A former member of the Boulder City Council has filed two election complaints over two new political mailers that began circulating recently.
The more controversial of the mailers, which was paid for by the Working Families Party National PAC, was an attack ad centered on Boulder mayor candidate Bob Yates, who currently serves on City Council.
The ad also mentioned the three other candidates for this year’s mayoral contest, which will be done via ranked choice voting: Councilmember Nicole Speer, incumbent Mayor Aaron Brockett and Paul Tweedlie.
The front of the mailer states that the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, was a “direct attack on our democracy, our values and our freedoms” and that Yates was a registered Republican until May 2022, “16 months after the insurrection.”
The back side of the mailers said Yates is “too conservative for Boulder” and urged voters to rank both Speer and Brockett, but not rank Yates or Tweedlie in the election.
Tweedlie is currently a registered Republican, while Yates is now unaffiliated.
A second mailer, paid for by the Colorado Working Families Party, endorsed a number of progressive candidates and ballot measures across the Front Range.
Former city council member Crystal Gray, who served on the council from 2003 to 2011, told the Daily Camera she initially decided to file a complaint after receiving the Yates attack ad in the mail on Friday. She found its content “troublesome” and said it violated Boulder election rules against “fraudulent misrepresentation” of a candidate.
“This is just a misrepresentation of Yates by trying to associate him with the insurrection on Jan. 6,” Gray said. “The negative and fraudulent campaigning — that was what drew me into this whole thing, and this whole insinuation that somehow being a Republican associated you with the insurrection.”
However, Gray began to have other concerns about both of the WFP mailers. She said the group did not adhere to city rules about forming committees for issues and candidates as well as reporting campaign expenditures.
She filed her initial complaint Tuesday but amended it the following day into two separate complaints: one against the WFP National PAC and another against the Colorado WFP. Boulder City Clerk Elesha Johnson has confirmed that independent groups such as the WFP are subject to the same Boulder election rules as any other person or group.
“(The intent of the complaints is) really to have transparency in contribution and expenditure so you can be confident that there’s not dark money (and) that large campaign contributions do not cause corruption, or the appearance of corruption, in the election process,” Gray said.
Reached for comment Thursday afternoon, Colorado WFP Organizing Director Kat Traylor wrote in a statement that she could not comment on the specifics of the complaints since she had not seen them yet, but that the WFP National PAC did not coordinate with any candidates or campaigns in developing its mailers and that the group “places a high priority on compliance with campaign finance and transparency laws.” She also wrote that she is “confident” the group filed the correct type of registration.
Further, Traylor wrote that the only factual claim in the mailer about Yates was that he changed his voter registration in the spring of 2022.
“Based on that,” she wrote, “we opined reasonably that the insurrection must not have been sufficient motivation for him to switch.” She added that the complaints were most likely “a political tactic and a wasteful attempt to distract from the real issues” that have been raised about Yates.
“The mailer … highlights the fact that Councilmember Bob Yates remained a registered Republican through Donald Trump’s election, presidency and re-election campaign, and well after the Jan. 6 insurrection. During the Trump years, many Republicans of conscience left the party and worked to stop Trump and his extremist MAGA movement, but Councilmember Bob Yates didn’t leave the party until soon before he decided to run for mayor in heavily Democratic Boulder,” Traylor wrote.
“We believe that Councilmember Yates should explain to the progressive voters of Boulder why he remained a Republican so long after the insurrection and what exactly he did to stand up to the MAGA extremists in his party during that time.”
Traylor wrote that the WFP also believes Yates should renounce his recent endorsement from the Colorado Conservative Patriot Alliance, which she called an “extremist right-wing organization whose leader is a former MAGA Trump Colorado chairman and … (that) is opposed to same-sex marriage, abortion rights, immigration, gun control, and environmentalism.”
Regardless of the validity of the complaints, the attack ad against Yates has angered a swath of the Boulder community. Photos of the mailer began circulating on social media over the past several days, sparking furious commentary from the public and demands for both Brockett and Speer to formally denounce the flyers.
Brockett posted a statement Tuesday on Facebook saying he was “disappointed” with the mailer, which he felt was meant to imply that Yates’ former Republican affiliation “connected him somehow to the Jan. 6 insurrection.”
“I’ve worked with Bob for many years, and while we sometimes disagree, I know him to be a good and decent human being who in no way supported or condoned the events on Jan. 6,” Brockett wrote. “Personal attacks like these should have no place in Boulder politics. I hope that for the last two weeks of election season we can all focus instead on candidates’ policies and priorities for our beloved city.”
Speer told the Daily Camera her campaign was not involved in sending or paying for the mailers, which she called “biased and single-sided.” She said that for her campaign to have engaged with an independent party in that way would have been illegal.
“I think my campaign is running an entirely positive issues-based campaign to make Boulder more resilient to climate change, more affordable and more inclusive,” Speer said. “In this political space that we operate in, having mean-spirited or questionable things said about you is, unfortunately, to be expected. … Politics isn’t always pretty, but one thing that I’ve seen from my time on council is that at the end of the day, when the voters decide who their next council will be, we’re all going to dust ourselves off and work together to do the work that we were elected to do.”
In a newsletter sent out Wednesday, Yates himself alluded to the attacks, saying people who opposed his election were “flinging mud” and that he would not “go into the gutter” to respond in kind.
“Recently, opponents of my election as Boulder’s mayor — and the election to city council of the four women who I support — have started attacking us ruthlessly and untruthfully. We knew that it was probably inevitable, that there would be some sort of ‘October surprise,’ once our opponents, depleted of any good arguments why they should prevail, would resort to meanness and lies,” he wrote.
“Our supporters have urged us to fight back, to respond blow for blow. We will not. We will not dignify dishonest attacks with rebuttal. Sometimes, the best response to an insult is a quiet smile.”
