Repetitive campaign ads — often lacking in accuracy or bloated with hyperbole — are a staple of any high-stakes campaign season. Front and center in the ad wars for this election is Colorado’s battleground 8th Congressional District race.
U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo, the Democratic incumbent, is running against Republican challenger Gabe Evans, a state lawmaker, and a poll this month showed the race in a deadlock.
Ad spending in the district, which runs from Greeley and Berthoud down to Denver’s northern suburbs, accounts for more than 75% of expenditures of this type across Colorado’s eight congressional contests, according to Axios Denver. Caraveo and her Democratic allies had a sizable edge in both money spent and ad time reserved through Election Day — $16 million as of mid-October, compared to $11.2 million spent or reserved by Evans and Republican groups, according to AdImpact data cited in the outlet’s reporting.
All those advertisements mean viewers have been exposed to messaging that often falls short of the truth. The Denver Post took a closer look at four recent campaign ads in the 8th District race to assess them for accuracy and context.
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Blaming Caraveo for fentanyl crisis
Evans and the National Republican Congressional Committee are running an ad accusing liberals of having “opened the border, legalized fentanyl and let criminals out of jail.” According to the ad, one of those liberals is Caraveo, whom Evans says “voted for it all.”
The Republican ends the ad by saying his “new mission” is to “stop Caraveo’s fentanyl crisis.”
Fentanyl, a powerfully addictive painkiller that claims tens of thousands of American lives from overdoses every year — and hundreds in Denver alone — is a widespread phenomenon, involving multiple countries, Mexican drug cartels and U.S. citizens who do much of the smuggling across the border.
Yes, Caraveo voted for a bipartisan bill five years ago, when she was a state representative in the General Assembly, that reduced charges for people possessing small amounts of the drug from a felony to a misdemeanor.
But after overdose deaths continued to rise across the state — and critics attacked the 2019 charging reforms — the legislature revisited the law in 2022. It restored the tougher charge for fentanyl possession above 1 gram. Caraveo also voted for that bill during her last year in the legislature.
“So when we saw that the level was wrong for fentanyl specifically, we went back in and we fixed it,” Caraveo told The Post in an interview this month. “That’s what you do as a legislator — you see how your bills exist in the real world, and you come back and you adjust.”
During her term in Congress, Caraveo sponsored a drug-related bill that was signed into law by President Joe Biden. It directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology to focus on researching existing and emerging illicit drugs containing xylazine, or “tranq,” a powerful animal tranquilizer that’s potentially lethal when …read more
Source:: The Denver Post – Politics
