Editorial —
New Colorado Republican Party Chairman Craig Steiner
As everyone is aware, Colorado is a one-party state (i.e., the Democratic Party), much like California and New York, but even more so. There are no Republicans holding any statewide office and there haven’t been since ballot harvesting was legalized in 2016. Democrats have overwhelming majorities in the State House and Senate. There is not a single judge at any level in the state who is not a Democrat.
But the state’s top Democrats recognize that for Colorado to be literally a single-party state like the Stalinist U.S.S.R. is not really a good look. Better for the Democrats to be like the old Harlem Globetrotters and the Republican Party to be like the plucky Washington Generals. The Generals almost never won a game, but it was, in theory, possible.
The Republican Party at the end of May elected a new chair, Craig Steiner of Douglas County. The position had become available due to the resignation of Brita Horn, the former Routt County Treasurer. She is almost universally recognized as the worst party chair in the 150 years since Colorado became a state in 1876.
The present Colorado Republican Party is split into two factions, and the essential battle is over how the party should pick its candidates for the general election. In 2016, the Democrats, with money from so-called independent Kent Thiry, put Proposition 108 on the ballot. It overturned past precedent and forced both parties to have semi-open primaries.
Under this scheme, unaffiliated voters were mailed primary ballots from both parties, and they could choose which party’s primary they wanted to vote in. It greatly weakened the rationale for a person to be affiliated with a party.
Today, approximately 54% of all registered voters are unaffiliated, swamping the Democrats at 24% and Republicans at 22%. Because Democrats, far more than Republicans, generally do not have contested primaries (with this year being an exception), many Democratic-leaning unaffiliated voters cast ballots in Republican primaries, choosing the more moderate or liberal candidate. As a result, many Republicans in the State House and Senate are little more than Democrat-lite politically.
For example, Cleave Simpson, the Republican leader in the Senate, has an “F” rating from the Liberty Scorecard, a leading conservative rating organization. His colleague in the State Senate and leading candidate for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, Barb Kirkmeyer, has a similarly dismal (from a conservative perspective) “F” rating. If you are a conservative Republican, there is often little reason to vote in a general election in Colorado.
Proposition 108 barely passed in Colorado, with a majority of Republicans believed to have voted against it. To pass constitutional muster, Proposition 108 provided that a party could opt out of the semi-open primary system only if an impossibly high percentage of its governing committee (75% of all members) approved. A federal district court judge recently ruled that the threshold was unconstitutionally high.
While the moderate/liberal wing of the party is in the minority, it does constitute more than 25% of the membership and has therefore been successful in keeping the Republican Party in the highly disadvantageous semi-open primary system that greatly favors moderate/liberal Republicans.
They have been able to do so by playing a deception game in which they pretend to support opting out while doing everything they can to prevent it. Every Republican chair since 2018 has played that game except one, Dave Williams (chair from 2023 to 2025), who is now in Washington, D.C.
The newest chair got elected by pretending he was for the opt-out, but since being elected has shown himself to be what they call a “DeceptiCon.”
The previous chair, Brita Horn, had to resign when it was discovered that she had allowed her attorney to loot the party of all its funds. Craig Steiner, since becoming chair, has done nothing to prevent all cash funds from being scooped up by the attorney, making it impossible to raise new funds.
Why in the world would Republican chairs like Horn and Steiner want to destroy the organization they head? It’s simple. The big donors to the Republican Party, who long propped up the moderate/liberal wing, no longer want a Republican Party to choose candidates at all. They and Kent Thiry want Colorado to move to jungle primaries, where candidates petition and/or pay to get on the ballot and the top two vote-getters, regardless of party affiliation or lack thereof, advance to the general election, just like California.
It is a system dominated by multi-millionaires and billionaires, and no one else need apply.
Perhaps it is all for the best. Instead of the present one-party state, we will become a no-party state where the very wealthy control all.
— Editorial Board
