January 09, 2024 02:00 PM UTC

Colorado Republicans Keep Busy By Challenging Other Republicans

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• by: Colorado Pols

At this time last year, the 2024 election cycle in Colorado was looking like it might be pretty uneventful. After all, 2024 won’t have a major statewide race on the ballot, and while it is a Presidential Election year, Colorado is such a solid-blue state in that regard that neither Democrats nor Republicans are going to pay us much attention.

But as it turns out, Republicans have made sure that 2024 won’t be lacking in political drama in Colorado…at least until July. The 2024 election will likely be remembered as “the year of the primary” (h/t to The Colorado Sun via “The Unaffiliated” newsletter). Many of these primary battles will take place in districts that are not particularly competitive in a General Election, which means much of the action in Colorado will conclude with the June 25th Primary Election. Democrats will have a few interesting intraparty battles in June, but most of the bloodletting will take place among Republicans.

The latest primary battle to watch is in Colorado Springs, where we don’t even need to wait for the campaigning to start to know that things are going to be nasty. As The Unaffiliated explains:

Two Republicans have filed to challenge state Sen. Larry Liston, R-Colorado Springs in 2024: Rex Tonkins, husband of El Paso County GOP Chairwoman Vickie Tonkins, and David Stiver, a GOP activist. [Pols emphasis] Liston accused Rex Tonkins of harassment at a party meeting, but a jury acquitted him and the state GOP censured Liston calling the complaint against Tonkins “unwarranted” and “inappropriate.” Stiver ran for the House District 10 seat in 2020, but he failed to get the required support at an assembly to make the ballot and the state party refused to intervene when questions were raised about the process.

The husband of the longtime Chairwoman of the El Paso County GOP is mounting a primary challenge against incumbent State Sen. Larry Liston. Not because of policy disagreements, but for a much simpler reason: Spite.

Rex Tonkins is still mad that Liston filed a criminal complaint against him following a contentious 2021 county party meeting that included allegations of racism (Tonkins is Black). Liston’s criminal complaint and alleged racism sparked El Paso GOP Chairwoman Vickie “The Censurer” Tonkins to pursue multiple roads of punishment for Liston, culminating (or so we thought) with getting the help of her buddy Dave Williams (the State Republican Party Chair) to both censure Liston and demand his resignation from the legislature. Liston has served in the state legislature for many years and is one of the few remaining Republicans in Colorado who has regularly demonstrated an ability to, you know, win elections.

Vickie Tonkins, on the other hand, has long been accused of bias by other El Paso County Republicans, and not without good reason. There is no quiet part that needs to be said out loud here: Tonkins has always pressed her thumb on the scale in favor of one Republican over another. The only thing new this time is that her own husband is the one getting the extra help.

Readers of Colorado Pols will be familiar with the constant fighting and bickering in El Paso County, where county GOP meetings are regularly ended with visits from either the Colorado Springs Police Department or the El Paso County Sheriff. Those battles escalated in 2023, a year that began with legal fights involving the State Party and ended with the ridiculous censure of Liston. We covered the El Paso GOP brawling early last year in our “Circle of Strife” series (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3). Some of this was spillover from the 2022 election, when a group of Republicans exasperated with the side-choosing leadership of Vickie Tonkins formed their own group called “Peak Republicans” in order to organize and coordinate campaign volunteers (many of the top state campaigns, including that of gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl, sided with the “Peak Republicans”).

But despite all of the very obvious problems resulting from Vickie Tonkins’s leadership, she was of course re-elected as El Paso GOP Chair in 2023…in a contest so bizarre that Republicans nearly held two separate elections with separate slates of candidates in different locations. And in 2024, she’ll be doing everything she can to help unseat a longtime elected Republican FROM HER OWN COUNTY. It’s no mystery why El Paso County Republicans have experienced more turnover than an overcooked hamburger.

If this all has a familiarly-disgusting taste to it, that’s because something very similar is taking place in the battle for an open congressional seat in El Paso County (CO-05), where Dave Williams is running for Congress and continuing to serve as State Party Chair.

The difference between the two major political parties in Colorado couldn’t be more obvious; the editorial board of The Denver Post even took note today of the State Republican Party chaos. Both the State Republican Party Chair and the leader of the most dominant Republican county in Colorado are worried more about choosing sides in a Republican Primary than they are about trying to unseat Democrats. As we noted yesterday, Republicans still haven’t found candidates for half of the available State House seats and only a third of the available State Senate seats, despite the fact that the caucuses are less than two months away.

Democratic State Party Chair Shad Murib, by contrast, already has paid staff in place in CO-03 and more coming in CO-08, and has just hired a year-round organizer in Pueblo (one of the most politically-unpredictable areas of the state). Democrats also have candidates in place in just about every competitive legislative district in Colorado.

We’ve answered this question before, but it’s worth repeating: Are Colorado Democrats really good at this, or are Colorado Republicans just really bad?

The answer is simple: Yes.