ASHE IN AMERICA — OPINION
Election years bring out the worst in our community, as people show their true colors and drop the mask in the pursuit of the win. This year is particularly pronounced because the Executive is up for grabs, and the Colorado ruling junta is less popular than it’s ever been.
Despite that fact — that Democrats have turned Colorado into a national punchline and they should roundly lose — Republicans can’t get out of their own way. The biggest story in CO GOP politics right now is the campaign of Victor Marx who, despite outraising all other candidates, appears apprehensive to face voters directly.
Marx has a habit of avoiding — and even bailing — on local candidate forums in favor of allegedly elitist out-of-state events, and he recently made headlines for a few cancellations that indicate a low level of comfort among the people.
For example, Marx was scheduled to appear with other gubernatorial candidates in Elbert County on January 31st, but he bowed out at the last minute.
“We are not going to spend our time responding to provocation, participating in sideshows, or lending credibility to distractions designed to pull focus away from the real work ahead,” Marx said in a statement, adding, “That is why I will not be participating in events or forums that devolve into personal attacks or grievance-driven theatrics, including the recently scheduled forum on the 31st. Our time, energy, and resources are finite — and we choose to invest them where they matter: with the people of Colorado.”
Strange approach to insult and attack local grassroots groups on behalf of “the people of Colorado,” but Marx appears to only want to speak to low information voters — as a matter of strategy.
“The less certain people think they know about me right now, the stronger position we’re in when it matters most,” Marx stated in a separate post on Facebook.
On February 4th, Marx was supposed to attend a Parker Conservatives event, where many of his opponents in the race have already spoken and answered unvetted questions from that group’s highly engaged audience.
This event was weird from the outset. Mark Hampton, who leads the group with his wife, first announced that the questions for Marx had to be submitted in advance.
“During the evening, we will not be taking live questions from the audience,” Hampton wrote in his event email. “Instead, we will conduct a focused interview with Victor Marx. If you would like to submit a question for consideration, please use the link below to send it in advance.”
Hampton framed this development as his own idea, and he appeared to blame his highly engaged audience for needing to change the rules for Marx. “If people could reliably ask a clear, direct question, we wouldn’t need this format, but after five years of doing these events, hope has been replaced by experience,” Hampton said in the same email.
Notably, when I attended the Parker Conservatives event with Scott Bottoms earlier in this campaign, no one vetted my questions.
In the end, it doesn’t matter. The Parker Conservatives event was cancelled, and replaced by a Victor Marx campaign event at the same time and location. I called Hampton to ask what happened, and he told me that his organization had received a volume of threats that made them uncomfortable proceeding with the event, but that the Marx campaign was reluctant to cancel — so Hampton turned over his event space and audience to the campaign.
When I asked Hampton about the nature and volume of threats, he said it was “enough.”
Apparently, I’m not the only skeptic of the storytelling around this event. Hampton posted on Facebook on January 31st, “But when you make a decision rooted in your values and principles that doesn’t neatly align with others’ preferences. That’s when the masks come off.”
Yikes. The statement continued, “I have been working diligently to provide a venue for gubernatorial candidates, the most recent being Victor Marks [sic]. Not the first candidate. Not the only one. Just one more in a long line of candidates running for governor. You’d think this would be the least controversial thing in a conservative movement…”
He declined to share that the other candidates had different rules on Q&A.
Then he compared himself to Job, “The people most convinced of their own righteousness are often the quickest to condemn others. Job learned that from his friends, full of certainty, empty of wisdom.”
Two days later, on February 2, Hampton changed his Facebook banner photo to a Victor Marx 2026 campaign image.
Now the Marx campaign is in control of the attendees and the questions, and once again the “dangerous gentleman” avoids facing the people he claims to want to serve.
In summary, in his short time campaigning, Marx has alienated the Colorado voters that are most likely to knock doors and make phone calls and get out the vote.
Curious strategy…
Then again, if his target audience is low information voters, Marx can just buy a ground game with all that out of state donor money.
I bet Parker Conservatives will help.
Ashe in America is an independent writer, host, and activist in Colorado. Learn more at linktree.com/asheinamerica.
