senator gardner, radical centrist

Colorado’s Republican statesman and unexpected cannabis-industry darling is on the run—from Trump’s legacy and, often, his own

There’s a 6,000-square-foot cannabis dispensary — Euflora, the only pot shop along downtown Denver’s pedestrian mall — I’ve been wanting to check out. But first I’ve got a holiday party to crash. Luckily the dispensary is a mere three- minute walk from the luxurious Brown Palace Hotel and Spa, which has hosted gold speculators, gunslinging gamblers, and other colorful patrons since it opened in 1892. On this brisk evening, Colorado’s junior U.S. senator has taken over one of its ballrooms.

Cory Gardner is a lawyer but not a three-piece-suit-wearing jackass. After working for his family’s agricultural company in eastern Colorado and getting a law degree, he became a spokesperson for the National Corn Growers Association. Republicans tapped him in 2005 to fill a vacant seat in the Colorado House of Representatives. In 2011 he was wooed eastward for a four-year stint in the U.S. House before finally capturing a Senate seat three years later. This November he’s running for reelection, likely against former Democratic governor John Hickenlooper, whom an Emerson College survey gives a more than 10-point advantage.

But Donald Trump’s advent has rendered almost all political scales obsolete. Six years ago Gardner captured one of the nation’s last purple Senate seats by running as a “freethinker.” Tides churned. Almost accidentally he now finds himself a Trumplican. On paper at least he has broken with the president on cannabis, immigration, and foreign affairs, but his independent flashes are drowned out by loyalty to a party unrecognizable to his forebears. That makes Gardner’s race feel more internal than external — almost as though he’s running against his former self and all the principles he once professed to cherish.