On a recent Saturday morning, the small Western Slope town of New Castle was bustling with the annual Burning Mountain Festival. People were getting the town pavilion ready for a pie-eating contest and log splitting. Children lined up along the main street, holding huge bags soon to be filled from passing floats.
Down the street, at the parade staging area, Republican House candidate Caleb Waller was preparing to walk with his wife and seven children. Waller is trying to unseat first-term Democratic incumbent Elizabeth Velasco in state House District 57, which extends from Aspen past Rifle.
Historically, this district has been held by Republicans, but it’s one of the many statehouse seats the GOP has seen slip away in recent elections, as voting patterns change.
Waller, a first-time candidate, said he’s only heard from the official state party once.
“They sent me an email saying that I was in the Top 10 races to win for the state, but no funding, no support other than they do a Zoom call every once in a while. And it's kind of lame, to be honest with you,” Waller said. “I can tell you most candidates running with the Republican ticket are highly frustrated with just the division within our party and just the stupidity of it all.”
The Colorado Republican Party has been in disarray for months when long-running discontent with party chair Dave Williams culminated with a faction of the party voting to oust him in August and replace him with former El Paso county party chair Eli Bremer. Williams, a former state lawmaker serving his first term as chair, angered party members over a number of issues, including endorsing GOP candidates in contested primaries and using party resources to promote his own failed primary race.
Williams and his supporters dismissed the ouster vote as fraudulent and held their own meeting to reaffirm his leadership. The leadership battle is headed to trial next month in El Paso County, just weeks before the November election. In the meantime, Williams has retained control of the party apparatus, while Bremer identifies himself online as the party chair.
The whole situation has left Republican candidates frustrated. Waller said he doesn’t know who’s in charge and he doesn’t really care. All he knows is he doesn’t want to be involved with “bullying and division.”
“Those guys just need to get their act together and stop being kids. This looks like a high school,” Waller said.
Republicans are at historic lows in Colorado — they’ve been reduced to a super minority in the state House and are one loss away from becoming a super minority in the state Senate.
“That's a critically important message for the people of Colorado to hear,” warned Senate Minority Leader Paul Lundeen. “Twelve Republicans in the state Senate, or more, is better for the people of Colorado because it brings more rational common sense conversations.”
If they lose seats in the upcoming election, Senate Republicans will lose the ability to block Democratic constitutional amendments from going on the ballot. They would also get less of a say on committees.
What candidates lose when the party is distracted
Usually, the state party has a big role to play in down-ballot races. Former Colorado Republican Party Chair Dick Wadhams said especially when it comes to the get-out-the-vote operations.
“That's the one thing that the state party can do more efficiently for candidates from the state legislature, and also for Congress,” Wadhams said, noting those operations are built over the two-year election cycle. “It requires a lot of money. It requires a lot of staff and it requires a lot of thoughts about how to get that Republican vote out.”
Wadhams gave 2010 as an example where a massive field operation helped defeat two incumbent Democratic congress members. And this is where Wadhams, a vocal critic of Williams, thinks the party is falling down this year.
“Whatever alleged victory operation the state party has, it is a mere shadow of what it's been in the past,” said Wadhams.
State parties also shape messaging and can provide support, like mailers and phone banks, especially for first-time candidates and those running for competitive seats.
“The vote efforts are important for the down-ballot candidates,” said Kenneth Bickers, a professor of political science at CU Boulder. “The mailings that people receive in their mailboxes… there's not a lot of evidence that those persuade people to vote one way or another, but it does remind them and give them name recognition.”
The Colorado State Party faction led by Williams recently put out an email outlining all the ways it is helping candidates and how it was “propelling our candidates to victory.” It listed candidate outreach and support, weekly meetings with candidates, support from software to email blasts, access to donor lists, and, quite tellingly, “dispute resolution and moderation between leadership contingencies and candidates.”
“It sounds like a bunch of empty rhetoric to cover their posterior to the fact that they have nothing really going on,” Wadhams said, pointing to the lack of paid staff who can organize volunteers and work on the party’s ground game.
For his part, Lundeen said he’s willing to accept help from either faction of the Republican party to help get state Senate candidates elected, but noted that the state party overall doesn’t have the influence it used to. He said they don’t raise as much money and more voters are unaffiliated.
Instead, Lundeen said, the actual candidates are still the most important factor in any race.
“Personalities have become a more important part of the political conversation because personalities have become a bigger part of the societal conversation, and that might have fed the diminishment of the party,” he explained.
Long-time Republican Garfield County Commissioner Mike Samson is running for reelection. He said the GOP state leadership fight has been terrible, and symbolizes larger challenges in politics.
“I've been a commissioner 16 years and I've seen over the years how it just gets harder and harder and rougher and rougher. And meaner I guess is what you say. And people are just kind of getting turned off a lot by politics and saying, I'm tired of all that,” he said.
Samson didn’t cast any blame on either Williams or Bremer, but said the tone starts at the top with the presidential race “and just kind of moves its way down through all 50 states and into the counties and so on.”
Even as Republican candidates worry about the state of their party, Democrats have announced they are making a push to organize and help candidates up and down the ballot in more rural and traditionally red parts of Colorado in local races.
A different picture in congressional races
Colorado has an unusually active set of congressional races this year. All three of the seats currently held by Republicans are open, which means those GOP candidates have extra work to do to introduce themselves to voters. And then there’s the toss-up 8th Congressional District, where Republicans are hoping to defeat first-term Democrat Yadira Caraveo and pick up a crucial seat.
In the 3rd Congressional District, currently held by Rep. Lauren Boebert, Republican Jeff Hurd is running against Democrat Adam Frisch. The state party endorsed one of Hurd’s opponents in the primary and even after his victory, he said state party Chair Dave Williams never reached out. But Eli Bremer, who is now fighting Williams for party control in court, did.
“I think it speaks to sort of a fundamental difference in perspective,” Hurd told CPR News. “The old leadership of the party was looking to support the party chairman and the new leadership is looking to support Republicans and helping them get elected.”
When Williams’ opponents picked Bremer as chair in August, the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House campaign arm, immediately recognized him as chair but so far the RNC has not weighed in.
Colorado’s sitting Republican congress members have avoided explicitly picking sides between Williams and Bremer.
Over the summer, Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert, who is poised to become the most senior GOP official in the state next year if she wins her race in the 4th Congressional District, called on Williams to either explain his plan to get Republicans elected, or be replaced. And she said that she would provide support to Republicans up and down the ballot.
A spokesperson for Boebert’s campaign said she has been true to her word.
“From directly fundraising for and financially supporting local GOP and Republican Women groups across the 4th District to promoting candidates at every level on social media and in earned media appearances, Congresswoman Boebert is doing everything she can to make sure her fellow Congressional nominees and down-ballot Republicans have the support they need and are successful in November,” campaign spokesman Drew Sexton said in a statement.
Boebert recently headlined a campaign event for John Fabbricatore, the candidate in the 6th Congressional District, focused on claims about gang activity in Aurora.
A spokesperson with GOP candidate Jeff Crank’s campaign in the 5th Congressional District thinks the party would do better with a new chair.
“Not sure they’re capable of helping us at all in the current state,” said Nick Trainer with the Crank campaign. “A new chair opens doors that can only go up from here.”
Crank and Williams faced off in the GOP primary for the 5th CD. After Crank’s victory, Williams did not reach out to him, according to a source familiar with the relationship.
Republican candidate Valdamar Archuleta, who’s running in the 1st Congressional District in deeply blue Denver, said he wishes the state party were doing more overall to help give voters a reason to back Republicans. He noted that two years ago, the state party touted a pledge called the Commitment to Colorado, which outlined positions and gave voters a reason to vote Republican.
This time around, he doesn’t expect the party to do much in his district.
“I don’t feel like it really even matters,” he explained, given how late in the campaign season it is. He said he was on a state party campaign call a few weeks back and it seemed like there were many on it who had no idea what they were doing.
“By that point, it's really too late. These candidates should have been reached out to months ago.”
- In a bid to boost Republican chances, Libertarian candidate bows out of Colorado’s 8th Congressional District race
- Supporters of embattled Colorado GOP chair Dave Williams vote to keep him in his job
- Colorado Republican lawmakers meet for special session amid party turmoil
- Republican infighting intensifies in Colorado as Dave Williams sues
