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But Tipton's congressional career is over, after his defeat Tuesday by gun rights activist and gun-themed restaurant owner Lauren Boebert. The first-time candidate, who spent less than $120,000 on her race, unseated Tipton on the premise that the co-chair of President Donald Trump's Colorado campaign was not sufficiently pro-Trump and not doing enough to win the cultural war against the president.
"If AOC can be one person and direct the narrative for an entire nation, then doggone, so can I," she told the Denver Post last year, referring to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. "I am ready to stand up and change that narrative back to good."
Boebert's win was the latest proof, if more was needed, of just how strongly the president has redefined the Republican Party and its priorities. While distraught ex-Republicans run ads against him, and while rumors swirl about how endangered senators will separate their campaigns from his, loyalty to the president is, more than ever, the determinant of whether a Republican can win a primary.
Boebert's well-known flirtation with the QAnon conspiracy theory, in which Trump is secretly at war against a murderous "deep state," did not hurt her campaign or even draw a rebuke from national Republicans. Even as the president's poll numbers slip, there is no way for a Republican candidate to be too close to the president. Footage and quotes from Republicans who criticized Trump before his presidency, even when they criticized him from the right, is the most combustible material any campaign can use against them. And because so many Republicans criticized the future president at so many moments, there's plenty of it to go around.
Loyalty to Trump has shaped this primary season - there are still three months to go - more than any other issue. According to data provided by Advertising Analytics, the president has been featured in 339 ads run by Republicans or affiliated PACs in this year's primaries. Just five Republican ads have mentioned Democratic nominee Joe Biden, largely as an afterthought, or a stand-in for the left-wing forces that want to defeat the president. In this week's Oklahoma primaries, for example, the Club for Growth's PAC blistered state legislator Stephanie Bice because she had endorsed Carly Fiorina for president in 2016.
"The candidate Bice backed and called for President Trump to be impeached," the ad says. "And now the candidate Bice backed says she's going to vote for Joe Biden, not Donald Trump." Commercials like that helped to force an August runoff, with Bice, who outspent a field of less-experienced candidates, taking just 25 percent of Tuesday's vote - even as her own ads accused the D.C.-based Club for Growth of attacking her "because Bice stands with President Trump."
In an interview, Club for Growth President David McIntosh explained that no issue moved Republican votes like support for the president. The group's polling, he said, found a 15- to 20-point bump for candidates who were endorsed by Trump and found that having opposed the president was "one of the top three negatives" in any race. (Three Republicans have lost renomination despite endorsements from Trump, though all lost to more conservative candidates.) The group's endorsements were based on candidates' records on taxes and spending, and the ads got into that. But the hook, frequently, was the president - an irony for an organization that had spent millions in 2016 to stop Trump in the primary.
"In my old district, there was a guy who led in the polls because he'd been elected countywide prosecutor, Carl Brizzi," said McIntosh, a former Indiana congressman. "He was claiming to be pro-Trump, but there were these video documents of him on a radio show just trashing Trump. When we ran that ad, it completely flipped the numbers." Brizzi wound up with less than 6 percent of the vote, as a pro-Trump state legislator triumphed.
Trump loyalty has been a defining Republican issue for most of this presidency. Before it was used against former attorney general Jeff Sessions in this year's U.S. Senate primary in Alabama, it was deployed in the 2017 race for his open seat. Rep. Mo Brooks, who like Tipton came into office during the 2010 tea party wave, was pilloried for criticizing Trump during the 2016 primary. Like many of the Republicans subjected to this treatment, Brooks had opposed Trump from the right - he supported Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas - only to see his skepticism that Trump was a reliable conservative turned into faithlessness toward a Republican president.
That pattern has continued into this year. In Alabama, where several House primaries will be decided by runoffs this month, Republican Jerry Carl has attacked rival Bill Hightower over a retweet of conservative columnist Quin Hillyer in which Hillyer said he was "disgusted" with both parties' 2016 nominees. "Hightower is trying to disguise his disgust for President Trump," one ad warns. In recent New Mexico and Kentucky primaries, candidates volleyed back and forth accusing each other of being critical of the president, splattering the screen with old Facebook posts or retweets.
Actual "Never Trump" Republicans are hard to find in this year's primaries; most Trump-related ads focus on the candidate's own unshakable support for the president. In Oklahoma, Rep. Markwayne Mullin fended off gadfly challengers by emphasizing how he fought "Pelosi's impeachment sham." In South Carolina, a PAC accused state Rep. Nancy Mace of "abandoning Trump before the showdown with Crooked Hillary," a reference to criticism of Trump in 2016; Mace fought back with a Trump endorsement and multiple promises to "help President Trump take care of our veterans." (She won her primary.)
When viewed together, the pro-Trump ads and messaging have a theme bigger than support for the president. It's that the president is under siege, that even some in his party do not defend him strongly enough, and that other Republicans do not understand why it's so important to do so.
The sudden popularity of the QAnon theory is in sync with that messaging. As with many conspiracy theories, its adherents hold a range of opinions. Some "9/11 truthers" believed that the government was covering up something up about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack; some believed that no planes actually struck the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. Similarly, the supporters of whoever is posting on message boards as "Q," claiming to be a government operative with details of how Trump will arrest his enemies, range from people who believe that bureaucrats are working to undermine the president to people who believe that coronavirus stay-at-home restrictions were biding time for government agents to free "mole children" from underground tunnels.
Ten Republican candidates have, so far, advanced to runoffs or won their nominations while expressing some support for QAnon theories. (None responded to interview requests this week.) They have generally, Boebert included, kept their endorsements of the theories as generic as possible. In a May interview with online host Ann Vandersteel, Boebert talked about QAnon only when prompted and dealt with none of the theory's specifics.
"That's more my mom's thing; she's a little fringe," Boebert said. "Everything that I've heard of Q, I hope that this is real, because it only means that America is getting stronger and better, and people are returning to conservative values. And that's what I am for."
That was enough for Democrats to attack Boebert, the first nominee to speak positively about the conspiracy theory and win a nomination in a Republican-friendly district. Georgia's Q-curious Marjorie Taylor Greene was denounced by the party, after a Politico investigation found her making a series of racist statements. She faces a runoff election Aug. 11. But Republicans stood by Boebert, accusing Democrats of peddling "their radical conspiracy theories and pushing their radical cancel culture," without tackling the substance of the attack.
The mention of "cancel culture," a pejorative term for demands that offensive or outdated thoughts be removed from public life, captured Boebert's place in the movement and the reason for that QAnon interview.
Boebert did not win because of one online interview. She became well known in the district for being on the conservatives' side of culture wars. She opened a restaurant with gun-themed food where waiters and diners were encouraged to carry firearms. She confronted Beto O'Rourke, during the waning days of his presidential campaign, over his idea of mandatory gun buybacks. And she opened her restaurant during the state's stay-at-home orders, putting the restaurant's license at risk and making her one of the biggest news stories on the western slope.
"I don't see anyone else taking these people on," Boebert explained in that same interview with Vandersteel. "We want someone who is going to disrupt the narrative and bring attention to what matters to us."
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