I know it’s late, and that prospects for the state GOP in the coming midterms are somewhere between bleak and desolate, but a challenging rescue operation, conducted from a leaky boat, is apparently underway.
It seems there are at least a few people left in the Colorado Republican hierarchy who don’t enjoy watching the party — currently engaged in a long-term civil war between MAGA zealots and somewhat-less-crazy MAGA types, a war that has left the party without a leader — continue to shrink, and almost as if by design.
But it won’t surprise you who wants to rescue the party from itself.
They’re the people trying desperately to hold onto their phony-baloney jobs in Congress, where half of Colorado’s eight representatives are actually Republicans. The state’s 4-4 congressional split is the lone bright spot for a party that has become all but irrelevant in a state that has become increasingly blue over the past few decades.
On Monday, the state party filed a motion that would allow it to block unaffiliated voters — the state’s largest voting bloc — from participating in June’s GOP primaries. The motion followed a recent ruling from a U.S. District Court judge who found that the state’s requirements for a party to opt out of an open primary are too burdensome.
Judge Philip A. Brimmer did not rule on whether opting out was a good idea or even halfway sane. He didn’t rule that open primaries were a problem. He just said that a 75% requirement for a party’s central committee to opt out was not constitutional and needed to change.
And so on Thursday, in a long-shot bid for party sanity, if not party unity, U.S. Reps. Lauren Boebert, Jeff Hurd, Jeff Crank and Gabe Evans have gone to court — along with the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), whose job it is to, uh, elect Republicans to Congress — to try to intervene in the state party’s lawsuit to block unaffiliated voters.
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SUBSCRIBEThis is no surprise. In a year in which Donald Trump’s approval ratings in the state are registering in the mid-30s, it’s a point of desperation. That kind of polling leads from a typical midterm loss for the ruling party in Congress toward a possible rout.
And that’s not even mentioning Trump’s Tina Peters-inspired war on Colorado.
Democrats have noticed this, and they’re bringing in the troops — and the cash. The 8th Congressional District, which Evans represents, was drawn to be a 50-50 district. It apparently is again this year. And both parties are all in. Many millions will be spent. Many brains will go to mush watching the TV ads.
But we go way beyond that. Democrats are also going after Crank in the 5th CD, which has forever been a Republican stronghold. And they’re also going after Jeff Hurd, whom Trump once attacked as a RINO for a vote against the volatile president’s volatile tariff laws, in the 3rd CD. As things stand today, this could be a big Democratic year.
So, why would the GOP want to drop out of semi-open primaries, where voters get mailed both party’s ballots and pick one?
Why do you think?
It’s about party purity and nominating MAGA zealots. It’s anti-RINO. It’s anti-small-d democratic.
It’s, well, a political assisted-suicide pact. It’s the kind of strategy that Donald Trump would embrace. You’ve seen how his gerrymander wars are working out for him — even worse than the war in Iran. And it’s apparently too late for a political ceasefire.
You’d think the state GOP would leave well enough alone in November, because matters are only going to get worse and they need all the voters they can get.
As you may have heard, it seems likely that Colorado will temporarily join Trump’s gerrymander wars — a measure is expected to be on the ballot this November — that would give Democrats a 7-1 edge in 2028. But for this election cycle, the districts stand as they were originally drawn.
And yet, state GOP leadership apparently wants to get ahead of the game in 2026 by bringing on its own emergency.
And by doing it in the most haphazard way possible.
The party’s executive committee, not long ago, had decided not to go to court on this matter and prohibited their lawyers from proceeding. But two days later, at the GOP state assembly on April 11, the committee reversed its decision and voted overwhelmingly to censure the 15 members of the party’s executive committee who opposed filing the motion.
So here we are, watching the party that put the diss in dysfunction fighting it out in open court — elected officials vs. party officials.
If the party leaders win, that means the many lean-Republicans who aren’t registered as Republicans are being spurned. It means that many of these unaffiliated Republicans, who may be uneasy about voting Republican this year, might decide to sit it out.
That means that the many voters who are skeptical of both political parties have a reason to become even more skeptical of the GOP.
State law allows semi-open primaries, which seem, like mail-in voting, to be a good idea to everyone but the GOP unelected crazies, who have been in court for years trying to undo open primaries. Once upon a time, both parties opposed the law. Now, Democrats have embraced it.
Meanwhile, the national temperature for Republicans, much less Colorado’s, is already in a deep chill.
With Virginia having voted to temporarily redraw its lines, the state is expected to turn its 6-5 congressional majority into a 10-1 majority. Meaning, at this point the redistricting wars, which began at Trump’s behest in Texas, are now a wash.
And maybe the most important victory for Democrats is that they’ve shown their voters they’re not entirely gutless and actually are willing to fight back.
Now, some state Republicans are taking a cue from the Democrats by fighting back, too, if just against their own party.
In the GOP congresspeople’s motion to block the block from taking place, they sum it up this way, saying, “it could cause chaos.” Which is a leading candidate for understatement of the week, if not for the entire year.
I mean, launching an attack on Iran is causing chaos. The Nuggets’ staggering playoff run (as of Friday) is causing chaos. The chaos for the state GOP is a long-running, long-simmering soap opera that predates this particular round of chaos by many years.
Here’s the basic math: State Republicans have won only one top-of-the-ticket race since 2004.
Here’s more math: Trying to turn away more voters has to be the worst possible way to turn that math around.
The math is so obvious, in fact, that even Boebert and friends recognize the problem. Political parties are supposed to be all about addition, but with this latest scheme the state GOP seems intent on multiplying its own problems.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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