October 27, 2025 02:03 PM UTC

Colorado Libertarian Party Changes Course, No Longer GOP-Lite

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Colorado Libertarian Party is dead. Long live the Colorado Libertarian Party.

As Seth Klamann reports for The Denver Post, the CLP’s weird quasi-alliance with the Colorado Republican Party that led to a strange “Libertarian Pledge” is now a thing of the past:

Two weeks ago, the leadership of the Libertarian Party of Colorado sued 15 people ahead of the party’s convention and accused them of setting up their own parallel leadership.

By the convention’s end, seven of those defendants had been elected to the party’s board, including as its chair and vice chair, with promises to “clean up” the party’s image, stop “repelling people” and — perhaps most consequentially for the state and country — to go back to running Libertarian candidates across the state…

…The overhaul was the result of more than 12 months of growing conflict within Colorado’s largest minor political party, which has about 37,000 registered voters and has long focused on personal and economic liberties over government regulation.

The civil war included lawsuits, competing factions claiming control and prior leadership attempting to place independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the ballot and snub their own candidate. The party also moved closer to the Colorado GOP, including trying to clear the field to ease U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans’ path in one of the closest congressional races in the country.

The acrimony grew so pronounced that a judge had to oversee a binding agreement between the party’s warring factions just to ensure that the Oct. 18 convention followed its own rules and didn’t devolve into a “(expletive)-show,” as Denver District Judge Sarah B. Wallace put it.

Longtime CLP leader Hannah Goodman is out…and becoming a member of the Democratic Party (no, seriously). Her former protege, the always-odd James Wiley, was easily defeated in the race for CLP Chairman by Keith Laube, a former Chair of the Iowa Libertarian Party (sure, why not?). Laube is looking to get the CLP back to its roots — running no-hope candidates in a smattering of races where the only interesting thing to watch is whether or not the CLP candidate can prove to be a spoiler in a tight race with a Democrat and a Republican.

As Klamann continues for the Post, the CLP is going back to the past:

The new direction is, in a sense, the old direction. Laube, who previously ran the Libertarian Party of Iowa, and his allies promised to run Libertarian candidates, reverse the decline in their voting base and repudiate the caustic public image embraced by the party’s now-former leaders. He said the party should support LGBTQ Americans, an apparent nod to the prior chair’s use of anti-gay slurs against a sarcastic Facebook critic. At the convention, supporters of the Laube faction held signs that said “make LPCO Libertarian again.”

Embarrassments abounded in recent years where the CLP was concerned. During the 2024 election cycle, CLP Chair Hannah Goodman worked out a deal with Republican Party Chair Dave Williams that the latter hoped would prevent Libertarian candidates from inadvertently spoiling the hopes of Republican candidates in tight races. In exchange for promises from CLP leadership to discourage Libertarian candidates from running in such a race, Republican candidates were asked to sign a “Candidate Pledge of Liberty,” for which it stood to forever tie GOP hopefuls to a complicated list of promises. The deal actually ended up giving CLP leadership much more political influence than ever before, but at the cost of basically telling potential Libertarian candidates to go jump in Lake Dillon.

The CLP leadership told the same thing to its own Libertarian Party Presidential candidate in 2024, choosing instead to support the Independent campaign of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. If the goal was to gain more political influence, this decision might have made some strategic sense. But again, doing so meant the CLP turning its back on its own party’s nominee — which is also a very Colorado Republican Party thing to do.

The CLP became so much like the Colorado Republican Party, in fact, that it even ended up fighting similar internecine battles about who is really in charge of what. The prior leadership of the CLP filed a lawsuit against other members of the CLP, arguing that the insurgents were trying to pass themselves off as the real leaders…or something (it doesn’t really matter because the recent leadership election seems to have been accepted by all).

The last straw for many in the CLP might have come in recent months when Libertarians and Republicans joined together to form the “Chainsaw Caucus” — a coalition (or, really, just a website) formed seemingly for the sole purpose of attacking disliked candidates of any political affiliation. The only headlines the CLP seemed to earn were when members got caught saying something horrible about someone else.

Anyway, all of that nonsense may be behind the CLP for now. Goodman has gone from being a quasi-Republican to a newly-registered member of the Colorado Democratic Party. The “Candidate Pledge of Liberty” is no more — at least not for its previous purpose of helping Republican candidates — and the CLP is back to focusing on not winning a General Election.

It was weird while it lasted.