassment,’ the Democratic candidate said.
‘I believe as a pro-business, pro-domestic energy, moderate Democrat — which is probably not exactly what the Democratic primary base is looking for to get by the primary — I felt I could build a coalition of Republicans, Democrats and independents,’ Frisch continued.
‘I think about 30 to 40 percent of the Republican Party wants the party to get back to normal, focusing on issues, not part of this ‘angertainment’ industry.’
‘We called all sorts of people. We got some support. A lot of people respectfully laughed at us,’ he said, adding that at the national Democratic Party, ‘nobody returned our calls.’
There’s little love lost between Frisch and the national Democrats, who ‘botched rural America over the past 30 years.’ claims the Colorado Dem.
‘The Democratic Party is just 20 big cities – we can and must do better.’
‘This white, working class, no college… the Democrats have lost that bucket and they’ve lost this bucket of just rural America and the white working class, and they’re starting to lose some of the working class of Latinos and African Americans as well.’
He added: ‘They might be voting against some of their economic interests, but they’re mostly voting against their dignity and the respect and their self worth.’
‘That’s going to trump — pun intended — that’s going to trump economics all day long.’
Frisch then rattled off statistics –
- 3,142 counties in the nation, 2,000 of them defined as ‘rural’ by the Department of Agriculture
- In 1996 President Bill Clinton won over 50 percent of those counties
- In 2012 President Barack Obama won 25 percent
- In 2020 President Biden won fewer than 10
‘When I’m out with farmers and ranchers and we get into conversations, there’s very little time for me to say hey, listen, why don’t you pull out the Farm Bill? It’s 2000 pages big,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile they’re being bombarded that they’re dumb because they don’t have a college education, or that they don’t work hard because they happen to be in the oil and gas industry.’
He then tore into members of his party peddling lofty climate goals he says have ‘no basis in reality.’
‘Some of the Democrats from very big urban areas who are complaining about oil and gas production – yeah, I bet your constituents use five times as much energy and power as the men and the women in western Colorado that are actually producing energy.’
And when it comes to Biden’s energy posture, he said: ‘I’m not sure what the energy policy is.’
‘When you have a president of any party, begging Saudi Arabia and Venezuela for help, yeah, you need to have a different energy policy domestically,’ Frisch said.
‘The climate crisis is happening by all means,’ he prefaced, ‘but when you hear Biden in California talking about needing to shut down all this stuff … then they have to backtrack.’
The moderate Democrat would not say whether he wanted to see Biden at the top of the ticket he’ll be running on in 2024. ‘I’m gonna focus on my own district,’ he said. ‘I think it’s important for the democratic process to play out. Let’s just see what happens.’
Frisch said Biden’s climate goals – net-zero emissions from the U.S. grid by 2035 – had a ‘math problem’ and a ‘regulatory problem.’
‘The locations where, where wind and solar are traded are not where it’s used,’ he said. ‘To produce the transmission lines to move solar from eastern Colorado into downtown Denver or other places around, it’s incredibly expensive and incredibly time consuming.’
He predicted it would be 80 years before there were enough transmission lines to rely on solar power.
‘It’s very, very frustrating at a national level, when you have politicians or other people that are talking about things that literally have no mathematical possibility of happening.’
On access and ownership of guns, Frisch and Boebert – who owns gun-themed Shooters Grill in her district – diverge less on policy matters.
‘I’m a big believer in the Second Amendment.’
‘Western and southern Colorado has this libertarian kind of leave-me-alone streak,’ he said. ‘So we see very high Second Amendment and also very high pro-choice.’
Frisch said he favors leaving restrictions to Colorado’s current gun laws, which include red flag legislation Boebert has said she opposes. He said it is ‘Very, very tricky’ to outlaw guns by type, but ‘A lot of people, if they want to own a bazooka, it’s fine for society. Other people shouldn’t hold a screwdriver.’
