September 08, 2025 12:10 PM UTC

Barb Kirkmeyer's Sacrificial Lamb Gubernatorial Bid Launches Tomorrow

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• by: Colorado Pols

A press advisory this morning directs interested parties to Historic Fort Lupton tomorrow evening, a notable venue as we’ll explain, for the announcement we’ve been awaiting for months: not so much out of anticipation rather than simply watching the requisite boxes get checked on the way to launching a campaign for governor that even many of her fellow Republicans don’t want, as state Republican Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer lays quixotic claim to leadership of a state she once led a movement to secede from:

This morning, Kirkmeyer’s campaign committee Kirkmeyer for Colorado’s registration with the Secretary of State was changed to support her in a run for governor, removing any doubt about the subject of tomorrow’s “special announcement.” The venue for Kirkmeyer’s announcement, Historic Fort Lupton, is itself significant, being the same location that hosted the watch party in 2013 for the ballot measure in support of secession from the rest of Colorado that Kirkmeyer supported–and was shot down by voters including in her own Weld County. In 2022 during her losing campaign for Congress, Kirkmeyer claimed to have “no regrets” about her support for the secession movement, an opinion a majority of voters in the state she now wants to represent wholly are unlikely to share.

And that’s just the beginning of the roadblocks Barb Kirkmeyer faces running for governor in a state that hasn’t elected a Republican to that office in over two decades, and has overwhelmingly voted against both Donald Trump and Republican downballot candidates since 2016 while the state Republican Party lurched rightward. Kirkmeyer is in no way an objectively mainstream candidate, only perhaps appearing so on the curve compared to predecessor statewide candidates like Heidi Ganahl whose 2022 campaign collapsed into a 19-point shellacking after Ganahl went off the rails in pursuit of election and “furry” conspiracy theories. Running for Congress in 2022, Kirkmeyer ran a darkly negative campaign that was widely condemned for an ad in which Kirkmeyer outrageously claimed that Democrats “voted to legalize fentanyl.”

As the ranking Republican serving on the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee, Kirkmeyer has faced the impossible task of trying to sidestep the GOP’s responsibility for the state budget crisis created directly by the passage of the federal “We’re All Going To Die Act” federal budget bill. In the process, Kirkmeyer has as much as perhaps any Republican in the state save America’s Most Vulnerable Incumbent™ Rep. Gabe Evans shouldered the baggage from the enormously unpopular federal budget bill. The GOP’s arguments in defense of the federal budget bill after it opened a billion-dollar hole in the state budget don’t add up, and Colorado voters are highly unlikely to reverse their dim view of the bill between now and the fall of 2026.

The first challenge that Kirkmeyer will have is in the Republican primary, where the base has already been tipped off that Kirkmeyer is an “establishment” candidate who isn’t sufficiently concerned about right-wing litmus test issues like “election integrity.” About the only thing Kirkmeyer has in her favor in a Republican primary focused on social issues is her well-documented absolutist opposition to abortion rights–a stand that might help Kirkmeyer validate her conservative credentials, but will ruin her in the general election.

Don’t take our word for it, just watch this video:

KIRKMEYER: I voted and I signed the petitions in support of personhood, so, no, I don’t and I don’t agree to any exceptions to abortion. And in fact, as a county commissioner, I voted to ban the Plan B abortion pill from our health clinics.

That 20 seconds of video is what’s known as “the ballgame,” folks. In a state that has repeatedly voted to protect abortion rights and send packing Republican candidates who oppose them, Kirkmeyer’s support for no-exceptions life at conception “Personhood” abortion bans is the most disqualifying of all of Kirkmeyer’s multitude of issues. After securing the GOP nomination in the CO-08 race in 2022, Kirkmeyer was caught purging her campaign website of its references to her opposition to abortion rights, demonstrating once again how this asset in a Republican primary becomes a race-derailing liability in the general election.

In short, no one being honest expects this to be a competitive campaign, perhaps not even in the primary where the hated “establishment” stigma awaits her.

“Both Ways Barb” Kirkmeyer is the latest product of all the lessons Colorado Republicans haven’t learned.