Recall Fights in Colorado Grow Fiercer in Last Days
By JACK HEALY
PUEBLO, Colo. — At first, Angela Giron was surprised to find herself in the cross hairs of a campaign to recall Colorado lawmakers who had supported a slate of new gun-control laws. She had won her State Senate seat by a 10-point margin. Her Southern Colorado district is heavily Hispanic and reliably Democratic, hardly ideal terrain to oust a lawmaker with Mexican roots whose mother once worked picking beans.
"I thought, what the heck?" Ms. Giron said. "Why would they do that?"
But over the summer, Ms. Giron found herself at the center of a citizen-led recall campaign heavily financed by the National Rifle Association and other conservative groups and Second Amendment advocates, who have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertisements and mailings to oust her and a fellow Democrat, John Morse, the president of the Colorado Senate.
In her fight, Ms. Giron has found support among liberal groups and unions across the state, as well as gun-control supporters with deep pockets like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, who contributed $350,000 to fight the recall campaigns. Emily's List, which supports Democratic women who favor abortion rights, and New York's junior Democratic senator, Kirsten E. Gillibrand, have also sent fund-raising e-mails urging their supporters to help Ms. Giron.
The campaigns have grown from a novelty into the central political battle here in Colorado. Fiercely fought and heavily financed by outside groups, they are widely seen as referendums on whether swing-state Democrats can survive the populist reaction after supporting gun restrictions.
On Tuesday, constituents in this struggling old steel town will go to the polls to decide whether Ms. Giron should be ejected from office before her term is up. A former police official, George Rivera, will be on the ballot as her potential Republican replacement. Mr. Morse, too, will face a recall vote in his Colorado Springs district, about 45 miles to the north.
But even as national interest crested, Ms. Giron and Mr. Morse have tried to focus on local issues. In a race dominated by guns, Ms. Giron has promoted her support for laws on juvenile offenders and overtime pay, and how she helped secure money for a new academic building at the Pueblo campus of Colorado State University.
As the race barreled into its final days, the two Democrats and their opponents stepped up what has become an all-out fight for every vote in the two Senate districts, which have less than 200,000 registered voters. On Sunday, 80 volunteers gathered inside a union hall in Pueblo for their marching orders: Find supporters, and get them to the polls. After thanking everyone, Ms. Giron, clipboard in hand, set out for another day of knocking on doors and rallying support.
"I'm a fast walker," she said as she headed out through a working-class neighborhood under a sweltering morning sun.
But it was slow. Most people, it seemed, were either at church or still asleep, so Ms. Giron scrawled her hellos onto glossy leaflets and wedged them into doorways. One man responded to her knocks by shouting, "I already voted!" from his living room. Ms. Giron thanked him, and moved on.
She guessed she has knocked on about 4,000 doors this summer, defending her pivotal support for new laws that require background checks on private gun sales and limit ammunition magazines to 15 rounds. She recalled one voter who approached her and yelled, "Angela, I'm so mad at you! I can't sell my guns at the garage sale."
"I thought, well, that's a good thing," she said.
Ms. Giron had never fired a gun before this winter, when Colorado's Democratic-controlled legislature began an emotional and divisive effort to pass the state's first new gun-control laws in more than a decade. Despite almost unanimous opposition from Republicans, Democrats pushed ahead with the bills, calling them a moderate, sensible response to mass shootings at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
As the debate raged and pro-gun billboards popped up in her district, Ms. Giron held several overflowing town hall meetings. She went to a target range with a women's club and shot off a few rounds. She spent weekends sifting through e-mails. When she went outside to water her garden or buy groceries, she said, people would approach her to talk about the gun laws.
It was a lot of pressure, she said this spring. "People all over the country were looking at us."
Ultimately, she decided to vote for the gun laws, though at the last minute, she reversed course and withdrew her support for a bill that would have restricted concealed weapons on college campuses. Her votes infuriated conservatives and Second Amendment advocates around Pueblo. They said Ms. Giron had sold herself to voters as a moderate Democrat with rural values when she was first elected in 2010, and they felt betrayed by her stance on gun control.
After the laws were signed, Victor Head, a plumber, borrowed $4,000 from his grandmother and started gathering signatures to put Ms. Giron's name on the ballot for a special recall election. He said he was taken aback by the flood of attention and cash.
"I didn't realize the implications it would have," Mr. Head said.
In Pueblo, more than 23,000 people have voted early, but gun control was not always the driving factor behind their decision. Several people interviewed Sunday said they were just dedicated liberals or conservatives, voting along party lines. Some said that they disagreed with Ms. Giron's gun votes, but that they were even more against an expensive special election to recall her.
But Jim Nunn and his wife, both supporters of the recall, relished the chance to replace Ms. Giron with a candidate with more conservative social and economic views.
"It gives us a chance to voice our opinions a little louder," Mr. Nunn said. "If we'd have waited, people would have forgotten."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/us/recall-fights-in-colorado-grow-fiercer-in-last-days.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&pagewanted=print
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