Interview with John Padora, August 24, 2026
Note: This interview was transcribed by an AI tool which seems to have done an admirable job, but errors likely remain. It has further been very lightly edited for readability.
I conducted this interview for my post, "Colorado's Hook and Squeeze."
Brad Jones: I wanted to start out with a big‑picture question: what got you into wanting to run for office in the Fourth District?
John Padora: Sure, man. I’ll try to do the 10,000‑foot view, and then I’ll just let you ask questions. I know a lot of politicians say that, but I never had an intention of running for office. I am somebody who went through a really tragic opioid addiction. I was in a bad car accident when I was 19, my head went through the windshield, and I ended up dealing with a significant amount of chronic pain. I struggled on and off with addiction for years. Long story short, I found myself in the midst of our broken criminal justice system. I rehabilitated myself, got my life back on track, and wanted to give back to the community in a positive way. I made a lot of amends in my life and used my energy and motivation to do something good.
I ended up hooking up with a nonprofit addiction recovery center that was working on something called the Second Chance Program—a drug diversion program centered on keeping nonviolent drug offenders out of prison. We were pushing for existential criminal justice reform, prioritizing that violent offenders stay in prison, reallocating and raising money for police budgets to make them more equitable and sustainable. I found myself in the midst of policy debates, sitting down with county commissioners, state senators, and state reps. We took that battle all over—I’m originally from Pennsylvania, so we went up and down the East Coast and to Washington, D.C.
I brought that level of activism out here with me. The Fourth District was something different when I first got into it. Ken Buck was the rep. I looked at the Democrats who had run previously and just saw how botched of a political effort it was. I knew that my agricultural experience, my advocacy work, my blue‑collar background, my understanding of what it’s like to not just live in rural America but to be an integrated part of it—whether on the East Coast or here, farming with my grandfather, building homes with my dad—could connect with a broad base of voters. I thought my independence, free from a lot of the partisan politics we see, would really help me connect and win over Colorado’s most independent district. I really just wanted to give people a choice and show them the energy and excitement we could bring to a local race that a lot of people wrote off.
Brad Jones: That’s cool. I’m a political scientist by training, so I want to get into some more details about the experience. It sounds like you did some work with that nonprofit, but you hadn’t previously run for political office?
John Padora: No, I’ve run for a local office—state representative—before. That was how I learned. I did that in a very red district, and I did it to learn because at that point I wanted to utilize my advocacy work to get in and write policy. Running for Congress as a working‑class person is incredibly overwhelming. But running for state representative and learning how fundraising works, building national political connections, and formulating a campaign team really gave me the skills to translate that into a congressional run.
Brad Jones: And you ran that race in Pennsylvania?
John Padora: Yes. I’ve only ever lived in Pennsylvania and Colorado, so these are my bread and butter.
Brad Jones: Cool. So let’s get into what that’s like. You’ve had some experience fundraising and managing a campaign team. When you first filed your papers to run in CD‑4, did you already have a team put together? Did you have a sense of what your campaign would look like?
John Padora: It definitely evolved quickly, but I had a political director lined up, a network of national advisors, and a local network of party activists and people lining up behind me. I brought a lot of people into it and really tried to build everything from the ground up. I didn’t just go to out‑of‑state consultants. I brought people in from all the different communities to be advisors on education policy, agricultural policy, affordability, foreign policy, and so on. We really did have some good bones put together.
Brad Jones: When you talk about having a network of national consultants, were these people you’d been in contact with from your previous campaign, or do you start getting emails when you run?
John Padora: It’s a little bit of both—you don’t really start getting emails. You always have connections. When I stepped into the race in 2024, nobody gave two shits about it because it was Ken Buck’s seat. Everybody thought it was unwinnable. When Boebert popped into it, all of a sudden my phone was blowing up, I was on MSNBC and national television, and reporters were reaching out. I was in a unique situation because of the advocacy work I’d done in criminal justice reform, environmental issues, and working on other campaigns for about four or five years before that. I worked on local county commissioner campaigns and got embedded into John Fetterman’s campaign for lieutenant governor in 2018. I learned connections through the Working Families Party, the Democratic Party itself, and even people active in the Republican Party. I built a strong rolodex of people I could pull together for information. Working on those campaigns, I got to ask candidates questions and work with activists who later transferred their work to advocacy. It was a little bit of everything. It’s super hard—by far the hardest part.
Brad Jones: Yeah, it did seem like a ton of work. In that 2024 campaign, it was close, and you were successful in raising a lot of money—I think $300,000 in receipts or something?
John Padora: Mid‑threes, 350‑360. Yeah. That was a stretch. The reason you don’t see working‑class people run for office is because of that money. It’s the big‑money networks—they shut you out. They choose which candidates they perceive as viable long before anybody ever gets to vote. The consultants all work for the same network of career politicians, so there’s a lot of blacklisting. I raised all that money through national outreach, spending time cold‑calling strangers throughout the country who I thought would believe in our campaign, through my network, through my family. It was all small‑dollar contributions. We got some $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 donations—very few—from people who saw us online, like Mark Hamill or some Hollywood actors and activists who saw us on the news and thought we had a good message. But mostly it was all from normal people. My average donation was around $21.
Brad Jones: Let’s talk about the fundraising work itself. You were hitting the phones, and you had earned media coming in. Was there a role for outside groups in managing solicitations? This has become increasingly common with emails and texts, and the lists get saturated.
John Padora: We had a fundraising consultant we worked with. We met with them one or two times a day, and they would use my voice to craft emails. I’d say, “Hey, I want to talk about this,” and they’d help coordinate, maintain our database of contacts, and do list acquisitions. It takes money to raise money. We definitely had fundraising consultants who did a decent job, but there’s an epidemic of consultants that swallow your money. They give you really high burn rates—like, “We raised you $300,000, and we spent $280,000 to do that,” so you’re left with $20,000 to run ads. There’s so much money in it, and so many people finance their way of life by doing it.
And really, you don’t raise the kind of money you need to compete without the blessing of the Washington, D.C. establishment. This last year I learned that the hard way, because they pre‑selected a candidate who didn’t live in the district, whom nobody knew, who was a lifetime registered Republican, and she was able to come in and raise six or seven million dollars by the time the primary happened, in order to nullify the voters having a primary choice. Money plays such a huge role. Yes, there were outside groups. Yes, we leveraged earned media, social media connections, and in‑person events. But the biggest thing I learned is that it really doesn’t matter how good your message is unless you live in a district where people are very politically active—which they’re not in the Fourth. You need the money.
Brad Jones: Political scientists sometimes talk about the “invisible primary”—that period between campaigns, mostly in terms of endorsements and fundraising. Those are the two big signals candidates can send about viability. It sounds like that was very much on your mind in this cycle.
John Padora: It happened in both. In 2024, our campaign had the momentum—we were the only campaign on national television, the only one really churning up a good volunteer base and inspiring people with an authentic message. But the state party here and the local Democratic chapters rallied behind somebody who moved to the state three months before the primary, had no political connections, and hadn’t even raised $20,000 to run for U.S. Congress. They nominated the weakest link because of ideological preference. They looked for somebody more easy to manipulate. In districts like ours, the Democratic Party doesn’t have a huge goal of flipping the district blue. What they have is a goal of leveraging the fundraising advantage that Lauren Boebert creates. They like to select candidates who don’t bring authentic idealism and independence, who will be cheerleaders for their blue‑dog politics. That was never me from the get‑go. That’s the level of resistance I fought in both campaigns. It was really John versus the machine. I have endless emails, texts, stories, and memories of them fighting me at every junction.
Brad Jones: I want to circle back to something you said about fundraising consultants burning through all the money to raise it. Full disclosure, I’m working on a piece right now on what Adam Bonica of Stanford calls “Hook and Squeeze”—the rise of spam packs on the Democratic side, which is exactly what you’re describing. They spend most of their overhead on raising more money and enriching their operations. As I’ve been looking at the data, the Fourth District really stands out from the others in Colorado in terms of the overlap between the donor base who give to candidates within the district and these spam packs. Bonica highlights that the prototypical donor is elderly, susceptible to high‑volume contacting tactics—fear‑mongering, “act quickly” appeals.
John Padora: Yes, and “match 2x if you get your donation in by midnight tonight.” It’s all misleading. If you go through the fundraising archive of texts and emails by district, you’ll see what my primary opponents did to raise money—they lied to people day in and day out. Our joke on the campaign was, “Maybe if I’d lied more, I’d have raised more money.” That’s not an exaggeration. Every email was a complete fabrication and lie. That makes the Democratic Party no better than the Republican Party. If you’re lying to people to steal their money for a race, that’s something I could never get behind.
Brad Jones: In that piece, he talks about how this was a path the Republicans have already gone down—they burned out a lot of their donors because they have the advantage of attracting donations from wealthy billionaires in ways Democrats don’t always. But as I’ve looked at the data, the Fourth District pops out across several dimensions. One of them is that Ike McCorkle ran three times, and about 84% of his donations came from folks who had contributed to these other standards.
John Padora: That’s how he got the lists.
Brad Jones: And one of the other things he highlights is that some candidates also hire the same vendors to work on their behalf—the high‑volume contacting folks, which leads to the same lists being recycled.
John Padora: It’s all recycling of the same consultants and the same lists. They’re used over and over. Then at the end of your campaign, vendors say, “Pay off some of your debt and sell us your list.” It’s like, no—some of those people are our friends and family; their data shouldn’t be up for grabs like that.
Brad Jones: So as I’ve been putting this together, it feels like a big part of the story is Boebert—having the boogeyman there, a name that draws this kind of money.
John Padora: Every Democrat in Colorado sends out fundraising emails invoking Lauren Boebert’s name—Joe Neguse, Jason Crow, Brittany Pettersen—they all do it. That goes back to my point: the Democratic Party really has an ulterior motive to ensure Boebert remains in power because they love to fundraise off her. Without her, their fundraising numbers would drop. Boogeyman fundraising works really well. It’s why Democrats at the national level prefer midterm cycles where they can run on opposition—look what Trump’s doing. It’s an effective way to raise money.
Brad Jones: Yeah, it’s easy to be against something so unpopular as Lauren Boebert or Donald Trump. So, reflecting on your overall experience in these two campaigns—and previously in Pennsylvania—do you see any way out of this? To what extent does something like Melat Kiros’s surprise victory in Denver’s CD‑1 paint an alternative path? As I was looking at the data, her donors looked different from the others.
John Padora: Melat was my communications director on my 2024 campaign. Her and I are friends. She learned how to navigate a lot of the structural barriers working with me. I wasn’t surprised by her win. She’s an excellent public speaker; she organized and turned out the young voters who typically don’t come out. She spoke to a new generation of the electorate and rallied national support, and that’s in a very blue, progressive district. They’ve had neoliberal representation under DeGette, who has some progressive ideology but never really delivered—she’s part of the system, thirty‑some years in office, longer than Melat's been alive. Melat leaned into that, and with the anti‑Israeli sentiment, the toxicity of AIPAC, the genocide in Gaza, she capitalized on that. She brought in Hasan Piker, leaned into DSA values, and offered people something different. She raised a million dollars and beat the machine.
But nothing that happened in Denver will be replicated throughout Colorado for one primary reason: the state party is a neoliberal extension of the DNC here, and they will do everything to squash progressivism spilling into other districts. I do think people like Jason Crow and Brittany Pettersen are susceptible to primary challenges down the road. Right now, Colorado is one of the last states that controls ballot access through the caucus and assembly process. There are movements and ballot initiatives to nullify that, create nonpartisan primaries, and eliminate the caucus and assembly. The power isn’t going to shift until we pass existential election reform like that. If Phil Weiser gets in here and says, “I’m going to end Citizens United in Colorado”—they have the ability to regulate state financing—I think that would have spillover effects. If we codify a nonpartisan primary and eliminate the partisan parties’ selection before anybody ever casts a vote, things would really change.
This year is the year of anti‑incumbency and anti‑establishment wave, but I do see a Tea‑Party‑like movement within the Democratic Party. The party is unsustainable in its current form. Progressive challengers will continue to step forward, watching what people like Abdul El‑Sayed, Melat Kiros, and Mamdani in New York City have done. People desire to take on that machine and replace it. It’s an inevitable response to a party that fails to recognize the needs of everyday working people. They’ve capitulated to Trump and failed to deliver. I say this as a state committee member and state executive committee member who’s been involved with the Democratic Party for the last decade, but I see a need to terraform it from within. You’ll see that in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and other swing states. States like Colorado have immense Polis‑Democratic and Hickenlooper power, and if we’re calling it like it is, those people aren’t there—they’re in bed with the billionaires. They’re Democrats because it was opportunistic. Look at the way Jared Polis has governed, who he’s protected. Colorado is such a blue state but represented by someone who toes the line of Republican policies. There’s a lot to overcome here, a lot of structural power. I don’t want to write off Melat's victory, but we’ve got a steep road to implement that elsewhere without electoral reform.
Brad Jones: I’ve heard people make the opposite case with respect to the caucuses—that they draw such a strange, active group, and it’s a small, unrepresentative group that can push things in one direction.
John Padora: They haven’t gone through it themselves. In 2024, I won almost every county except Douglas—100% of the delegates in Weld County, did very well in Larimer, won a lot of rural counties, won Arapahoe, did well in Douglas. This year, Eileen was able to spend a million dollars. She had Republicans change their voter affiliation to Democrat, bombarded them with mailers, ads, and phone calls because she had the money to mobilize that support. So they brought out people who typically weren’t involved. At the same time, the Colorado Democratic Party rolled out a new internal platform where all votes were tabulated in their system, with no traceability or accountability. They could show pie charts with no validity. I’m not even making that accusation—I’m just saying we saw inconsistencies. There was no ability to audit that data. That gives the party too much power. There’s a reason the caucus and assembly process is an antiquated backroom deal that many states don’t adopt. In Pennsylvania and Michigan, you collect signatures and get on the ballot, and that’s it.
In hindsight, if I’d known how much the state party would have their hands in the caucus and assembly this year, I had 100 volunteers who would have gone out every weekend and got signatures for me, and we’d have bypassed all of that. But they also changed the rules on the eve of the caucus. In other years, they capped the number of delegates per county. This year, they uncapped them all—so if only 12 delegate spots existed in Arapahoe but 120 people showed up, you had a larger pool. Larimer County, where I had predominant support, they capped the number of delegates so that only 50‑60% of my delegates could even go to assembly. They also kept them on a 12‑hour phone call—many caucuses are virtual, with people who don’t know how to use Zoom, sitting for 10‑12 hours. It is the most anti‑democratic process I have ever witnessed. Anyone who claims it’s an efficient method for ballot access hasn’t gone through it themselves. Melat could mobilize Denver voters, but the Fourth has 21 counties. You’re managing 21 caucuses, some on conflicting dates, so you can’t attend them all in person. Unless you have the money to mobilize resources like Eileen did, it’s another example of how big money shifts the trajectory before the primary even happens.
Brad Jones: Well, I want to be respectful of your time. I sure appreciate you talking with me. Any last thoughts? What’s the future for John?
John Padora: Right now I’m doing a lot of decompression, focusing on my career and spending time with my kids. I ran two consecutive congressional campaigns, lost, and sacrificed a lot of time with them that I can’t get back. Since it’s all been over this year, I’ve traveled and camped and everything in between. Haven’t been too politically active. If I step back into it, two routes—people have approached me to run for something specific, but I have no intent to do that now. If I get involved again, I want to highlight my experiences and advocate for electoral reform. I think we need nonpartisan primaries in Colorado and need to dissolve the caucus and assembly process. I’d like to use my stories to shape public opinion and get it done, because Colorado is predominantly independent and unaffiliated, so it’s disingenuous to allow the two major parties to dictate all the power. I think we can implement a system that’s more democratic than it is now. So right now I’m focused on helping out in my local community, working on local issues, helping other candidates run, and spending time with my family.
Brad Jones: Great. Thanks again.
John Padora: Yeah, man.
