Former state rep mounts last-minute Republican primary challenge to U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District 

Republican U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd is headed for a primary against former state Rep. Ron Hanks in his bid to hold onto his western Colorado congressional seat. 

The development comes after Hanks, who served in the Colorado House from 2021 to early 2023, launched a last-minute campaign to secure a spot on the Republican primary ballot during the party’s state assembly in Pueblo. Hanks won enough support from party delegates during an April 10 voice vote, meaning he will challenge Hurd to be the Republican nominee for the 3rd Congressional District in the June 30 primary. 

The 3rd Congressional District stretches from the northwestern corner of Colorado throughout most of the Western Slope and also swings east to include Pueblo. 

Hurd and Hanks previously faced each other in the 2024 Republican primary to represent the district after U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, who had held the seat since 2021, abandoned her re-election bid to run for the 4th Congressional District in eastern Colorado. 

Hurd went on to beat Hanks in the primary by a nearly 13-percentage-point margin before winning the general election against his Democratic opponent, former Aspen City Council member Adam Frisch, by 5%. 

Hurd did not seek support from party delegates to secure a spot on the June primary ballot and instead gathered petition signatures to qualify. 

“I respect the assembly process and the role that all of you play in it. That’s why I’m here,” Hurd told a crowd during the party’s assembly in Pueblo. “But I made my decision to get on the ballot by petition, and I’m confident in that path.”

A video posted on X shows several crowd members booing Hurd following his comments. 

Hurd’s second major primary threat 

Hanks is the latest Republican to mount a challenge to Hurd over what he sees as Hurd’s weak conservative policies and lack of loyalty to President Donald Trump. 

“This is Conservative Colorado, Jeff.  We support President Trump and America First … and you threatened (Donald Trump) you’d ruin it all,” Hanks wrote in an April 10 post on X. “(3rd District) voters will have your seat, Jeff. WE want to drain the swamp. You are part of it.”

Hurd previously faced a primary threat from Hope Scheppelman, a Navy veteran and a former vice chair of the Colorado Republican Party, who said Hurd is “dead set against President Trump and the millions of MAGA citizens like me who demand that Congress does the will of voters.”

Trump himself pulled his support from Hurd in February after the congressman joined a small group of House Republicans and nearly every Democrat in voting to oppose the president’s tariffs on Canada. Hurd said the tariffs were hurting agricultural and steel producers in his district.

In a reversal, Trump re-endorsed Hurd for re-election in March and convinced Scheppelman to drop her primary bid against him, saying he was giving her a position in his administration. 

Asked last month how that would affect the race, a spokesperson for Hurd said, “Congressman Hurd is confident that the voters of (the 3rd Congressional District) will vote to re-elect him because he has consistently voted to put the district first.”

Hanks runs to Hurd’s right 

Like Scheppelman, Hanks has pounced on Hurd’s legislative record. 

While Hurd has supported much of the policy agenda of congressional Republicans and the Trump administration, including the GOP’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act, he has also broken with his party at times and worked with Democrats on issues ranging from public lands to health care.  

Hanks called out Hurd’s support for a sweeping conservation bill, the Gunnison Outdoor Resource Protection, or GORP Act, which Hurd is co-sponsoring alongside Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper. The measure would enhance federal protections for some 730,000 acres of Western Slope land across Gunnison, Saguache, Ouray, Hinsdale, Delta and Pitkin counties. 

“NOBODY locks up the land tighter than the federal government,” Hanks wrote in an April 11 X post criticizing Hurd and the GORP Act. Lock It Up, and Watch It Burn.”

Hurd said he championed the bill because it has support from local communities, including several counties, municipalities, conservation and recreation groups, as well as the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe.

During an interview last year, he said his message on public lands during his campaign for Congress was to “make sure that we have federal lands management decisions that have the buy-in of the people that are affected by them.”

Hanks was in the spotlight at the beginning of his tenure as a state representative for attending Trump’s election denial speech in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, which preceded the riot at the U.S. Capitol. He said at the time that he had marched with other Trump supporters to the Capitol and protested outside the building. 

He has supported Trump’s false claim that he won the 2020 election against Joe Biden. 

Asked by The Colorado Sun in 2024 whether they believed Biden was the winner of that election, Hanks said “no,” while Hurd said, “yes.”

On the Democratic side, two Aspen area candidates are running in the June primary to be the nominee to take on Hurd. They are businessman Alex Kelloff, the co-founder of Armada Skis, and Dwayne Romero, a former member of the Aspen City Council and Aspen School District Board of Education.