After logging 77,000 miles on the odometer across two campaigns in one of the largest congressional districts in the country, Colorado Democrat Adam Frisch says he’s learned a few things that can help his party return to what he calls a better version of itself — and in the process win back rural voters Democrats have been hemorrhaging for more than a generation.

That’s why Frisch has spent the last month or so running for one of three at-large vice chair positions on the Democratic National Committee, set to be decided at the party’s winter meeting on Feb. 1 in National Harbor, Maryland, where the DNC will also elect a chair and other officers.

Donald Trump anointed the Republican National Committee’s leadership this week at an RNC meeting in Washington prior to the president’s second inauguration, as is typical for the party that occupies the White House.

The DNC is faced with electing new leadership — incumbent Chair Jamie Harrison isn’t seeking another term — as the party grapples with its across-the-board setbacks in November, when Democrats lost the presidency, lost control of the U.S. Senate and failed to take back a majority in the House of Representatives.

One of the Democrats’ House losses was Frisch’s race in Colorado’s largely rural 3rd Congressional District, a seat that covers more acreage than the state of Connecticut, where he nearly defeated Republican Lauren Boebert two years earlier in the midterms’ closest congressional race.

In a near-upset that hardly anyone except Frisch saw coming, Frisch came within a whisker of unseating one of the most recognizable national brands in the new, Trumpified GOP. Months later, he launched a bid for a 2024 rematch and quickly started setting fundraising records, eventually hauling in more in contributions through the third quarter than any other congressional candidate except for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. After Boebert moved across the state rather than face Frisch a second time, the Republican who took her place, newcomer Jeff Hurd, won election in November by a comfortable margin, though Frisch ran about 5 percentage points ahead of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in the district.

“There are very few people in the country that have driven 77,000 miles in the past three years, from 2021 to 2024, and I’ve learned a lot. And I appreciate I lost twice, and I own that. But I don’t think it takes away from what I’ve learned,” Frisch said in a recent, wide-ranging interview. “I’m trying to figure out — can I add some value to one part of a puzzle about getting more moderate candidates and getting both parties back to what I think is a better version of themselves?”

Born on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Northeastern Montana, near the Canadian border — “it makes La Plata County look like a metropolis,” he joked — where his father, an obstetrician-gynecologist, worked for the Indian Health Service, Frish grew up in a small town in Minnesota, where he worked the family farm supply store and grain elevator. After earning a degree in economics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Frisch moved to New York and waited tables while starting a lucrative career in international finance. But in the wake of Sept. 11 — and “attending too many funerals” — Frisch returned to Colorado and settled in Aspen, where he met his wife, Katy, and they raised their two teenaged children, Felix and Quintessa.

Frisch pointed to national electoral maps that depict Republican dominance across in sparsely populated rural counties — the country a sea of red with blue borders along the coasts and tiny blue islands here and there — as illustrative of the Democrats’ decades-long decline in regions where the party once held its own.

“The line goes, the Democratic Party is like 20 big cities, Aspen and Martha’s Vineyard, right? It’s a quip, but you look at the map,” said Frisch.

It was an entirely different picture as recently as 1996, Frisch noted, when Bill Clinton carried a majority of the country’s roughly 2,000 rural counties, a share that dropped to about 25% by the time Barack Obama won in 2008 win and fell below 10% four years ago, when Joe Biden was elected.

“I’m not sure where the bottom is,” Frisch said. “I’m not a big fan of monopolies in business, and I don’t like them in politics. In the big cities, you see a monopoly from one party, and in rural America, you see a monopoly from the other. I’m trying to figure out: How do we offer some more competition in the rural parts in our state, and our country, for that matter?”

That means meeting voters where they are, Frisch said, not where party bigwigs imagine them to be.

“I’m a believer that the majority of people are kind of somewhere between the two 40 yard lines, if I could use a football metaphor,” he said. “I stand by what I think this country needs more of is a lot more people focusing on the local issues to their district over following a national party line, but I also want to at least try to figure out how to get a better version of both parties.”

Frisch said one thing he learned traveling all those miles, covering the 3rd CD’s 27 counties — “some 80% Republican, some 80% Democratic, a few of the wealthiest counties in the entire country and some of the most economically challenged” — is that 80% of people agree on 80% of the issues. Still, even candidates who focus on that agreement and cut an independent course — Frisch was one of the first nationally prominent Democrats to call on Biden to drop his bid for reelection last summer — can be weighed down by the Democrats’ national brand.

“What people are hearing from the Democratic Party — partly due to the Fox News ecosystem, but also partly just the words out of the mouths of a lot of high-profile Democratic candidates — is, ‘Shame on you,’” he said. “The Democratic Party has become the ‘shame on you’ party — shame on you for driving that type of car, shame on you for having that type of job — natural gas worker, right? — shame on you eating that kind of food, shame on you for mispronouncing a pronoun. And it’s really hard to talk to people about some policies that might be better for them and their families when you are demeaning and denigrating how they’re living their lives.”

Frisch said what he learned on the campaign trail — he sometimes refers to his travels as a “77,000-mile focus group” — can help the DNC find its way forward.

“What I’m hearing from the Democratic Party is, ‘Maybe we should actually spend some time talking to the voters.’ I’m like, oh my goodness, no wonder why the party did so bad. It’s like, put down the pollsters, put down the consultants, get out there and listen, really listen to people.”

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