Published July 13, 2026 · Updated with each build
Red Box Watch

A public ledger of red‑boxing — campaign‑site signals to super PACs

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Finding Senate · Colorado Democrat

Hickenlooper, John W. FINDING

Seat
S-CO-00
Party
DEM
Universe reason
contested_primary
FEC receipts
$7,718,309 FEC
Campaign site
https://hickenlooper.com/ (unverified)
Pages scanned
164 · last 2026-07-09

Posted public messaging guidance consistent with red-boxing

Detected on https://hickenlooper.com/issues  · classifier confidence 0.90 · model fireworks/deepseek-v4-flash

The page includes a 'What Voters Need to Know' section that explicitly instructs that specific voter segments (Democratic primary voters and those under 50) 'need to see' a particular message about Hickenlooper's stance on ICE, along with links to video assets. This language is directed at an outside spender who would run ads, not at voters directly, and the asset provisioning reinforces the red-boxing function. The rest of the page is standard campaign content, but this section alone constitutes red-box guidance.

Quoted evidence — verbatim spans from the page

  • Coloradans who vote in Democratic primaries and Coloradans under 50 need to see that John Hickenlooper is fed up with Donald Trump and ICE’s violence and cruelty and fighting to reign in the out-of-control agency.
    Directive language specifying audience segments and the message they should see, indicating media-buy guidance for outside groups.
  • Video of Hickenlooper can be found here: LINK, LINK, LINK, LINK, LINK
    Provisioning of ad-ready video assets, typical of red-boxing to enable outside groups to produce ads.
Archived screenshot of https://hickenlooper.com/issues
Archived at detectionFull-page screenshot of https://hickenlooper.com/issues · Raw HTML preserved

Independent-expenditure corroboration

FEC Schedule E · 19 filings

Sequence. Messaging guidance was present on the candidate's site when detected (by us) on 2026-07-09; $705,448 in supporting independent expenditures is on file for this candidate.

Committee AmountFilingsDate range
S OUR FUTURE COLORADO $390,500 6 2026-06-24 – 2026-06-26
S COMMON SENSE ACTION FUND $300,000 3 2026-06-17 – 2026-06-18
S NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE $14,754 3 2026-06-10 – 2026-06-10
S GIVEGREEN UNITED ACTION $194 7 2025-03-31 – 2025-12-17

S Supporting O Opposing

Schedule E is corroboration, not the trigger — a filed expenditure is late evidence, and our detection timestamp reflects when we crawled, which can lag the actual posting. Supporting IE dated on or after our detection day: $0. Dates are FEC expenditure dates.