March 24, 2021 10:34 AM UTC

Anybody But Honey Badger: Gloves Off In GOP Chair Race

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• by: Colorado Pols

With the election for the next chairperson of the Colorado Republican Party coming up fast this weekend, a new coalition has emerged between three of the five candidates in the race with the express goal of ensuring that former Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler doesn’t get the job:

The next leader of the COGOP must be able to bring unity within the party! pic.twitter.com/4Ib0jsSaIa

— Casper Stockham – future leader of state GOP! (@Casper4Colorado) March 23, 2021

Try not to chuckle while GOP chair candidates Kristi Burton Brown, Casper Stockham, and Jonathan Lockwood insist that “we not not a party of smears, we are a party of substance!” But it’s clear that something has happened to deepen the acrimony between these candidates and Gessler just a few days before the election.

By most estimates this has been a two-person race between Gessler and the current party vice-chair for some time, with Gessler counting on old school GOP funder support and “KBB” backed by the ideological wing of the party including evangelical conservatives as well as Rep. Lauren Boebert. With that said, former GOP chairman Dick Wadhams has been sounding off with increasing urgency about the misguided message coming from most of the candidates in this race, culminating in a Denver Post op-ed today that minces no words:

Colorado Republicans will be electing a new state chair on March 27 and five candidates are running to succeed the outgoing chair, Congressman Ken Buck. The candidates are former Secretary of State Scott Gessler, GOP vice chairwoman Kristi Burton Brown, Jonathan Lockwood, Rich Mancuso and Casper Stockham. All of the candidates are articulate individuals who have their strengths and weaknesses, but it has been very disappointing to see four of the five contend that the 2020 election might have been stolen. They have expressed varying degrees of actions they would take to expose these conspiracies.

Every minute of time, every ounce of energy, every dollar of money spent on pursuing these conspiracy theories by the new state GOP chair is at the expense of being competitive in the 2022 election [Pols emphasis] when governor, U.S. senator, attorney general, secretary of state, state treasurer, a reapportioned state legislature, and eight redistricted congressional seats — including the addition of a new eighth district — are on the ballot.

It’s not a message that will make Donald Trump dead-enders happy, but we have to believe there are Republican activists voting in this weekend’s elections who understand Wadhams is absolutely right that their party cannot continue to relitigate a proven falsehood from the 2020 elections if they want to start recovering from the historic losses of the last two elections in Colorado.

And if you accept that, as a Republican looking to rebuild, who is your choice to be the next party chair? Gessler, who has literally spent the last decade on a fruitless quest to ferret out election fraud that his own investigation proved does not meaningfully exist, or Kristi Burton Brown–who despite having also engaged in election fraud speculation has far less commitment to the false narrative of stolen elections that threaten to blind Republicans from addressing their real problems?

It’s a choice that will speak volumes about the Colorado GOP’s future. A competitive minority adapting to a changed political landscape, or a permanent minority trapped inside their own delusions.