June 25, 2025 10:53 AM UTC

GOP DougCo Commishes Make Epic Fools Of Selves As Home Rule Question Craters

• 8 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

As Colorado Public Radio’s Stephanie Wolf reports, a ballot question put before Douglas County voters in a special election yesterday that would have granted the conservative bastion “home rule” status has failed by a lopsided margin that can only be interpreted as a humiliation for the county’s politically activist all-GOP board of commissioners:

Voters in Douglas County appear to have strongly rejected an effort to become the next home rule county in the state, with preliminary returns showing the question failing by a more than two-to-one margin.

Reflecting on the results Tuesday evening, County Commissioner George Teal said he’d been reassured that home rule campaigns rarely succeed on their first attempt.

“So in many ways, this is not a surprising result. And we did hear several times from the public we were going too fast. The public needed more information,” said Teal. “I myself stand committed to continue to work on home rule for Douglas County.”

Speaking to Denver7, Commissioner George Teal says that despite being shellacked by over 70% voters against their proposal, and also voting against any of the serving commissioners for the committee that would implement home rule, he wants to “continue the conversation” in the future:

“Listen, to the 80% who voted to not move forward on home rule, I would like to still continue the conversation,” Teal said. “I didn’t hear from them that they don’t want to have the conversation. I heard they need more time. I heard they need more information.”

In these two stories, although perhaps unrealistic about future prospects for home rule given the wide margin of defeat for Question 1A last night, Commissioner Teal sounds like a reasonable actor taking the result in stride and looking forward to making a more informed case for home rule in a future, hopefully general election where more of the county’s voters would participate.

But as 9NEWS’ Kyle Clark reports, Commissioner Teal has, to put it mildly, a much more troubling message for the conservative faithful on talk radio about why Question 1A failed:

Republican Commissioner George Teal, who led the home rule effort, claimed without evidence on Monday that the opposition was funded by the Chinese Communist Party. The opposition group Teal accused is organized by an Asian American resident of Douglas County.

Teal made the unsupported claim on KNUS Radio.

“Here’s a nationwide [effort], funded by China, funded by a communist organization that is actually trying to work against the people of Douglas County having a say on local control issues,” Teal said on KNUS.

Blaming your defeat on the Chinese Communist Party is, we think everyone can agree, a significantly different response from accepting defeat and promising to work harder informing voters next time. Without some very good evidence to justify that kind of wild allegation, it’s difficult to take Commissioner Teal seriously on this or any other subject–let alone entertain the idea of giving Teal more power through home rule and a seat on the commission to make DougCo one.

So what is Commissioner Teal’s evidence of Chinese Communist Party intervention in Douglas County’s Question 1A, you ask?

9NEWS asked Teal for evidence of his claim that the group is funded by Chinese communists.

“Is there evidence it isn’t?” Teal responded. [Pols emphasis]

In the fever swamp of local talk radio, we suppose the Chinese Communist Party is assumed to fund everything and nobody questions that canonical assumption. But the reality-based community of course needs a little more, and there is one additional detail that must be acknowledged:

[Anti-home rule organizer Eiko] Browning, a physician who treats cancer patients, said his comments smacked of racism.

“I am of Japanese heritage. That’s not the same as China,” Browning said. [Pols emphasis] “I am an American citizen.”

To summarize, Republican DougCo commissioner George Teal believes the Chinese Communist Party is responsible for the defeat of Question 1A, and the only basis for that allegation appears to be that the primary organizer of the opposition is of…Japanese heritage. This is not the explanation for Question 1A’s defeat that Teal gave to Colorado Public Radio or Denver7 last night. And that makes sense, since we remember a former political climate in which this would be a career ending moment of self-destruction.

With that said, all three Republican commissioners in Douglas County share in the disgrace of this monumental failure, as well as the Republican political consultants paid tens of thousands of dollars for this losing effort. Blaming the Chinese for a humiliation they themselves engineered will only ensure no useful lessons are learned.