A recent Vail retreat organized for select Democratic lawmakers — financed in part by a prominent dark money group — has heightened tensions within the legislative caucus and escalated a broader struggle over the direction of Colorado’s dominant political party.
The event was a summit earlier this month for the legislature’s “Opportunity Caucus,” held at Vail’s Sonnenalp Hotel. Nearly 20 legislators — who generally hew closer to the party’s mainstream than its more progressive wing — were invited for group discussions and educational panels featuring organizations that paid to attend the event. A number of prominent lobbyists also took part.
The hotel rooms were covered by a donation from One Main Street, a nonprofit group that doesn’t disclose most of its donors. Last year, the group supported several caucus members against more left-wing opponents in Democratic primaries that it and others viewed as an existential struggle over the party’s future.
The existence and details of the summit, first reported by the Colorado Sun, triggered immediate criticism from other Democratic legislators, elevating simmering complaints about the caucus that had remained low-level earlier in the year. Critics, like Rep. Yara Zokaie of Fort Collins, accused the summit’s attendees of “hobnobbing with lobbyists for Xcel and the prison industrial complex,” and one ethics expert told The Denver Post this week that the circumstances of the event appeared “problematic.”
Sen. Lindsey Daugherty, an Arvada Democrat and the caucus’s chair, said the group formed earlier this year so that lawmakers could have open conversations about policy proposals in a “supportive environment.”
Echoing a national debate among Democrats for the past year, the caucus largely represents a response to concerns that the party is shifting too far to the left, crowding out ideological debate and risking — they argue — Colorado’s hefty Democratic majorities.
In a column announcing the caucus’s founding earlier this year, Daugherty and co-founder Rep. Shannon Bird wrote that “political discourse has been dominated by extremes, leaving behind hardworking people who keep our state running. Divisive rhetoric and political theatrics have no place in the legislature when the stakes are this high.”
“We know that now more than ever, folks are really struggling to pay the bills, they’re struggling to pay rent, they can’t afford groceries, and we really want to talk about the kitchen-table issues that we feel resonate with our constituents in this state,” Daugherty said in an interview.
Several other caucus members declined to comment for this story.
One critic, Sen. Julie Gonzales of Denver, said she and other Democratic senators — who created their own group chat after the summit became public — were “appalled at the unprecedented nature of the retreat.” Sen. Janice Marchman, a Loveland Democrat, wrote on social media that she was “ashamed of the politicians I work with” who attended the event.
“This is the Democratic establishment in control of Colorado,” she wrote to describe participants.
Just as the Opportunity Caucus views itself as an effort to steer a beleaguered party into a more pragmatic, voter-focused future, its critics have cast the caucus’s existence as the sort of moderate, industry-friendly politicking that has hobbled the party’s brand.
Links with nonprofit group
The recent castigations from progressive Democrats were driven in part by the Opportunity Caucus’s ties to One Main Street. The lawmakers’ hotel stay was paid for by the group, which last year spent nearly $800,000 in largely untraceable funds to back several Opportunity Caucus members in safe Democratic primaries.
While the group has declined to reveal its donors, past support has come from select labor unions, charter school groups and business interests, like the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce and Denver’s apartment association, according to tax and campaign finance filings.
To secure the Opportunity Caucus’s hotel rooms, the caucus requested $25,000 from One Main Street, according to an email that Andrew Short, its executive director, sent to the group’s board. The email was obtained by The Post.
In an interview on Wednesday, Short confirmed his group paid for the rooms. He said One Main Street was a separate entity from the caucus and that his group didn’t cover any other part of the retreat. He cast the payment as a donation and said it was similar to donations One Main Street had made to other political entities.
Colorado Sen. Julie Gonzales speaks to the crowd during a rally organized by the Center for Health Progress on the west steps of the Colorado State Capitol in Denver on April 16, 2025. Organizers called the rally “to demand an end to corporate greed in health care." (Photo by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)One Main Street did help start the caucus, he said, as part of “a need for the Democratic Party to get back to kitchen-table issues. And we provided limited startup assistance, but now they’re their own independent board. The caucus raises its own funds, manages its own operations. Our relationship is really one of shared values and collaboration.”
It’s unclear how much money the caucus raised from the early October event or what the entry fee was. Daugherty declined to discuss the event’s financing. She told the Sun that the caucus paid for the event.
Jane Feldman, an ethics consultant who previously worked for Colorado’s Independent Ethics Commission, said the One Main Street donation and the event’s opaque financing likely warranted an investigation, though she cautioned that she was aware only of what had been publicly reported. Feldman currently serves as chair of the Denver Board of Ethics, which weighs in on ethics complaints involving city government.
She pointed to a 2010 state ethics commission advisory opinion concerning a legislative women’s caucus that sought to raise money through a nonprofit partner.
In that case, the ethics commission wrote that a caucus partnering with or forming its own nonprofit — as the Opportunity Caucus and other subsets of lawmakers have done — was permissible under state ethics laws. But the commission also warned that legislators “should be careful to avoid an appearance of impropriety in the solicitation of funds.”
“I need to know more about how it was paid for and who paid for it and who was speaking,” Feldman said Tuesday about the caucus’s recent event. “But at first glance, it’s problematic.”
Daugherty told the Sun that a lawyer attended the event to ensure it abided by state law.
Democrats’ popularity slips
The larger conflict among Democrats about the summit hits upon the uncertainty and ideological jockeying that has riven the national Democratic Party since President Donald Trump’s election win nearly a year ago returned him to office.
Polling — including some commissioned by One Main Street — has shown that Colorado Democrats’ popularity has slipped among voters, mirroring similar trends nationwide. Both caucus members and their critics have cited those data points as evidence that a fundamental change is needed within their shared party.
Though caucus members and progressive legislators had privately vented about each other and the other side’s approach throughout the year, the tension hadn’t previously devolved into open conflict, nor had it derailed policy debates in the Capitol.
But the summit, and its appearance to some as a private getaway for select legislators and lobbyists, pushed nascent disagreements into public view.
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In an interview, she said her statement wasn’t solely in response to the summit but was a call to arms for Democrats in general. She said voters wanted Democrats to fulfill promises and “be bold.”
Some Opportunity Caucus members felt that the more progressive voices in the party had made it more difficult for those conversations to take place, Froelich said. But that should prompt a broader discussion within the Democratic majority, she argued.
“I told them, my heart breaks for you that you don’t feel you have a voice. We have to be able to have those conversations,” Froelich said. But she said both party wings needed to unify and find a path forward together.
“This is tough,” she said. “The bottom line is, we need to wake up every morning and say, ‘How am I fighting fascism? How am I fighting authoritarianism? How am I doing right by Coloradans who are really hurting?’ And it isn’t by forming a faction that goes someplace” with high nightly hotel rates.
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