July 24, 2024 11:43 AM UTC

Colorado Republicans On The Run, Meet Under A Literal Bridge

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• by: Colorado Pols

9NEWS’ Marshall Zelinger provides the latest updates in the micro-saga we’ve been watching unfold within the Colorado Republican Party under historically controversial chairman Dave “Let’s Go Brandon” Williams, for whom the knives are out after Williams’ audacious gambit of turning the state party into a personal political vehicle for himself and favored Republican primary candidates collapsed in a heap on June 25th. A petition submitted by Williams’ critics in the party intended to force a vote on his continuing chairmanship was declared invalid, and a meeting in Brighton set up by those critics for the vote was similarly declared by Williams’ allies in party leadership to be “illegal.”

As for the need for some kind of meeting to satisfy the requirement for one without putting Williams’ job in danger? As Zelinger reports, that’s where Williams’ allies in party leadership got creative:

[T]he submission of the petition started a clock that required a meeting to be held within a certain amount of time. That is why Vice Chair Hope Scheppelman called a meeting for July 19 at a park in far southwest Colorado in Bayfield, where she lives.

When the party deemed the petition invalid, the executive committee supported canceling the July 19 meeting. Yet, it still happened. For four minutes and 40 seconds, the Colorado GOP held a meeting on a bike path, under a bridge in Bayfield. But first, they had to get out of the way of a maintenance truck using the trail…

The meeting served its purpose, to fulfill a timeline set by a petition to try to oust the chairman that has already been deemed insufficient. Watkins has called his own party meeting for Sunday at a church in Brighton. The Colorado GOP sued Watkins in Arapahoe County court to prevent a meeting “fraudulently conducted as ‘official business.’”

If you’ve ever driven to Durango in the southwest corner of the state, you may have driven by the town of Bayfield on U.S. 160. Bayfield is almost six hours from Denver, and although it’s a scenic trip it’s one of the longer drives you can take from the metro area and still be in the state of Colorado. Obviously, if you want to hold a meeting that no one attends, it’s about as perfect a location as can be had in terms of distance from where most people in Colorado live.

But that’s the state of today’s Colorado Republican Party: on the run from its own members, and using every trick in the book to stave off the vote on Williams’ future until Labor Day Weekend. By that time, Williams’ allies will no doubt argue that it’s too late to change leadership before the November election, and hope that anger has cooled enough for Williams to survive the vote by the central committee. Williams is also hoping that his legally dubious reimbursements to the party for funds spent supporting Williams in the CO-05 Republican primary, which the party can’t call reimbursements without opening the party to further liability, will ease tensions.

And no matter how the vote ultimately goes on August 31st, it’s that much more time for Williams to get paid.

While the Colorado Republican Party is preoccupied with the internal conflict over Dave Williams’ future, the November election is rapidly approaching, and there’s no sign that we can see of the party doing the bread-and-butter organizing that must happen if Republicans want to chip away at Democratic dominance in the Colorado General Assembly and local races. Meanwhile, Democrats are hard at work on their coordinated statewide campaign to support their candidates at all levels.

That’s a recipe for Republicans to lose across the state in November as bigly as Dave Williams lost his race last month.