In Colorado’s Trump country, a Bernie revolutionary runs a real campaign
October 31, 2016
Excerpts:
Electra Johnson, a local architect and urban designer, is running an aggressive, well-funded campaign against Trump supporter Stan VanderWerf, a retired Air Force officer and defense contractor who is also a newcomer to politics. The El Paso County Commission has not had a single Democrat on it since the 1970s.
A political newcomer who did not expect she would run for office, Johnson, 44, got into the race in the spring while caucusing for Bernie Sanders. Someone nominated her to run at the county assembly when she expressed concern about the qualifications of two other candidates, and she accepted. She swept the room, and has been impressing Democrats in and outside the county ever since.
“We’re all pushing for her, and she’s working her buns off,” says Dale Lyons, chairwoman of the Huerfano County Democratic Party more than an hour south. Lyons has known Johnson since the day she was born in Gardner, Colorado.
Johnson says she is running because she is fed up with the ugliness and vitriol in politics. She talks about how Republicans have controlled El Paso County at nearly every level of government for nearly half a century.
“We need a fresh voice in El Paso County,” she said as she campaigned over the weekend at the Manitou Springs coffin races. El Paso County is one of the most heavily Republican counties in the country. Ringed by five military installations, home to a large number of retirees and dotted with a network of religious nonprofits, it is a conservative stronghold. Donald Trump and his running mate Mike Pence have rallied three separate crowds apiece in the county since July.
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As she has campaigned in the district, which has about 12,000 more registered Republican voters than Democrats and about 28,000 unaffiliated voters, she says she has heard a repeated claim.
“People feel very shut out of the process right now and it doesn’t matter what party you’re in,” she says. “They are sick of politics as usual.”
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If Johnson wins on Nov. 8, it will be a sign of an impressive campaign, but it also will be a clear local impact of the “political revolution” Sanders, the Democratic Socialist from Vermont, promised throughout his unsuccessful campaign for president.
“If it wasn’t for Bernie I wouldn’t be running,” Johnson told The Colorado Independent. She says she is following Sanders’ lead by supporting Hillary Clinton— and because it is the rational thing to do.
http://www.coloradoindependent.com/162035/electra-johnson-stan-vanderwerf-el-paso-county-commissioner