The Western Conservative Summit keeps getting bigger, more influential and, as far as John Andrews is concerned, better.

Every year, the summit breaks its own attendance record, and this year was no exception. The three-day conservative confab, which wrapped up Sunday at the Colorado Convention Center, is expected to hit nearly 4,000 attendees when the final figures are tallied, or several hundred more than the 3,500 guests who turned out in 2014.

But the number of summiteers doesn’t quite explain the event’s growing influence in Republican politics. This year’s summit featured six announced or likely GOP presidential contenders and one surrogate — Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz — the highest number of presidential hopefuls in the event’s history.

Part of the summit’s appeal for GOP candidates lies with Colorado’s status as a pivotal swing state. Part of it lies with the summit itself, says Andrews, director of the Centennial Institute at Colorado Christian University, the event’s sponsor.

“We get a lot of compliments that we match up well to CPAC and some of the other, more established conservative conferences because there’s a spirit of fun and an entertainment dimension to the summit that some other conferences don’t have,” Andrews said.

This year’s entertainment highlights included cowboy singer Michael Martin Murphy, who performed Friday and Saturday night, and a Saturday night song-and-dance routine by the Colorado Children’s Chorale.

Then there was something you’ll never see at CPAC, namely a flash mob.

“CPAC, the Beltway crowd that’s all politics all the time and takes themselves pretty seriously — here we like to laugh, we like music and dance and surprises,” Andrews said. “We think the summit just keeps improving in some of those ways as well as growing.”

New to this year’s summit was a Shabbat service for Jewish attendees. The program format differed from previous years in that would-be presidential candidates shortened their stump speeches, then participated in onstage interviews with the Washington Examiner’s Byron York or radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt.

The event drew three of the top five presidential contenders — Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, neurosurgeon Ben Carson and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee — as measured by the RealClearPolitics polling average, as well as former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, ex-Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum.

Not surprisingly, the media presence nearly doubled, with 64 state, national and international media outlets and 207 individual reporters, editors, producers, hosts, bloggers, photographers and freelancers, said WCS media coordinator Jim Czupor.

The largest media presence was that of KNUS-AM radio in Denver, a summit sponsor, which sent 26 personalities and staffers, he said.

Andrews pointed out that the program also included two left-on-right debates, featuring a couple of bona fide progressives: radio talk-show hosts Richard Fowler and Mark Levine.

“We’ve never had full-on left-versus-right debates,” Andrews said. “We did one on gun rights versus gun control, and we did a great one on race and poverty.”

For the first time, the Log Cabin Republicans were represented at the summit, albeit with a caveat. Summit organizers had declined the gay Republican group’s application for a booth, saying anyone was welcome to attend but that sponsors and exhibitors had to share the values of the event’s ultimate sponsor, Colorado Christian University. But then the Colorado Republican Party invited the group to share its table.

The timing was interesting: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Friday in favor of gay marriage, but LCR member Travis Taylor, who staffed the booth Sunday, said attendees were almost uniformly friendly and interested in discussing the decision.

“With really just one exception that I can think of, everyone here has been just fantastic,” Taylor said. “They’ve made it clear that they’re happy we’re here.”

That didn’t surprise Andrews. “A love-your-neighbor spirit prevailed during the summit,” he said. “We were confident that it would.”

— valrichardson17@gmail.com