State Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Yuma). (Photo/Bob Spencer, The Colorado Independent).

That message, peppered throughout with references to Ronald Reagan and aimed chiefly against the Obama administration, suggested the steep challenge these candidates face in winning office in 2010.

After eight years of Bush administration deficit spending, however, and in light of the relative fiscally conservative approach taken by local Democrats like U.S. Rep. Betsy Markey of the 4th Congressional District, the old Reagan battle lines might not deliver the same punch as they once did, especially beyond the shrimp-boil faithful among the increasing number of swing voters in the state, including young people who never lived through the Reagan years and feel no nostalgia for them.

“The country is on the verge of spending itself out of existence,” said an animated state Rep. Cory Gardner, a Republican from Yuma running against Markey. As the sky drizzled over the shrimp boil hosts’ well-manicured backyard in the tony Warren Lake neighborhood, Gardner railed against taxes and fees as the “enemy of liberty and freedom.” He said he had “sold tractors [his] whole life” and urged the crowd to avoid sending any more “fat cats and bureaucrats” to Washington.

Gardner was unabashedly channeling Reagan and he was stretching. For all of his adult life Gardner has been a lawyer and a legislator. He owns and runs no businesses. His family sells the tractors.

Likewise, Tom Lucero, who is also running against Markey, has pinned his candidacy on the message that he would advance business interests by leaning on the hard-won knowledge he has gained in “creating more than 50 jobs” and having to “meet payroll each week.” By 2010, however, long-time restaurateur Lucero will also have held elected office as a University of Colorado regent for 12 years — making campaign trail digs that he’s a career politician a hard critique to shake.

Notably, when not talking about themselves, Gardner and Lucero stayed abstract. They talked about the country and freedom. Neither man mentioned Markey. Neither man made any reference to her voting record.

As voters know, Markey enjoys solid business credentials. She founded the communications tech company SysCom in the 1980s and in the mid-1990s bought the popular, local Huckleberry’s cafe. In a political teflon-coating vote in this conservative district, Markey did not support Obama’s landmark budget, saying at the time that she was “elected to bring fiscal responsibility back to Washington” and that she believed “Congress must be more aggressive in cutting the deficit.”

Short-hand monikers, therefore, like “fat cat” or “big government tax-and-spend liberal” may be hard to pin on the Fort Collins Democrat.

The Ken Buck brand

Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck is taking a different tack in his run against what he called the state’s “accidental senator” Democrat Michael Bennet, who was appointed by Gov. Bill Ritter to fill the seat of Ken Salazar, who was tapped for Interior secretary by the Obama White House.

Buck didn’t dwell on fiscal policy Friday night and he didn’t hit on social issues. He hit an emotional chord with the crowd by stressing immigration enforcement and gun rights.

“We’re going to win this city and we’re going to win Northern Colorado. The folks in this state are fed up,” he said. “… We have to secure the border and prevent illegal immigrants from coming up here and taking our identities and our jobs.”

Buck made a media splash recently for winning a groundbreaking hate-crimes conviction but also for seizing thousands of confidential records from an income tax office in Greeley in a search for illegal immigrants. The seizure was later declared unconstitutional, a ruling Buck has challenged. His actions in the immigration case have been wildly popular with conservatives but have also been deeply divisive in the heavily Latino Northern Colorado town, which was also the site of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in 2006 that saw hundreds of workers rounded up for deportation.

“You’re fed up with infringements on individual liberties,” he said later. “I want to say it clear: Obama can take my gun out of my cold dead hand,” in an homage to the defiant statement by former NRA chairman Charlton Heston.

But Buck’s political brand — the independent-minded law-and-order immigration warrior — will be challenged in the next year and a half. Even an opponent as untested as Bennet will likely run repeated fact-check campaigns against Buck’s statements on disappearing gun rights and point out the fact at each campaign stop that Obama-era Coloradans own as many guns as they have ever owned and as many as they want to own.

Strident immigration enforcement rhetoric like Buck’s is also under attack — from Colorado Latinos and the left, of course, but also from the right. Influential local conservatives like Archbishop Charles Chaput are already speaking out for immigration policy reform. Speaking at an immigration forum with liberal U.S. Rep. Jared Polis of the 2nd Congressional District this week, Chaput said:

The Catholic commitment to the dignity of the immigrant comes from exactly the same roots as our commitment to the dignity of the unborn child…

Despite all of the heated public argument over the past few years, Americans still find themselves stuck with an immigration system that adequately serves no one. We urgently need the kind of reform that will address our economic and security needs, but will also regularize the status of the many decent undocumented immigrants who help our society to grow.

The Buck campaign will find Chaput difficult to dismiss. Through years of outspoken pro-life advocacy and by essentially campaigning against Obama last year — calling him the most pro-abortion presidential candidate in history — Chaput has more than established his conservative credentials across the state.

Hewitt will get to share his boycott message with “the largest gathering of free-market, pro-capitalism, pro-defense, pro-liberty activists” in the state Friday night as Bob Schaffer’s conservative boot camp, the Leadership Program of the Rockies, graduates its latest class of future leaders Friday night at The Wildlife Experience in Parker.

A veritable who’s who of Colorado conservatives have passed through the 20-year-old training program, which changed its name from the Republican Leadership Program four years ago.

Republican Tom Lucero, one of a host of candidates hoping to take on Democrat Betsy Markey in the 4th Congressional District, sits down with Hewitt and some supporters for a $100-a-plate lunch at Maggiano’s Little Italy in downtown Denver.

It could be an uncomfortable meal. Lucero, who counts Hewitt at the top of his list of advisors, told Fort Collins Coloradoan editor Bob Moore earlier this week he disagrees with Hewitt’s conclusion that what’s good for General Motors is bad for the country. While he shares Hewitt’s concern about the federal government’s role in the iconic automobile company, Moore writes in his blog, “Lucero thinks it’s important for American businesses to succeed, so he draws the line at a boycott.”

“In order for those companies to succeed, Americans are going to have to do business with those companies,” he said.

Distancing himself from Hewitt on the boycott call probably is good politics for Lucero. The 4th Congressional District is home to more than a dozen GM dealerships employing hundreds – people who would be deeply impacted by a boycott.

As the Hewitt fundraiser was set to start at 11 a.m. Friday, only two guests — Lucero and his wife — had confirmed they’d be attending on the event’s Facebook page, but it must be said Lucero’s supporters are still grappling with “a Tweeter” and not all are yet “on a computer at this point.”

As for Hewitt’s plan to boycott GM, echoed by fellow conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh? The Detroit News got this reaction:

“While it’s not surprising that Rush Limbaugh would root for the failure of a national institution for partisan political gain, it is surprising that the other so-called leaders of the Republican party are silently going along with him given how many hard working Americans rely on GM for a living,” said [Democratic National Committee] spokesman Hari Sevugan.

And liberal MSNBC talker Ed Schultz asks, “Conservatives, are you out of your mind?”

What do you say we just kick the American worker in the teeth. What do you say we just give all the money to Wall Street. Let’s just take their health care, let’s take their education, let’s take their jobs. Let’s just genuflect to the Hugh Hewitts of the world.

Let’s watch:

Tom Lucero rallies the crowd at the April 15 'Tea Party' protest in Denver. (Photo/Wendy Norris)

“We have to replicate Obama’s Chicago-style politics, Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals,’ if we’re going to beat the [Democrats],” he told the small group of almost-all retirees. They nodded in agreement but said nothing.

Lucero faces a tough slog between now and Election Day 2010, and he knows it.

He has served the maximum-allowed two terms on the University of Colorado Board of Regents and is looking for a job — as the next U.S. representative of Colorado’s 4th Congressional District.

But his own Larimer County, a must-win area, is in transition. The bellwether northern county has faded over the last few cycles from far-right Republican red to conservative-Democratic purple. Indeed, Larimer County took a star turn in the November election, when voters overwhelmingly helped unseat hardcore social conservative Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave in favor of moderate Democrat Betsy Markey, a long-time Fort Collins resident. Part of that undoing was the result of high profile, local Republican leaders — former U.S. Rep. Jim Johnson, former state Rep. Bill Kaufman and former Republican Party Committee member Betty Ehn, among others — openly defecting from the race amid heated disputes over Musgrave’s campaign tactics and policy priorities.

Sipping a coffee, taking a measure

The Penguin Cafe breakfast attendees were deeply concerned. In discussion spiced with references to membership in Fox News personality Glenn Beck’s 9/12 movement, they all agreed that the country is becoming socialist and that the local GOP was unprepared to meet the challenges presented by today’s army of digitally organized Democrats.

But Lucero wasn’t discouraged. He pointed to the energetic tea party crowds that came out this spring to protest Obama’s big-spending policies. He pointed to how, as a CU regent, he had helped establish the Center for Western Civilization as part of an incremental approach to bolster conservative views on campus, no easy task.

Despite his upbeat efforts, the breakfast conversation kept ringing alarm bells.

Lucero admitted that a lot of people in Larimer choose to identify themselves as conservatives or independents, not as Republicans. The party has fallen out of favor, he said.

Voter registration data supports that impression. As the Colorado Independent reported just before the election last fall, the Larimer County voting population was split into rough thirds with unaffiliated voters coming out on top: 28 percent registered as Democrats, 35 percent as Republicans and 36 percent as unaffiliated. Comparing those figures to figures from 2004 — 26 percent Democrats, 35 percent unaffiliated and 39 percent Republican — makes it clear GOP voters have been peeling off.

“I keep telling people here, you have to choose,” said Lucero. “If you register as a Republican, you can have an influence. It’s in the primaries that you can make a difference and that’s coming up. We have to build that base of voters now.”

Grassroots and Astroturf

One of the breakfasters responded gloomily by relating a story about visiting the Fort Collins GOP office in the fall in search of McCain-Palin lawn signs.

“I guess they were too busy for me. There were just a few young people in the office and they took no interest… I have to ask: Do we have a totally inept GOP organization in Northern Colorado?”

Republican leaders have made mistakes, Lucero admitted. The McCain campaign was badly managed and alienated locals.

“A man like you, who comes into a campaign office to get signs, will probably be eager to make calls and do canvassing. That was a clear lost opportunity.”

Lucero said the party basically “made it as difficult as possible to get involved” but that he knows there is an “organic conservative movement” in Larimer and that candidates like him just need to “build on that momentum.”

The need to emphasize such a basic observation — that there is an “organic conservative” presence in front-range Colorado — would have been unimaginable just half a decade ago.

The GOP representative formerly known as …

Lucero was notably careful to put none of the blame for the local GOP’s woes on Musgrave. In fact he never mentioned the three-term devout Pentecostal congresswoman who the American Conservative Union celebrated in 2006 with a top-dog 99 lifetime rating.

Lucero’s silence regarding Musgrave would come as no surprise to Larimer Democratic Chairman Adam Bowen, who said in an interview that perceptions of the two main political parties have changed over the last three election cycles. Musgrave’s aggressive values agenda, he said, which targeted abortion and sex-ed and gay marriage seemingly above all else, alienated voters.

“Pro-business and fiscal conservatives looked at what was happening with the economy and they saw a narrow Republican social agenda,” he said. “The budget deficit and debt of the Bush years put the lie to Republican fiscal conservativism.”

“Look at the races and the vacancy committees here. You see that business Republicans run for these positions and are defeated. The most active Republicans here are far-right social conservatives and they’re driving folks out of the party.”

For Bowen there is also an important history of grassroots Democratic action in the county that is paying dividends now.

“We never had the big money behind us. Larimer is a microcosm of the kind of organizing [Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard] Dean took national last year.”

It is a crucial point Lucero’s breakfast club found easy to concede. They referred each other to the “Facebook classes” held at a bar in Fort Collins.

“Do you know Tweeter?” one asked. “I mean I guess you can get 10,000 people on a Tweeter and that can have a huge effect.”

Lucero nodded. The others nodded.

“So, how many of you are on a computer at this point?” someone else asked.

(Photo/Vermario, Flickr)

Policy being weighed now in Washington concerning ethanol will have a major impact in states like Colorado, home to Yuma County, one of the most efficient corn-growing regions in the country and a major producer of the biofuel.

As debate over ethanol heats up, the path the Obama Administration is steering looks to be exactly the kind of middle-way, practical political tack that chagrins progressives, in this case energy analysts and environmentalists who want to see the country take bold steps and begin to lead the world in green technology and climate change mitigation.

Supporting ethanol is not at all how they would propose to do that. They say ethanol production and delivery takes so much energy it’s a zero gain or net loss in the battle against CO2 emissions, that it also shifts food farming overseas and leads to loss of carbon-capturing rainforest.

Ethanol production expansion as “farm-country stimulus”
The science behind those forward-thinking arguments is debated, of course. More significant, however, is that the arguments, no matter the validity, are almost impossible to reconcile on the ground.

For farm-country politicians like U.S. Rep. Betsy Markey, whose 4th Congressional District takes in much of northern and eastern Colorado, ethanol is an immediate economic issue, and supporting the industry in a recession doesn’t compromise her alternative-energy credibility anything like supporting traditional fossil fuels might.

“Ethanol is a renewable homegrown fuel available today. Every gallon of ethanol you use is a gallon of gasoline you haven’t burned,” said Dave Cunningham, a longtime ethanol backer in the state who has worked closely with the industry for years. “Look around. There’s no more brown cloud in Denver. Ethanol people can see the mountains sooner coming west from Sterling and they’re proud of that.”

Markey, a Democrat, is co-sponsor of two key ethanol bills. Along with U.S. Rep. John Salazar, a Colorado Democrat from the San Luis Valley, Markey is backing a hot-button amendment to the Clean Air Act being pushed by Minnesota Democrat Colin Peterson, who chairs the House Agriculture Committee. That amendment would limit the way ethanol’s CO2 emissions are measured, a measure Peterson has said he wants passed or he’ll block the larger climate bill being pushed by top Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee, Henry Waxman of California and Ed Markey of Massachusetts.

Congresswoman Markey is also one of two co-sponsors of legislation being pushed by South Dakota Democrat Stephanie Herseth Sandlin to provide incentives through tax breaks to increase ethanol fueling-station infrastructure.

And in April, she signed on to a bipartisan letter to the director of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, urging the agency to raise the ethanol blend cap per gallon of gasoline from 10 percent to 15 percent. The EPA recently extended the Open Comments period on the proposal to the last weeks in June.

Markey spokesman Ben Marter is quick to cite a figure familiar to anyone in the ethanol business and the reason why many are referring to it off-hand as farm-country stimulus: “The 15 percent blend translates to 135,000 jobs.”

Markey acknowledges the precarious position of ethanol in the next-generation energy industry and the difficulty in assessing the promises and risks of future fuel and transportation technologies. But the congresswoman believes that the benefits of ethanol right now are rich, Marter said.

“She sees ethanol as a bridge technology. She believes corn-based ethanol is crucial in moving the country toward energy independence.”

Ethanol isn’t as recession-proof as proponents claim
In Colorado as elsewhere, Markey’s “bridge technology” is heaving.

Denver’s BioFuel Energy, founded in 2005 during what many call the ethanol boom, plunged this year from a one-time share-price of $7.75 down to 35 cents. The company’s now trading at 65 cents per share but is hanging in the balance. BioFuel Energy, which owns and operates two 115 million gallon-per-year plants in Minnesota and Nebraska, announced Thursday that it received a Notice of Default from its lenders and posted a press release like a dispatch from the ethanol front.

Should the lenders delay or prevent the company from gaining access to funds… The Company may have to curtail or cease its operations, which would likely result in its inability to continue as a going concern and force it to seek relief from creditors through a filing under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.

Broomfield-based Range Fuels, the company behind a pilot cellulosic plant in Denver that converts biomass from Colorado beetle-killed pine trees into fuel, confirms that it has secured funding and is moving forward with its cellulosic ethanol plant in Georgia.

But in February, Canadian ethanol company Lignol suspended a similar beetle-kill ethanol project slated for Grand Junction. The reasoning, according to the company, included “the instability of energy prices, the uncertainty in the capital markets and the general market malaise.”

Bill Pentack, a spokesman for Texas-based Panda Ethanol, told the Colorado Independent that once-celebrated plans for a major 115 million gallon-per-year ethanol refinery in Yuma County were on hold indefinitely.

“There’s no timeline for that project now. The window for financing new green-field ethanol facilities in the United States has been closed for quite some time.”

Supplanting corn-based ethanol for cleaner renewable energy
With the industry dipping, now would be the time to shut it down, say ethanol’s critics, and move the country more toward cleaner wind and solar energy.

But no farm-country politician, including Obama from Illinois, would do that.

There are five ethanol plants in Colorado employing hundreds of workers. What’s more, the present ethanol infrastructure will serve much cleaner next-generation cellulosic ethanol. An inarguably clean fuel, cellulosic ethanol can be made from low-water consuming prairie switch grass and bio waste. It displaces no land for food farming.

There is also the fact that Denver is a substantial market for ethanol, something that surely plays in the minds of Colorado’s delegation in D.C.

Yet, the rules under consideration in the nation’s capital might effectively take those decisions out of the hands of lawmakers.

The controversial draft rule on ethanol emissions the EPA is considering would take into account estimates of indirect carbon emissions — not just what comes out of your tailpipe but the emissions from production and distribution and from land conversion here and overseas, including rainforest.

It’s a move that would amount to a radical shift, signaling a whole new level of seriousness on the part of the U.S. to mitigate climate change. The rule would essentially move corn-ethanol out of the alternative fuel category, drying up federal money and hobbling the industry.

Failing to raise the ethanol blend in gasoline to 15 percent would also send a clear message that national leaders have lost faith in contemporary ethanol, in effect cutting losses after investing tax money heavily for a decade.

“Ethanol is not busting,” says Steve McNinch, CEO for Kansas-based Western Plains Energy, which ships 50 million gallons of ethanol to Colorado annually and 10 percent of its production to the Denver market alone.

“There have been growing pains but ethanol as we know it today is a whole new industry. Critics are looking at baseline data from 2004, before the boom.”

Efficiency has gone way up. Yields have climbed and the approach to energy use and waste has shifted.

“They’re producing more from local corn, transporting less. And they’re making both ethanol and feed for livestock in the process now, basically getting two bites at the cob,” Cunningham said.

And most observers agree that raising the blend cap to 15 percent is the only way to reach the levels for clean fuel established by the Renewable Fuel Standard passed in 2007, the standard which has dictated industry expectations ever since.

“We’re not in a bust and we’re not looking for a stimulus,” McNinch said. He maintains that if the debate in Washington is centered on the facts, ethanol will win.

The facts, though, are probably more fungible than the political realities of the current recession.

Roll Call.com reports today that Yuma Republican and House Minority Whip Cory Gardner is set to announce his bid to challenge Fourth District U.S. Rep. Betsy Markey in 2010.

UPDATE: Rep. Gardner is reportedly making a campaign announcement Thursday afternoon to officially enter the race, according to email exchanges to and published by national political media outlets leaving local reporters and politicos in the dust and scratching their heads over yet another bungled GOP candidate roll-out.

Speculation about Gardner’s intentions has been leaking throughout April as the state legislative session, dominated by a fiscal crisis, GOP filibusters and general partisan mayhem, wound to a close.

Gardner would join already announced Republican candidate CU Regent Tom Lucero and a grassroots campaign pushing ex-Fort Collins City Councilman Diggs Brown to run in what could shape up to be a raucous multi-way primary a la the 2006 and 2008 Fifth District races that have battered and bruised several GOP candidates.

If Gardner has anything going for him, besides his boyish charm and stump speech talents, it’s that he’s a big hit among the Republican base. A conservative acolyte of former Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, who lost the CD 4 seat in a contentious 2008 race with Markey, and newly announced U.S. Senate candidate Ken Buck, Gardner was well-received by the recent Tax Day Tea Party protesters:

Whether that translates into the ability to raise money is another deal entirely.

Markey smashed fund raising records for all freshman members of Congress in the first quarter of their first term — hauling in $340,000 between January and March. Ben Marter, spokesman for the Fort Collins Democrat, told the Greeley Tribune that three-fourths of the contributions came from in-state donors, belying criticism that Markey won’t be able to hold the seat.

Rep.-elect Betsy Markey waves to members of her staff during her victory speech after defeating Rep. Marilyn Musgrave. (Photo/Jason Kosena)

Fund raising by 10 House incumbents in the chamber’s most perennially competitive districts topped $2.56 million during the first three months of this year, according to a Washington Independent analysis of campaign-finance reports filed this week to the Federal Election Commission. That total represents an 18 percent increase from the 10 House districts’ incumbent fund raising during the similar post-election period in 2007.

The Senate money chase is also hitting dizzying heights despite the dismal economy. Total fund raising for the five closest races in the upper chamber, as rated by the independent Cook Political Report, hit $8.3 million during the first three months of 2009, an increase of 39 percent compared with five similarly competitive races during the same period in 2007.

The congressional fund raising juggernaut is pushing onward this year even as the U.S. savings rate climbs higher than it has in a decade and personal spending falls into negative territory. Paradoxically enough, campaign-finance analysts said that the economic crisis is likely pushing even more cash into Washington coffers as lawmakers embark on an unprecedented marathon of spending and legislating, from health-care reform to a possible second stimulus bill.

“The federal government is getting more intimately involved in the economy than we’ve seen in history, except perhaps for the Great Depression,” said Craig Holman, legislative representative for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch. “So we have special interests, the executive and management class of business in particular, investing much more heavily in lobbying Capitol Hill, and in fund raising on behalf of congressional candidates.”

The Washington Independent chose 10 House districts and five Senate races to analyze based on Cook’s ratings of competitive races for the first quarters of 2005, 2007, and 2009. Each of those three-month windows represents the first fund raising lap of a new cycle.

The 10 selected House districts run the gamut in terms of income and state-wide political preference. Only three of the seats are held by the same incumbent that was in office in 2005, and the partisan makeup of the 10 has changed dramatically during the past two election cycles: The seats are controlled by seven Democrats and three Republicans today, compared with two Democrats and eight Republicans four years ago.

That GOP-dominated slate actually experienced a better fund raising climate in early 2005 than the mostly Democratic incumbents enjoyed during the first months of this year. Sitting lawmakers in the 10 districts raised $2.66 million in the first quarter of 2005, nearly $100,000 more than was raised in the same areas in the comparable period this year.

If campaign fund raising tracked the economy’s overall performance — which grew steadily before showing the first signs of decline in early 2008 — the 10 House incumbents could be expected to have reaped more cash in 2007 than in the previous cycle before falling in 2009. But the 10 districts actually saw less incumbent fund raising in early 2007 than in the same period in 2005 or 2009.

As Sunlight Foundation Senior Fellow Bill Allison pointed out, the political season after the Democrats took back Congress in 2006 was hardly ripe for heavy giving.

“You had a Republican president who wasn’t eager to endorse the ideas of the new Congress,” Allison said. “Between the vetoes and the slimmer [Democratic] majority, not as much was getting done in Congress, which might have been less incentive for people to give … if there’s less on sale, there’s going to be less money coming in.”

Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, concurred that those most likely to donate to a congressional campaign are even more concerned with getting bang for their buck during a productive legislative term.

“Remember that givers are [part of] a small elite, particularly in congressional and Senate races,” McGehee said, “Less than 1 percent of all Americans give $200 or more. Because of that, what you have are people who want to stay active in the political system, because they feel like the system has a fairly big impact either on their business or on an issue they care passionately about.”

Another possible reason why fund raising hasn’t dropped along with Americans’ bank balances is the role played by “ordinary” donors in the 2008 presidential campaign. The Obama campaign often touted small contributions as the key ingredient in its success, raising the prospect of a radical re-orientation of the campaign-finance landscape.

But in reality, as the non-partisan Campaign Finance Institute found after the election, low-dollar donations made up about the same percentage of Obama’s war chest, 25 percent, as they did of George W. Bush’s — making everyday folks less important to candidates’ fund raising future.

“There was no indication that [small-dollar giving] had spillover into congressional races,” said Holman, of Public Citizen, “and I would expect it to completely fade away after the 2008 presidential election.”

What has faded slightly, thanks to the flailing economy, is individual donations to corporate political action committees (PACs). A Wall Street Journal analysis conducted earlier this month concluded that corporate PAC contributions fell by 6 percent during the first two months of this year relative to 2007, after increasing by at least one-third during the first quarters of the three previous election cycles.

Why would giving to corporate PACs slow down while giving to candidates rises? Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, noted that donors who give to their senator or congressman have different motivations than workers who write a check to the company PAC.

“Individuals giving to corporate PACs represent a slightly broader spectrum of a company’s workforce,” Krumholz said. “With PACs, it’s relatively smaller donations coming on a routine basis. For large individual donors [to candidates], these are CEOs, vice-presidents, partners — they’re giving in a concerted way.”

Looking at the rise in fund raising this year for the five most closely contested Senate seats reveals more unexpected trends. While the total amount raised for competitive Senate races has increased steadily, rising about 30 percent between the first quarter of 2005 and the same period in 2007, the rising pace of retirements has pushed more candidates into the hunt early.

Three of the five top races this year, in Ohio, Florida, and Missouri, are to claim open seats, and all are expected to draw at least three serious candidates. The remaining two, in Kentucky and Connecticut, have already drawn two challengers to the incumbent. (The Pennsylvania Senate field was firmed up too late in the quarter for significant fund raising to occur, and the New York and Illinois fields have yet to be settled.)

By contrast, the first quarter of 2007 saw only two of five competitive battles already joined: Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) knew she would face Rep. Tom Allen (D-Maine), and Democrat Al Franken had begun raising money to take on Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.). Senate campaigns were even sleepier in the first months of 2005, with Minnesota’s open seat attracting interest but no other race drawing a challenger to the incumbent.

Perhaps because of that boom in Senate fund raising, the average amount raised per candidate has fallen for the most competitive races as winners and losers are crowned at a notably early point in the election cycle. Average fund raising per candidate in the five Senate races studied by The Washington Independent hit $768,000 in the first quarter of 2005 and $858,000 during the same period in 2007, before falling to $761,000 in the same period this year.

The first quarter of 2009, however, is only the beginning of the money tree-shaking that will occur as the two parties gear up for next year’s midterm election. And whether or not the weak economy starts to impede congressional fund raising, the primacy of economic rescue efforts will ensure that lawmakers have plenty more openings to dial for dollars.

“For the average citizen, the election is over and they’re not even going to think about it for the next four years,” Allison, of the Sunlight Foundation, said. But the donors “who are paying close attention,” he added, have a vested interest in what Congress does — or does not — pass into law this year.

Elana Schor is a freelance political reporter in Washington, DC. She has previously written for Talking Points Memo, The Guardian and The Hill.

And despite announcing his CD 4 candidacy to oppose her mere months after she was elected, University of Colorado Board of Regents Vice Chair Tom Lucero, a Republican, has been relatively invisible — at least when he wasn’t ducking impropriety charges on the stand in the Ward Churchill witch hunt trial. Lucero’s fund raising, like his record of experience, will surely be no match for Markey’s.

According to a Markey press release, the Fort Collins Democrat drew cash from an expanding bipartisan base in the 4th District:

Today Congresswoman Betsy Markey announced that she has raised more than $340,000 in the first quarter of 2009. Markey’s total is the highest amount ever raised by a freshman representative for the first quarter in Colorado history.

[...]

Markey’s fundraising numbers represent support from nearly 600 individual donors-Republicans, Democrats, and Independents-from across the 4th congressional district. Over 75% of the campaign’s contributions came from donors inside Colorado.

Markey has already established a voting record of note. She seems either refreshingly non-ideological or extremely savvy or both. She has already voted for guns and against the Obama budget, for example. Newspapers are writing about her record, and she’s been making news for weeks for supporting rancher property rights against the Army’s plan to gulp up land in Pinon Canyon.

Contrast that with Lucero’s version of glib on the stand at the Churchill trial:

Lucero testified … that he never told then-CU President Betsy Hoffman — at the height of the controversy over Ward Churchill’s 9-11 essay — that he wanted the professor fired…

He said he actually hoped Churchill wouldn’t be fired so he could continue using the ethnic studies professor as a “poster boy” for campus reforms he favored, including bringing more conservative faculty members to universities and overhauling the system of tenure.

So the first quarter of the long race goes to Democratic incumbent Markey by leaps and bounds.

Also a note: What happened to the YouTube of Markey standing by the fence at Pinon Canyon and making assurances about fighting for the land? It’s gone from her government site. …

The Fort Collins Democrat has established a pattern of bucking her party on key issues while at the same time siding with House leadership more often than most of her colleagues, the Fort Collins Coloradoan’s Bob Moore writes in a detailed assessment of Markey’s first three months in office.

In her most recent break with Democratic leaders, Markey was among a group of Democrats mostly elected from traditionally Republican districts which also voted for presidential nominee John McCain. Here’s Markey’s statement explaining her vote against the budget resolution, which passed 233-196:

I support the President’s long-term economic plan to rebuild our economy by cutting the federal deficit and making strategic investments in energy, education, health care. I grappled with this budget, but ultimately could not support it. I was elected to bring fiscal responsibility back to Washington, and I believe that Congress must be more aggressive in cutting our deficit. At a time when families all across the country are tightening their belts, we can do a better job of rooting out inefficiencies, and cutting out government waste.

The rest of Colorado’s congressional delegation split along party lines, with Republican U.S. Reps. Doug Lamborn and Mike Coffman opposing the resolution and Democratic U.S. Reps. Diana DeGette, Jared Polis, John Salazar and Ed Perlmutter voting in favor. Both senators, Democrats Mark Udall and Michael Bennet, voted for a slightly different version of the budget, which passed the Senate 55-43.

“I look at every piece of legislation that comes through Congress and evaluate it on its merits,” Markey wrote in an opinion column published in newspapers throughout the 4th District last week.

With a 76-vote margin, House Democrats have the luxury to let lawmakers from swing districts break ranks, Moore noted.

Robert Duffy, chairman of the University of Colorado’s political science department, told the Coloradoan, “[It] is not unusual for the leadership to ‘allow’ members from iffy districts to break with the party on votes that could be problematic back home. This is especially so when the vote is not expected to be a nail-biter.”

Moore cited three other high-profile examples where Markey has voted against House leadership:

• She cast a largely symbolic vote to block release of the second half of the $700 billion financial bailout package approved by the previous Congress.

• She was among 24 Democrats who voted against a mortgage-relief package for homeowners facing foreclosure.

• And Markey was among 63 Democrats who supported an amendment that weakened proposed compensation limits for executives in companies receiving federal bailout money. The amendment removed the compensation limits for companies that entered into a repayment agreement with the government.

In other areas, Markey is solidly with the Democratic majority — voting with her party 97.9 percent of the time, Moore noted. She signed on as a co-sponsor of the Employee Free Choice Act and voting to pass the $800 billion federal stimulus bill, which President Barack Obama signed in Denver. Markey’s party loyalty scores higher than the 93.8 percent average for House Democrats and 89.9 percent average for House Republicans, Moore calculated. The vast majority of votes are on procedural and noncontroversial matters that often pass with near unanimity, he added.

This week she made news for unabashed strong stances on two controversial issues: She defied the president and attorney general by publicly opposing the reintroduction of an assault weapons ban. Then she defied the business lobby and co-sponsored the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

She didn’t have to do either of those things. She didn’t have to stand up and tell anyone what she thought. Hell, no. When it came time, she could have simply voted against the gun ban and she could have waited to see what happened with the pro-Labor EFCA instead of putting her name on it.

But gutsy Betsy Markey didn’t play it like that. Depending on your perspective, she’s either naïve or unencumbered by politics as usual. As Politico reports:

Markey is one of a surprisingly large number of Democratic freshmen sitting in competitive seats who have … challenged the conventional wisdom that at-risk, first-term members should avoid high-profile positions on tough votes.

[…]

There’s no question that in Markey’s case, there is considerable risk to her [EFCA] position. In her Republican-oriented district on Colorado’s Front Range, the area’s 6 percent unionization rate is about half the national average, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates. The Chamber of Commerce in the largest city in her district, Fort Collins, has lobbied her to oppose the measure.

Markey makes the case for fully unionized workers and fully loaded AK 47s, even though there’s almost none of the former and probably not a whole lot of the latter floating around the 4th District. That’s fresh.

When she voted for Obama’s stimulus package, she told The Rocky Mountain News she wasn’t concerned with the partisan jabs she’d be taking as a result:

… at this point, I’m really not taking that into consideration. I’m just trying to do my job … The vast majority of [my constituents] are Republican. This is a conservative district … But they know help is needed, that we cannot just allow [ourselves] to do nothing. That is reckless behavior if we would just let the economy continue in a downward spiral. I mean, I think that is a fiscally irresponsible thing to do. The government needs to take action. This is bold action. I think we are in a situation where the cost of doing nothing is huge.

The men already gunning for her seat — official candidate Tom Lucero and unofficial candidate state Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Yuma — with their amateur buzzword pitches (here and here), seem like poseurs by comparison, which is exactly what the GOP does not need in its candidates right now.

The impression that Republicans post-Bush are all pose and no policy is a problem the party doesn’t seem to know how to fix. Mastering Twitter and Facebook are not going to do it.

And neither is jumping aboard excitable Fox Friend Glenn Beck’s crazy-train tour of the country’s FEMA re-education camps!

Josh Penry, state Senate minority leader and gubernatorial hopeful, won’t support the federal stimulus package or state budget reform but he’ll help Glenn Beck look for the “monsters under the bed.” No amount of Twittering is gonna make that look like leadership for a country in economic crisis.

The Chamber saluted Markey by press release for backing the stimulus bill, citing Obama administration figures that the district would gain 8,800 jobs over the next two years.

“Since the elections, we’ve worked with the President and Congresswoman Markey to quickly pass a bill that would apply a defibrillator to the economy and shock it back to life,” said Bruce Josten, the U.S. Chamber’s executive vice president of Government Affairs.

“While not everyone in Washington or Colorado agrees on every item in this package, the whole is more important than the individual parts,” Josten said. “Our economy is in uncharted and dangerous waters and inaction from Washington is not an option.”

On the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, the DCCC listed 40 incumbents likely to be targeted in 2010 by their campaign season nemesis, the National Republican Congressional Committee. The Dem incumbents will receive early financial rainmaking via independent expenditures in the way of ads and direct mail in order to expand the candidates’ voter outreach and online networking.

In the last election cycle, the DCCC pumped a state record $1.11 million into the Markey-Musgrave slugfest renown for its vicious attack ads to counter the $1.14 million from the NRCC.