The five Colorado Republicans running for state party chairman agree that the state GOP needs fixing but differ wildly on the remedies.

After suffering historic thumpings in the last two election cycles in Colorado, the state Republican Party will be headed for the next two years by the fifth chairman in as many terms, as the state’s once-dominant party continues to grapple with reversing its decline.

At the same time, the GOP faces what could be its best chance in years to regain a foothold in Colorado in next year’s midterm elections, when voters typically favor the party out of power in the White House. And for the first time, a voter-approved independent redistricting commission is poised to redraw Colorado’s congressional and legislative boundaries in the run-up to the 2022 election, possibly yielding more competitive seats that could break the Democrats’ hold.

U.S. Rep. Ken Buck, the former prosecutor who has doubled as state party chairman for the last two years, announced in December that he wasn’t seeking a second term, opening the race to a field of potential successors.

The chairman candidates are former Secretary of State Scott Gessler, an election law attorney and one-time gubernatorial candidate; current State GOP vice chairman Kristi Burton Brown, the young constitutional law attorney who led a failed “personhood” statewide ballot initiative when she was a teenager; perennial candidate Casper Stockham, who has run congressional races in three different districts in the last five years and recently launched a nonprofit dedicated to candidate recruitment and training; Jonathan Lockwood, the openly gay communications consultant who endorsed Joe Biden last year and threw his support behind the anti-Trump Lincoln Project; and retired businessman and high school history teacher Rich Mancuso, who lost a race for Congress 15 years ago and has been mostly missing from party activities since.

The state party is navigating the twin shoals of a rapidly shifting statewide electorate that polling – and election results – shows is repelled by Trump, along with the uncertain influence of the former president, who has staked a claim to continuing to fashion the Republican Party in his image, potentially jeopardizing the Colorado GOP’s bid for a comeback.

In perhaps the most obvious sign that state Republicans have a tough task ahead, just one of the chairman candidates – Lockwood – is willing to state unequivocally that Democrat Joe Biden won last year’s presidential election, while the others agree with varying degrees of certainty that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, who spent months refusing to accept his loss.

But the candidate who rejects baseless claims that widespread election fraud cost Trump re-election has zero chance of winning this month’s chairman race. That’s because Lockwood declared last summer that he was voting for Biden and threw in with a group of disaffected Republicans working to defeat Trump, who remains the most popular and influential figure in the national GOP.

“If Republicans do not accept the fact that Joe Biden won this election and are willing to say it, we’re screwed,” Lockwood said at a recent forum. “People are going to leave the party that refuses to accept the election results. The mainstream has accepted the election results, and virtually every elected Republican has.”

Stockham said “transparency” was crucial to restore faith in Colorado’s election system.

“I agree the election was stolen nationwide and we have major problems here in Colorado,” he said, later adding, “I don’t know if the election was stolen, but I feel it was.”

Added Stockham: “I feel there is evidence out there that has not been exposed in the court system and legislative process.” He said he’s “ready to go back to paper ballots” in Colorado, despite the fact that nearly every vote cast in the state is on paper ballots and has been for years.

“There’s no question that there’s plenty of voter fraud across the nation,” said Burton Brown, who said she wanted to demand a forensic audit of Colorado’s voting machines last year but was unable to as the party’s vice chairman. “People deserve answers.”

Buck, the state GOP chairman, broke ranks with some of the more vocal members of his party soon after the election by making clear that after discussion with Republican county clerks, he trusted Colorado’s voting system, calling it the “gold standard.” The system, he noted, includes every county auditing the election results using a process that hand-counts ballots to check whether they were accurately tallied by the machines.

Gessler, who helped the Trump campaign investigate claims of election fraud in other states last year, said the election “may have been stolen,” adding, “We have huge problems across the country. We definitely need to work on election integrity here.”

While Gessler said in an email to supporters last month that he will “push for a recount,” he walked that back a bit at a forum.

“In a perfect world we could do it in all 64 (counties). In a practical world, we want to do it in a number of counties where there’s questions and concerns so that people can have a sense of confidence or an understanding there was a real problem with this election,” he said.

“There have been big questions raised and there are big concerns and there’s a lot of demoralization out there, and we need to get to the bottom of it,” Gessler said, adding that he doesn’t believe the state’s audit procedures have “been enough to dispel the deep concerns we have here in Colorado.”

Lockwood shot back, suggesting that the only reason Republican voters question the 2020 election’s results is because Trump and his allies have repeatedly made the claim, without evidence.

“I think that it’s very clear that the reason there’s a lot of doubt on election integrity is because people foment that doubt for their own political gain,” he said, looking at Gessler. “We can’t have a Republican Party chair who is profiting off of casting doubt on elections, screwing with voters that they want their votes from.”

Lockwood added that he has faith in Colorado’s current election system.

Mancuso had a contrary opinion.

“I definitely believe it was stolen, it was fraudulent,” he said.

Mancuso added that “as a historian,” he sees things differently than most people. “What’s wrong with us putting on the brakes?” he asked, proposing that Colorado do away with all-mail ballots and require voter ID for in-person voting for the next election.

“Then maybe we can tweak things.”

The state GOP’s chairman, vice chairman and secretary will be elected March 27 by the party’s state central committee – made up of county officers, elected officials and bonus members, chosen in party elections in larger counties based on the number of votes Trump received in last year’s election.

The meeting will be conducted virtually, using the conservative social media site Caucus Room, with an in-person option added this week for central committee members who want to travel to a hotel in the Denver Tech Center to hear speeches and cast their ballots.

According to party activists and close observers, the front-runners in the chair race just over a week before the election are Gessler, representing the more establishment flank of the party, and Burton Brown, who has excited support from the party’s self-described grassroots wing, though both seasoned politicians can point to support that crosses the traditional divide within the GOP.

Stockham, who has lobbed perhaps the harshest criticism at the current party apparatus, can count on a cadre of hard-core supporters but is more of a wildcard.

While Lockwood’s campaign has been provocative, his support of Biden looks to be a deal-breaker for the vast majority of activist Republicans, and Mancuso has yet to excite perceptible interest with his more folksy take on the challenges facing the state GOP.