March 29, 2023 09:53 AM UTC

Dave Williams' GOP Gets To Work Wrecking Itself

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Colorado Public Radio’s Caitlyn Kim reports today, with the Colorado Republican Party now firmly under the control of far-right chairman Dave “Let’s Go Brandon” Williams, one of the first orders of business is the long-sought goal of closing the Republican primary to insufficiently “America First” unaffiliated voters:

“The Colorado Republican Committee wishes to explore a lawsuit against the State of Colorado, which would challenge the constitutionality of Proposition 108,” stated the letter, written on behalf of the party by attorneys with Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. The legal fund would defray the costs of legal action.

In 2016, Colorado voters approved Proposition 108, which allowed unaffiliated voters, now the state’s largest bloc, to vote in either the Republican or Democratic primary. The law does have a provision allowing a party to opt out of the open primary system and instead pick its candidates through a caucus process, but 75 percent of the members of the state central committee must support the move…

“We must work to close the primaries so that only Republicans choose our Republican nominees,” he said. “We cannot afford to let Democrats become unaffiliated so that they then can meddle in our primaries, like they did with (Rep.) Lauren Boebert. We must defend and protect our caucus assembly.”

Williams’ choice of Rep. Lauren Boebert as an example of the supposed harm of semi-open primaries is on the one hand ridiculous, since whatever attempt mounted last year by Democrats in CD-3 to tip the GOP primary to Don Coram failed miserably based on the results. On the other hand, examples Williams didn’t cite of who would benefit from closing the party’s primaries are much more telling: close allies like former Rep. Ron Hanks, who dominated the state assembly before going on to lose to Joe O’Dea. Former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters likewise won the top line at the 2022 GOP assembly. Not to mention Williams’ own dismally failed run against Rep. Doug Lamborn. These are the candidates who would directly, perhaps decisively benefit from excluding unaffiliated voters from the primary. None of them can win a primary under the current rules, and last year none of them did. But after the “establishment” Republican picks all went down in November of 2022, they feel perversely vindicated.

The intent of the proponents of 2016’s Proposition 108 was to encourage “moderation” in both parties by allowing presumably neutral unaffiliated voters to take part in the primary process. But for the ideologically strident far-right activists in control of the Colorado GOP today, that’s the exact opposite of how they want primaries decided, and a threat to their newfound control. At the same time, pursuing a legal challenge against the law instead of simply taking advantage of the existing provision to close the primary with a 75% vote of the central committee is a clear sign that Williams doesn’t have the support he needs to go the simpler route.

Make no mistake: as much as the Colorado GOP leadership elections themselves, the weighty decision of whether to close off the party from unaffiliated input in their primaries is a crucial inflection point for the party’s immediate and long-term future. Closing the primary would insulate and empower far-right candidates like Hanks and Peters, but then those candidates would have to stand in the general election where they would face certain annihilation at the hands of Colorado’s leftward-trending electorate. There has rarely been a clearer proposition for short-term gain and long-term pain.

If Republicans are more interested now in ideological purity than victory, and that seems to be Dave Williams’ bent, closing the primary makes sense. It’s catastrophic to anyone who wants Republicans to be competitive in future Colorado elections.

Maybe there really aren’t any left.