August 14, 2025 11:06 AM UTC

There Are No More "Sane Republicans," Rob Witwer Edition

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• by: Colorado Pols

It’s history that Colorado Republicans don’t like to get into these days, but those of us with intact long-term memories can recall a time when Donald Trump had not yet supplanted values to become the Colorado GOP’s personal object of veneration, and even resisted Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party. Even before Donald Trump descended the golden escalator of Trump Tower in 2015 to launch a political career that would forever alter the course of American politics, the GOP’s lurch to the right that began as backlash against the election of the first Black President in 2008 was nominally opposed by a faction of Colorado Republicans who considered themselves more enlightened and sophisticated than the Tom Tancredo/Dudley Brown rabble.

Way back in 2012, after Republicans suffered across-the-board defeats including the loss of a narrow GOP majority in the Colorado House, two such would-be “moderate” Republicans appealed to their comrades in a Denver Post editorial, warning in an op-ed that has since become prophetic about the long-term consequences of the Republican Party’s obsession with repellent and exclusionary social wedge issues. “Improve or die” was the dire warning delivered by former GOP state Sen. Josh Penry and Rep. Rob Witwer, the latter of whom authored The Blueprint, a prerequisite book on Colorado’s Democratic comeback that began in 2004:

The bottom line is that the Republican Party has sullied its brand. And unless that changes, the GOP is unlikely to win a competitive statewide race in Colorado for the foreseeable future.

We live in a diverse state that is roughly divided between Republicans, Democrats and unaffiliated voters. Yet since the mid-1990s, our party has been barely distinguishable from the TV show “Survivor.”

Every year, we kick somebody else off the island. We make it easy for Democrats to say that we don’t want the support of women, Hispanics, teachers, gays and lesbians, African-Americans, conservationists, Muslims and union members. Pretty soon there won’t be anybody left to vote for us. [Pols emphasis]

Over the following decade, Colorado Republicans fulfilled this prophecy with compounding losses that led to historic Democratic dominance of the General Assembly and statewide executive elected offices. Meanwhile, the Colorado Republican Party was consumed by infighting and corruption that eventually produced a Colorado Republican Party chairman Dave Williams, who flagrantly converted the party into a vehicle for personal graft and promotion of a slate of favored primary candidates–beginning with himself. Williams was more or less driven from office by outraged fellow Republicans and succeeded by an avowed opponent, but was eventually rewarded for his loyalty to Trump with a plum Commerce Department patronage job. In the end, the wrong actions were rewarded, and loyalty to Trump pre-empted all accountability.

It is in this new debased context that we find the aforementioned former “moderate” Rep. Witwer sharing the stage later this month with one of the best examples of the Republican Party’s toxic lurch to the right, 2022 gubernatorial double-digit loser Heidi Ganahl, along with a pair of Jefferson County-based fever-swamp social media whacktivists:

For Witwer to lend his credibility to an event featuring Heidi Ganahl, who lost by almost 20 points in 2022 and whose campaign for governor devolved into a widely-ridiculed mess of rants about “furries” in the schools and election conspiracy theories from Ganahl’s running-mate, is a head-spinning turnabout for those who know Witwer’s history. Witwer’s dissatisfaction with the direction of the party led to his ostentatiously re-registering as an unaffiliated voter in 2019, and to this day he enjoys a degree of “post-partisan” credibility as a go-to for quotable quotes on the day’s political news.

No longer. Rob Witwer has joined forces with the crazies he once deplored.