March 30, 2026 11:06 AM UTC

Colorado Republican Party Chairman Joe Oltmann, Anyone?

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Erik Maulbetsch reports for the Colorado Times Recorder, America’s Hangman™ and would-be Republican candidate for governor Joe Oltmann announced this weekend that he is exiting the race for the Republican nomination presently led by Victor Marx, and running instead to be the next chairman of the Colorado Republican Party:

Oltmann told the delegates he is running because there are good candidates in the race, naming state legislators Scott Bottoms and Barb Kirkmeyer and also Teller County Sheriff Jason Mikesell, before acknowledging the presence of Victor Marx, without saying his name.

“I entered this race because there were some policy things that I thought we had to talk about,” said Oltmann. “And we’ve got some really good candidates in the race Scott Bottoms is in the race. Barb Kirkmeyer is in the race. Uh, Jason Mikesell is in the race. And then one to remain unnamed by me is in the race.”

Someone in the audience yells, “Victor Marx!”

“There you go,” replied Oltmann. “We have a broken GOP. Would you agree? Yes. So I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I had a meeting with all the candidates. We leaked it out so it wasn’t some secret, but I’m going to withdraw from the governor’s race and I’m going to get in the race for the Colorado GOP chair.”

Oltmann’s exit from the gubernatorial race could be an effort to shore up the sputtering campaign of far-right state Rep. Scott “Rock” Bottoms, but in practice it will likely only help Marx consolidate support ahead of the Republican state assembly next month. Oltmann’s short-lived candidacy for governor was not exactly what you’d call a serious endeavor, serving mostly to keep him in some flavor of headlines while his legal problems stemming from helping invent the Dominion Voting Systems election conspiracy theory grind on.

But Colorado GOP chairman? The total state of disarray in the state party today makes it harder to rule Oltmann out.

9NEWS Kyle Clark reports that Oltmann’s switch to the Colorado GOP chair races comes as his well-known penchant for anti-Semitic rhetoric takes on a new virulent energy that signals…well, something, even if only an increased desire for attention:

On a March 17 episode of his podcast, Oltmann told his audience that elected officials in Colorado who are Jewish are “terrible people that have lied and stolen from you.”

“We’re a largely Christian nation,” Oltmann said. “We’re not a Synagogue of Satan nation.”

Oltmann said Colorado Governor Jared Polis, Attorney General Phil Weiser, and Secretary of State Jena Griswold are “demonic individuals that have built a fraternity around the George Soros’ of the world.”

Polis, Weiser, Griswold, and Soros are prominent Democrats who are Jewish…

On the one hand, as a successful business owner with a proven ability to earn press, Oltmann might have some degree of rudimentary competence that the previous two Republican Party chairs conspicuously lacked. And it’s not like Oltmann is a completely out-of-orbit choice, once courted by former Republican Party chair Kristi Burton Brown, and infamously present in the “war room” suite in Washington, D.C. on January 6th, 2021 with top-shelf Donald Trump coup plotters like Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman. There are a substantial number of Republicans with whom none of these figures have been discredited, and it wouldn’t surprise to find them on the Colorado Republican Party’s central committee.

In selecting Oltmann, these “assets” would come at the expense of alienating, to put it mildly, a whole lot of people, like Colorado Republican megadonor Larry Mizel, co-founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The question becomes whether or not such old-school Republican interests still have any influence in a Republican Party that has flirted with Oltmann’s brand of radicalism for years–while drifting from loss to loss under incompetent leadership.

It may be that, like Brita Horn and Dave Williams before him, Joe Oltmann is exactly the chairman Colorado Republicans deserve.