After he founded and served as the inaugural chairman of the Cherry Creek High School Republicans last November, James Ruehmann, a 16-year-old junior at Cherry Creek High School in Greenwood Village, went on to co-found the Colorado Federation of Teen Republicans and serves as its president.

The affiliate of the Colorado Republican Party is organizing chapters around the state, including in Arapahoe, Jefferson, Douglas, Weld and Fremont counties, with groups forming at Denver Academy and Cherokee Trail, Regis and Grandview high schools.

Ruehmann followed that up in April by co-founding the High School Republicans National Federation and serves as the organization’s executive director.

This summer, the Colorado GOP and Heidi Ganahl’s gubernatorial campaign hired Ruehmann, who helps out the state party with graphics and helps organize the Students for Heidi Coalition.

It isn’t all partisan politics for Ruehmann, who was appointed in June to the Centennial Youth Commission, which is in the process of getting organized and will advise the suburb’s city council on issues important to young residents.

Colorado Politics: You’ve already founded and run a number of organizations for young Republicans — at your school, statewide and at the national level. What made you want to get involved in politics, and to this extent?

James Ruehmann: The biggest thing that got me involved was in my freshman year of high school, I had a couple of very left-leaning teachers that didn’t really hide it very much. They were very open about their political beliefs, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but they used it to spread their ideas in their lesson plans instead of actually teaching the lessons, and I found that to be a little odd. So I started looking into some of the things that they were talking about, like Black Lives Matter, tax reform, the Green New Deal, all these kinds of things, and I started to realize, “Hey, I don’t know if I agree with this.”

So the following year, a couple friends and I started the Cherry Creek High School Republicans, to kind of provide a safe space for discussion with other conservative students, so that we could formulate our opinions a little bit better and think about what our classes were teaching us and what the news was saying.

CP: It surprises me that there wasn’t already a Republican organization at Creek, it’s right in the middle of what’s traditionally been a very Republican part of town.

JR: There had been one at one point but it was very flimsy. This was probably a couple years back, like in 2016, and then after the election in 2016, I don’t think anybody was really interested in being that polarizing. It’s probably about a 50-50 political split at Cherry Creek. So I could see why people weren’t exactly real interested in getting something started up there. But then after the last election, the dust had settled, so we figured it might be a good idea to get some sort of engagement set up.

CP: Did you meet any resistance from the school?

JR: Surprisingly, no. I could tell I was getting some dirty looks from the administration (laughs), but other than that, it was a very streamlined process. We had to have a clear constitution. We had to have a sponsor. And after that, everything was pretty smooth, we just had to get room reservations, and we had to tell them what we were doing, what events.

CP: Have you brought speakers to the school, or is it mostly getting together with other Republican students?

JR: A lot of the time it’s just been people talking, but we’ve had people from the Colorado GOP come speak, and we’ve had Heidi Ganahl talk a couple of times.

CP: A few months later, you helped found the statewide group of teen Republicans?

JR: Kristi Burton Brown and the staff at the Colorado GOP have been very supportive, in that they streamlined our application to be an affiliate of the Colorado GOP, which means we have access to some of the fundraising and documents and all that they have. They’ve just been really great with helping me get contacts and resources and all these kinds of things. They’ve been very helpful.

CP: If state party leaders asked for your advice, as someone who can’t yet vote but has a deep interest in politics, what would you tell them?

JR: I would say the Republican Party in Colorado needs to be focusing on what we need to do to win and make things better. That doesn’t mean that we have to go crazy and go all-out on certain issues, but we need to make sure that we can get effective legislation passed and stop what Jared Polis and the Democrats are doing in a moderate way so that we can actually keep our popularity up.

CP: Are there particular issues that as a high school student you think some of the older Republicans aren’t paying enough attention to?

JR: I find that it differs slightly, there’s a lot of our members that are supportive of gay marriage and even myself, I support some of the climate stuff that needs to happen because we do want to have clean air, clean water in the future. But I think one of the big things that the national Republicans are not focusing on is climate the way that they should do it. We believe that we certainly need to be energy independent, but that also can go with keeping things clean, keeping things regulated and keeping everything safe, so that we have a world to grow up in.

CP: What do you think of the state of politics these days, about what you’re getting yourself into?

JR: I guess the state of American politics is pretty dim, but I think we have a bright future where we are going to be putting American citizens first and make sure that we do put this country on the right track again, but I think it’s going to be a while until we can get things on the road and rolling. The biggest thing that we need to be focusing on is how can we reverse some of the damages that, over the past 50 years, both parties have contributed to this country, such as the decline in the middle class, the decline in our infrastructure, our climate, and the decline in our economy. And I guess that’s what we really need to be focusing on as Republicans: How can we reverse some of the damages that both parties have contributed to over the past 50 years.

As far as my political leanings, I would identify myself as a national conservative, meaning that I believe that we need to have a strong military, some trust-busting, keeping Big Tech under control, having a populist environmental policy and putting the interests of American citizens first.

CP: You were involved with founding a national federation of high school Republicans shortly after you got things off the ground here in Colorado?

JR: So for decades, the United States had plenty of little high school Republican groups pop up, but there was really no national structure for it until this April. When I started the Colorado branch and we started our social media pages, this guy from New Jersey reaches out to me and asks me to get on a phone call with him and he’s like, ‘Listen, we’ve been talking about setting up a national federation, because there is nothing really. The high school Democrats have a great structure. We’d like to focus on getting something set up like that.’ And I said of course, I’d love to help. So in April, we got a plan put together. All of the — I know this is a dismal number — but 12 states voted in favor of it. And we had a convention over the phone, just so we could get things provisionally set up, and I was elected executive director to grow the federation and do some outreach and these kinds of things.

CP: Is there a group of high school Democrats at Cherry Creek? Do you work with them on anything?

JR: The high school Democrats are active at Cherry Creek. I know the chair pretty well, and I would say that we have a good working relationship on the state level. I have a good working relationship with the new high school Democrats’ chair — I do have a good working relationship with the opposite side of the aisle, and we both agree that the biggest thing for us is getting kids involved in politics.

CP: Are you working on anything together?

JR: We’re going to be sponsoring a debate in the 6th Congressional District between Rep. Jason Crow and Steven Monahan sometime in the fall. We’re coordinating with both of their offices right now.