Conservative campaign forces lost badly in the Jefferson County school board elections this week. They lost unaffiliated voters and they lost Republican voters — and it wasn’t for lack of trying.

“I’m a conservative and I can tell you that these school board people were not conservatives,” Jeffco voter Robert Zurbin told The Colorado Statesman on election night. He was one of a crowd of hundreds at the Denver West Sheraton celebrating the landslide recall of three conservative school board members.

Dr. Zurbin is a passionate and curious figure. He is the author of a long list of publications about colonizing Mars. Motherboard called him a “right wing bulldog for space travel.” Pixies frontman Frank Black wrote a song about him. Zurbin is also the man behind a natural gas capturing system being developed by Pioneer Energy, the company he founded, and he has been an advisor to Newt Gingrich.

Zurbin is not a socialist. He opposes over-reaching government. But he was clearly upset about the way education reform politics has thrown the district’s school system into turmoil over the last two years. He suggested the recalled board members were radical figures who, to whatever extent they realized it, were acting according to the dictates of party politics more than they were acting according to the demands of public education.

“I think it came across that these people fundamentally do not believe in public education — and taking a hostile attitude toward the system and the teachers is a terrible mistake. How can you run a system like that? They’re missing the point that the American public school system has been an enormous success. It has produced many of the greatest thinkers, the greatest inventors and entrepreneurs of the last centuries.”

Even taking into account the unique and intensely local qualities of the single-issue school board race, the spectacle in the Sheraton ballroom on election night, where parents, teachers, students, Democrats and at least a few Republicans bonded over the success of the recall effort, was not at all the result conservative politics groups working the election could have been hoping to deliver.

Americans for Prosperity, the anti-union, small-government advocacy organization founded by billionaires Charles Koch and David Koch, was not stingy about dedicating resources to the school board elections. The group has been working swing-state Colorado intensely for years, and it approached the swing-county election as a warm up for the 2016 presidential election.

A summit on education policy sponsored by AFP in the county in late September — it took place in the same Sheraton ballroom that would be crowded with recall supporters just over a month later — featured state Sen. Tim Neville, R-Littleton, who is running for the U.S. Senate, among other conservative headliners. The school board election, he told the attendees, is about “control of our future as a country… It’s going to be relating to the presidential election.”

AFP dumped more than $100,000 on TV ads and mailers. It hired a Jefferson County field director and part time staffers and managed large teams of get-out-the-vote volunteers. (The pro-recall forces, likewise, spent heavily in the election, although because of reporting deadlines and numerous committees, it could be months before anyone knows which side spent more in Jefferson County.)

Based on those high-profile efforts, observers thought the election would be close.

Democrats make up only 30 percent of voters in Jeffco, Republicans 32 percent, and unaffiliated voters 38 percent. What’s more, in the school board election, Republicans turned out in higher numbers than Democrats — 54 percent of registered Republicans voted compared to 51 percent of registered Democrats — which translated to 7,180 more ballots cast by Republicans than by Democrats.

Yet the conservative school board members won only 36 percent of the total vote. It was a blowout.

“Much of this school reform is transparently about politics,” said Zurbin. “They don’t like the teachers unions because they think the unions are solid for Democrats. But their attacks on the unions force the unions to be more solid for Democrats, which makes these reformers hate the unions even more. It’s a loop and it’s not about students and education. And look at the result of approaching education like that: They lost in a landslide, two-to-one, these candidates. No one in America loses that big. Goldwater didn’t lose that big.”

— john.tomasic@gmail.com