October 12, 2007 06:05 PM UTC

No Room for Moderates in Colorado Republican Party

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• by: Colorado Pols

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

UPDATE: Check out the open letter to Stafford from a Republican reader of Colorado Pols.

It should perhaps come as no surprise that Rep. Debbie Stafford announced yesterday that she was switching parties from Republican to Democrat if you consider the move in a recent historical context.

As Stafford said in her remarks yesterday, the Republican Party does not well tolerate moderates:

I considered my options.  Ideally, I find myself a moderate and would be best suited for a third party.  However, the reality that our political system is not designed for a third party voice to be strong, my answer was to join a party that better reflects my values and respects my contribution.

Like many others in Colorado who want to balance the role of government, who want to protect business yet show compassion for those less fortunate, who want to stand up for citizens who have been lost in bureaucracy, I find that I am in the middle of the political spectrum.

I will spend my last year as an elected official serving the constituents that elected me to public office.  My ability to affect change for my constituents and the state of Colorado has been impacted by the fact that I am a moderate.

Like many others in Colorado, I feel this way:
I am not leaving the Republican Party as much as the Republican Party left me.

No one pushed me or pulled me:  I decided it was time to place myself, and my self-respect, with the Democratic Party.

Former moderate Republican Mark Larson was the first to publicly highlight the Republicans’ intolerance of moderate voices when he abruptly walked away from a state Senate race that he almost certainly would have won. As it was reported in early 2006:

Recent sniping between state and local Republican power brokers is exposing a bitter rift in the party, as GOP officials struggle to replace state Rep. Mark Larson in the 6th District state Senate race…

On Monday, conservatives, rankled by the maverick lawmaker’s history of bucking the party line, responded with guarded glee. But disenchanted moderates lashed out at local party brass and close-knit GOP leaders, who Larson said are cloistered in the right-wing power center of Colorado Springs.

Larson may have been the most vocal, but he was not the first Republican to be cannibalized by their own party. Ramey Johnson lost her general election race in 2004 when a group led by Bob Schaffer and Alex Cranberg attacked her because she wasn’t strong enough on school vouchers. Months later, the ultra-conservative Republican Study Committee of Colorado promoted itself as a group dedicated to purging the GOP Statehouse of those who aren’t true to the party’s “core values.”

The Denver Post outlined this rift in greater detail in January 2006, but apparently another bad defeat at the polls last November hasn’t swayed Republicans from the idea that there is only one “true” Republican. Unfortunately for the GOP, “true” Republicans aren’t winning a lot of races these days.