August 02, 2024 10:56 AM UTC

The Colorado Republican Party Has Become a Hindrance for Republican Candidates

• 17 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

The pratfalls and misadventures of the Colorado Republican Party have been a key storyline throughout the 2024 election cycle. The infighting that has consumed the Colorado GOP for more than a year isn’t letting up despite the fact that ballots drop in Colorado in about 10 weeks. Candidates and campaigns are now speaking out more aggressively about how this is distracting from what should be the only real objective of the State Party: Trying to win elections.

As Jesse Paul writes today for The Colorado Sun, the State Republican Party remains laser-focused on ridiculous nonsense:

Republicans running in tight races across the state this year don’t expect to get the kind of help from the Colorado GOP that the party has offered in the past, a big deficit as conservatives try to claw their way back to political relevance.

They have good reasons for that assumption.

Fourteen of the 18 candidates the party endorsed this year in contested Republican primaries lost. Chairman Dave Williams used the party’s limited funds to pay for mailers to benefit his own failed congressional primary bid. And Williams hasn’t been seen much since his primary loss even as a movement to remove him as chair is underway.

“When you can get everybody in a boat, rowing in the same direction, that’s an ideal circumstance,” said Senate Minority Leader Paul Lundeen, a Monument Republican who is trying to prevent Democrats from expanding their already historic power in the legislature.

The Colorado GOP is “not even in the boat,” Lundeen said, so he is “moving on without them.”

“You’ve got to work with what you’ve got,” said Lundeen, who has called on Williams to resign. [Pols emphasis]

This is a pretty good analogy from Lundeen, though it’s still a bit inaccurate. It’s not clear that the Colorado Republican Party could even afford a boat right now.

Things have gotten so bad, it seems, that many Republican campaigns don’t even want the State Party’s help:

Some Republican operatives told The Sun that even if the Colorado GOP were to offer fundraising help, they likely wouldn’t work with the party given how it spent money to benefit Williams’ candidacy. They’re also worried about being associated with the GOP’s controversies, including a homophobic email it sent out during Pride month calling for people to burn Pride flags.

[Former State Party Chair] Kristi Burton Brown, for instance, is running for a Colorado Board of Education seat this year. She says she hasn’t heard from the party and wouldn’t accept its help if it was offered.

“I have no interest in working with them whatsoever,” she said. [Pols emphasis]

It’s hard to argue with this strategy considering what happens when the Republican Party does try to help candidates. Over the course of the last month, the State GOP has sent out numerous endorsement emails for various candidates for the state legislature that are crammed full of disgusting language and ridiculous allegations.

An email supporting Robyn Carnes for State Senate in SD-16 attacks incumbent Democratic Sen. Chris Kolker for recognizing the existence of the LGBTQ community in Colorado, including a screenshot of a social media post from Kolker showing him — GASP! — attending the June PRIDE celebrations in Denver. The language included in the email is awful…but also completely absurd:

Chris Kolker pushed the Sensitive Spaces Bill, the bill to strip Coloradoans of their right to protect themselves, and he claims that guns make life more dangerous. Apparently, Chris Kolker never read the Constitution. Coloradoans will never be stripped of their right to protect themselves, but Kolker will keep trying. He also sponsored the bill to force schools to keep trans porn in their libraries for kids. 

Kolker is endorsed by the Colorado Education Association, which is the Teacher’s Union. The CEA wants to transition as many kids’ genders as possible and is pumping millions of dollars into Colorado school board elections so that it can create more trans kids and continue to propagate anti-white racism and anti-American curriculum. The CEA is one of the most evil and destructive organizations in Colorado, and it repeatedly attempts to push gender ideology onto innocent Colorado children without their parent’s knowledge. Kolker is also a huge Pride supporter, often pushing trans and drag queen ideology onto his constituents and his coworkers. [Pols emphasis]

Huh?

The Colorado Education Association “wants to transition as many kids’ genders as possible”? There’s no evidence for this claim, of course, because this is a nonsense assertion.

Scary transgender kids are a common theme in these endorsement emails, but there’s plenty of other crazy crap included. Take a look at this email endorsing George Mumma in HD-25:

Tammy Story, HD-25’s current Representative, is a radical liberal who supports Hamas and associates with anti-Semitic causes. [Pols emphasis] At a time when average Colorado families are concerned with making ends meet and ensuring a quality education for their children, Tammy Story spends taxpayer dollars on terroristic antics, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza….as if extreme Hamas leaders in Palestine care what a Colorado representative says about Middle East conflict.

Tammy Story also sponsored and crusaded for the Charter School Accountability Act, a bill to force charter schools out of Colorado. Despite the fact that most charter students are disadvantaged and live in metro areas, Tammy Story wants all children to attend public schools so that they will be indoctrinated into harmful sexual situations and CRT. Story’s bill failed, but if she is re-elected, she will continue her anti-charter school attempts at legislation.

Tammy Story championed Colorado’s wolf reintroduction. As Colorado Politics articulated, Tammy Story cares more about wolves than actual Coloradoans.; Story cannot coexist with charter school families or Jewish people. [Pols emphasis]

There’s a lot in those three paragraphs about incumbent Democratic Rep. Tammy Story: The GOP claims that Story suppots Hamas; wants to “indoctrinate” kids “into harmful sexual situations and CRT” (Critical Race Theory); and prefers wolves to “charter school families or Jewish people.”

Why stop here? The Colorado Republican Party might as well just accuse Story of eating babies and building a nuclear bomb in her basement.

The Colorado GOP has sent out similar endorsement emails for Dan Woog (HD-19); Rebecca Keltie (HD-16); and Stan Vanderwerf (SD-12). All of those emails employ similar crazypants accusations and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.

Here’s what the Colorado GOP says about Democratic State Rep. Stephanie Vigil in HD-16:

Having never signed a paycheck, Vigil hates business owners and landlords…

…Vigil supported all anti-Second Amendment bills for the last two years, and she also spoke against Colorado Republicans’ attempts to filibuster. Vigil proclaimed, “filibusters threaten the legislature’s reputation as an effective form of government.” Vigil hates Republicans and America so much that she wants to limit debate on important legislation.

Vigil also voted against HB23-1135, “Penalty for Indecent Exposure in View of Minors,” which would have made sexual acts in front of children a felony. The Democrats, including Vigil, said the bill would “hurt drag shows.” Let that sink in; these radicals admit the quiet part out loud.

Stephanie Vigil supported House Bill 24-1071, which added sex changes to the definition of good cause for when a person convicted of a felony petitions to change their legal name, making it easier for men to commit felonies and then become women in order to hide from their criminal identities. Vigil does not work for Colorado families; she works for a small contingent of radicals who push wealth redistribution, socialism, and the sexual transitioning of Colorado children…[Pols emphasis]

…Like all Anti-Americans, Vigil is pro-illegal immigration. She co-sponsored HB23-1100, which became law and prevents Sheriffs and Police Officers from informing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of illegal immigrants who are in their custody and from detaining them until ICE can pick them up. Vigil protects illegal immigrants while endangering Colorado families. It is time for Stephanie Vigil to go back to “gig work” and stop making laws that endanger women and children across the state.

In addition to the standard anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ accusations, the Colorado Republican Party claims that Vigil “hates business owners and landlords”; wants to allow criminals to change their sexual identity in order to escape justice; and loves illegal immigration.

Vigil also fought for the British in the Revolutionary War and conspired with John Wilkes Booth to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. We’re joking about that last sentence, of course, but let’s be honest: You wouldn’t have blinked twice if those bullet points were also included in the Colorado GOP’s email.

The State Republican Party has also tried to “help” Gabe-ish Evans in his bid for Congress in CO-08 — despite the fact that the State Party endorsed his opponent, Janak Joshi, in the June Primary Election. But even that attempt created headaches for Evans. As Jesse Paul noted for The Colorado Sun:

The party did this week use its email list to distribute a flyer advertising a fundraiser for Evans and conservative commentator and activist Jeff Crank, the Republican who beat Williams in the 5th Congressional District primary. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, was a featured guest.

But the fundraiser was organized by a joint committee set up by Evans and Crank, not the Colorado GOP. And the gathering was supposed to be private.

The flyer shared by the party included the personal email addresses of the candidates’ fundraising consultants, as well as the exact time and location of the gathering. That prompted security concerns given that Scalise was gravely wounded in a shooting a few years ago in which members of the GOP congressional baseball team were targeted. [Pols emphasis]

Whoops!

The rest of that email was as batshit crazy as all the others, with claims that incumbent Democrat Yadira Caraveo tells kids that they are racist when she isn’t trying to convince them to change their gender:

Representative Gabe Evans needs our help! The 8th CD is a winnable district, and we must help Gabe Evans take the district back from Yadira Caraveo, a tax-and-spend liberal who has only hurt her district and the families and children living there. When Caraveo, a well-paid pediatrician, was a State Representative running for Congress, she took $39k of donor money to pay herself.

Caraveo’s socialist mentality does not represent the 8th Congressional district. She has spent the last two years voting for any bill that takes money from hard-working families in order to pay for medical care, abortion, and LGBTQ outreach, including transgender surgeries, in order to redistribute wealth. Caraveo encourages abortion and gender transitioning for children and teaches children she encounters as a physician that they are born inherently racist. Her views simply do not align with Colorado.

That first paragraph is also problematic for Evans for a different reason. As we noted in this space last month, Evans is CURRENTLY taking a salary from his own campaign account. Maybe don’t bring that up?

[Evans, BTW, is among the latest batch of Republican elected officials and candidates who have publicly called for State Party Chairman Dave Williams to resign].

All of these “endorsement” emails come from the account of Darcy Schoening [pictured], the State Party’s “Director of Racist and Homophobic Missives” (see, we can make up shit, too; Schoening’s actual title is “Director of Special Initiatives”). Schoening has been branching out from her usual task of listing things that Colorado Republicans should no longer be doing — stuff like sending their kids to K-12 schools and following laws in general — but isn’t changing her rhetoric. Schoening shouts out words like “transgender” and “indoctrination” as though she were suffering from a political form of Tourette syndrome.

If we were a Republican candidate seeking elected office in 2024, we probably wouldn’t want any “help” from the State Party, either. The Colorado GOP has devolved to such a ridiculous state that they do more harm than good even when they aren’t actively trying to harm each other.