Who has the worst rebuilding job in Colorado: Colorado Rockies Manager Bud Black or Colorado GOP Chair Dave Williams?

Both are saddled with cellar-dwelling organizations that somehow need to find a path to success. And both have rock-bottom expectations for accomplishing that.

But I think Williams has the toughest road. He’s dug some potholes himself, including with extended public doubting of the 2020 election results.

Williams was elected in a very contentious, closely watched race. He’s had a rough start to the job, catching more flak than a Russian bomber over Ukraine.   Some pundits have ripped him, occasionally in the most juvenile of terms. And others have publicly, loudly departed the GOP.

It would be easy to pile on. But I decided to ask him directly whether he’s gotten his head around the huge task he has signed up for.

“The ultimate measure of my success in this job is winning elections,” he said. “If we keep losing to Democrats, then my time will not have been successful.”

Bingo.

Now he must figure out how to get that done.

Though Williams is a bare-knuckled battler – telling me three times on three different issues that it’s time to “beat the snot out of Democrats” – he also acknowledged the reality that the advocacy portion of his job is not its core.  And certainly not the key to his own definition of success.

“We need to be focused on fundraising, organizing, turning out the voters, the basics,” he said.

That was hard enough when the Colorado GOP was riding high. It’s a barefoot climb up a fourteener now that the GOP has broken its brand.

Williams has bristled at this in the past, believing the “brand” is the party’s position on issues, while acknowledging to me that it’s about the messengers not the content of the message.

“We have a character problem, not an issues problem,” he said. “We have the ‘normal’ positions on issues. We just have to tell the truth and flip the script and go on offense.”

In fact, it was the fact that Republican positions on the issues matched up so well with the concerns of voters, combined with national Democratic struggles, that generated the belief a red wave was coming right up to Election Day.

And then voters looked at the slate of candidates from the socially moderate to ultra conservative and, unfortunately, too many voters believed anybody affiliated with the GOP had just arrived on the express train from Crazy Town.

So where can Dave Williams go to start building trust with voters, particularly the growing unaffiliated bloc in our state?

If it were up to me, I’d move the headquarters and staff out of tony Greenwood Village and set up shop in Pueblo. No longer a Democratic stronghold, Pueblo is a prize Republicans should seek even more aggressively in this cycle. Recall that Donald Trump won Pueblo County in 2016 and lost it very narrowly in 2020.

With a population nearly half Latino, Pueblo is a blue collar, hard-working town having more in common with communities in western Pennsylvania and Ohio than it does with Boulder.  It’s chock full of veterans and is a place where the Second Amendment, faith and family matter.

Williams, who happens to be Latino, agreed, citing the fact that the GOP scored one of its few flipped legislative seats in recent years in the county in 2020.

So why not get folks on the streets of Pueblo, start knocking on doors, listen to what the real day-to-day worries are and offer the Republican vision to help shape a better future?  What is the alternative but more intra-party pie fights over what are increasingly perceived by swing voters as eccentric niche positions on past, settled issues?

So, Chairman Williams, who struck me as sincere in wanting to plug in the GOP defibrillator and revive the party, stands at a crossroads.

His best path is to choose to blow up the stereotype of the intolerant “election denier” and really focus on the behind-the-scenes, unglamorous party building work including serious outreach to communities who can and should be part of a center-right GOP.

The other path? An ineffective party with narrow appeal that gives us more deep blue, anti-freedom, anti-law-and-order, anti-taxpayer loony left-wing control of Colorado.

I’m not naïve. It’s not a sure thing which path the party will end up on. But I’m worn out with Colorado’s leftward collapse, and so I’m staying in the party with the hope Dave Williams, despite all the slings and arrows heading his way, is a smashing success.

Sean Duffy, a former deputy chief of staff to Gov. Bill Owens, is a communications and media relations strategist and ghostwriter based in the Denver area.