If Colorado Republicans are serious about trying to win back the state’s top elected post in November, they will pick someone in the June 28 GOP primary who grasps the biggest challenges facing the average voter. Notably, Colorado’s rising cost of living and, for many, its declining quality of life.

Republicans must pick someone who gets consumers’ frustration with soaring utility bills and prices at the pump. Someone who has firsthand experience with the make-or-break pressures on our state’s small-business owners. Someone who understands what it is like to create jobs and opportunity, and what it costs. Someone who knows government’s role in fostering a prosperous business climate – as well as the boundaries it shouldn’t cross in regulating it.

It also involves picking someone who perceives the pressures on family life – from our sometimes-problematic public schools, to Colorado’s alarming, and skyrocketing, crime rate – and who is willing to do something about it. Someone who feels parents’ fears about fentanyl and other drugs creeping into their children’s lives. Someone who knows public ed and higher ed and wants to make them more accessible and responsive to parents’ and children’s needs.

In other words, Republicans need a candidate with fingers firmly on the pulse of everyday Coloradans. That is why they must pick Heidi Ganahl as their party’s standard bearer in the 2022 race for governor.

Ganahl is well known in politics as an at-large member of the University of Colorado Board of Regents since 2016 – the only member of her party currently elected to a statewide office in Colorado. She helps oversee the CU system’s $5 billion budget and 30,000 employees. She has chaired the regents’ finance committee, audit committee and search committee for a new president, and has led major initiatives addressing free speech, diversity and the cost of college.

Ganahl is even better known as a successful entrepreneur. She is the founder and former CEO of Camp Bow Wow, a pet care franchise that has grown to hundreds of operations across the U.S. and Canada. She also founded Camp Bow Wow’s sister charity, the Bow Wow Buddies Foundation, which placed over 10,000 unwanted puppies and helped franchisees raise over a million dollars for animal health causes.

Prominent and respected Republicans – including party patriarch and former CU President and former U.S. Sen. Hank Brown – have lined up in support of Ganahl. But the most important reason for Republicans to stand her up against Democratic Gov. Jared Polis this fall is that she has her feet firmly planted on the ground and understands the meat-and-potatoes issues discussed at the kitchen table in Colorado households.

Ganahl’s lone opponent in the primary, veteran political contender and former Parker Mayor Greg Lopez, just doesn’t offer the lift Ganahl will bring to Republican prospects for the general election ballot. It is lift the party will need to take the battle to Polis.

She is a self-made go-getter and a creator of opportunity who never forgets the people around her – or the many others who are still trying to succeed in their own endeavors. She is a paragon of her party’s values in our state.

Mail ballots will start arriving soon. For those of you who vote the Republican ballot, make it your first order of business to vote for Heidi Ganahl.

Denver Gazette editorial board