January 16, 2024 09:43 AM UTC

It's Official: Colorado Republicans Short-Circuit Super Tuesday

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• by: Colorado Pols

Ernest Luning of the Colorado Springs Gazette broke the news from Sunday’s vote of the Colorado Republican Party Central Committee, voting by a 65% margin to formally endorse ex-President Donald Trump for re-election two months ahead of our state’s Super Tuesday primary:

The Colorado Republican Party endorsed former President Donald Trump’s bid for another term late Sunday, nearly two months before state voters are set to cast ballots in Colorado’s presidential primary.

In an unprecedented decision, the state GOP’s central committee voted to endorse Trump over objections from some Republicans that the move abandons the party’s policy of staying neutral in primaries…

Colorado’s GOP became only the second state Republican Party to make an endorsement in the primary, following the Ohio party’s endorsement of Trump in early December.

The resolution put forward by Monument-based GOP activist Darcy Shoening not only endorses Trump for re-election, but also calls for the other Republican candidates to get out of the race entirely. Colorado Republican Party chairman Dave “Let’s Go Brandon” Williams played coy when asked about this proposal in early December, but now that the vote has succeeded any pretense of impartiality from the state party has been discarded:

“On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, the Colorado Republican Party wanted to give President Donald J. Trump a big send-off by enthusiastically endorsing him for president in November,” said Colorado GOP Chairman Dave Williams after the vote, adding that the state party “is more than happy to stand with President Trump because he risked it all to stand for this country.”

We can’t say for sure whether late-breaking word of Colorado’s endorsement boosted Trump in last night’s Iowa caucuses, but it certainly didn’t hurt, and together with Trump’s convincing win in Iowa this move does help cement Trump’s status as the prohibitive favorite to win the GOP nomination. For a number of also-ran presidential candidates, however, this endorsement is doubly insulting after they paid tens of thousands of dollars to the state party to appear on Colorado’s Super Tuesday primary ballot. For candidates out of the running like the newly-departed Vivek Ramaswamy, it’s sunk cost–but if we were Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley we would be finding a way to get our money back with maximum public displeasure.

All told it’s a huge contrast to the last contested Republican presidential primary in 2016, when the state party pulled out all the stops to prevent a Trump victory in favor of Ted Cruz. The #NeverTrump era of the Colorado Republican Party, almost unthinkable after what the country has been through these last seven years, is a distant memory today.