Blaha, Glenn Spar Right Up To Colorado GOP Senate Primary

DENVER (AP) — Colorado's five-way Republican Senate primary campaign goes to the voters Tuesday with a last-ditch effort by conservative Colorado Springs businessman Robert Blaha to discredit fellow El Paso County conservative Darryl Glenn's commitment to the party's presumptive presidential nominee.

Blaha blasted Glenn for accepting endorsements from politicians who haven't backed Donald Trump, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, the first Republican senator to say he won't vote for the billionaire businessman.

"Glenn makes backroom deals for money and power. He is the permanent political class," said Blaha, who's running as an anti-establishment outsider.

Glenn's campaign said in a statement that "Darryl has always committed to supporting the GOP presidential nominee." It didn't mention Trump by name; just two weeks ago, Glenn earnestly pitched for Trump.

"I am tired of people out there saying, 'Well, I can't support Mr. Trump.' He is our presumptive nominee, and people need to get over it," Glenn told a Highlands Ranch fundraiser. He said deciding who gets the next U.S. Supreme Court nominations far outweighs any Trump negatives.

Blaha's criticisms also reflect concern that Glenn, who'd run a shoestring campaign, gained late momentum with the endorsement of — and hundreds of thousands of dollars from — the tea party-aligned Senate Conservatives Fund.

Colorado's Democratic Party spent most of the GOP campaign targeting former state Rep. Jon Keyser. It's now focused on Glenn, saying his "extreme" positions would only add to "Washington dysfunction."

That dysfunction — and Bennet's association with it as an incumbent — has animated the GOP campaign, including bids by retired businessman Jack Graham and ex-Aurora City Councilman Ryan Frazier.

Graham, a recent convert to the GOP, staged a self-funded advertising blitz in the closing weeks. He rejected his opponents' attempts to cast him as a moderate for supporting abortion rights and a Senate hearing for Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland. "Policy in Washington has been enslaved by dogma and ideology," he says.

Frazier, a self-described conservative libertarian, calls the Iran deal "one of the biggest foreign policy debacles of our time." Like Graham, he has yet to endorse Trump.

"If I'm going to call out Bennet for voting with (President Barack) Obama 98 percent of the time, and I go to Washington and do the same thing, how does that make me different?" he says.

To the end, Keyser stressed his personal combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan to attack Bennet's support for the Iran deal.

By James Anderson, AP Writer