September 15, 2025 01:06 PM UTC

Rose Pugliese, We Hardly Knew Ye

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• by: Colorado Pols

Apparently without much notice even to her colleages in the Colorado House GOP minority caucus, Colorado Public Radio’s Bente Birkeland reports that Minority Leader Rose Pugliese will resign her El Paso County seat effective immediately, complaining about the “toxic” work environment in the aftermath of the controversy over now ex-Rep. Ryan Armagost’s (and much of the GOP House caucus’) treatment of a female colleague:

“The last day of Special Session was sad and disappointing for me,” wrote Pugliese in a letter to friends and supporters on Sunday, Sept. 14.

“I had no other choice but to bear witness to the collapse of integrity in the Colorado State House of Representative. The lies and hypocrisies the Majority spewed were beyond what I had ever expected, even in Colorado politics. It has been degraded, and the one word that is at the top of my mind is toxic,” she wrote.

Pugliese represented northern El Paso County, including much of the city of Colorado Springs, but said she would be taking her two young children and moving back to Mesa County, where she previously served as a county commissioner, and still considers home.

If Pugliese hadn’t resigned, we would be updating instead today the story of her participation in the Charlie Kirk memorial purge campaign, calling along with Rep. Jarvis Caldwell for the firing of a state employee who failed to express the necessary degree of remorse of Kirk’s assassination last week. Pugliese’s zeal to get a state employee fired over her speech stands in marked contrast to her infamously hands-off management of the House GOP minority, which was ridden with infighting and indiscretion long before Rep. Armagost’s photo from the floor of a female colleague became a scandal.

Pugliese’s sudden resignation from the House presumably puts an end to her years of attempts at higher office, after serving eight years as a Mesa County Commissioner and entertaining runs for a variety of offices before relocating to Colorado Springs and running for the House seat vacated by ex-Rep. Shane Sandridge. Pugliese was briefly a candidate for Congress in the 2024 CO-05 GOP primary ultimately won by Jeff Crank, and had been mentioned as a possible Secretary of State candidate next year. Now the principal question is who will succeed Pugliese as House Minority Leader–a question that won’t be easy to answer given the deep ideological and personal divides between minority caucus members. The top name circulating as of this writing is Assistant House Minority Leader Ty Winter, who would signal an even further shift to the hard right and likely even less cooperation from the minority when the legislature reconvenes in January.

On the upside, Winter insists that despite what you may have heard, he’s not a Proud Boy.

Because of Pugliese’s inability to manage her undisciplined caucus or meaningfully reach out across the aisle, her term as House Minority Leader will be remembered as more or less equivalent to having no minority leader at all. The one positive thing we can say is that if the next minority leader is a fire-breathing disaster like Ty Winter could well become, Pugliese’s vacuous leadership may be fondly remembered by comparison.