One can envision a grandstand full of Democrats laughing and munching on popcorn while watching the Great Purge of the Colorado Republican Party led by “Comrade Dave” Williams and his merry gang of Soviet-style purists.

Deep anti-Trump sentiment drove hundreds of thousands of new, younger, unaffiliated voters to annihilate Colorado Republican candidates during the past three election cycles resulting in Democratic dominance not seen since the 1930s. Comrade Dave wants to complete the job the defeated former president started to make Colorado a permanent one-party blue state.

A recent fundraising appeal from Comrade Dave explicitly states “the Colorado GOP is going on offense against the radical left and the RINOs within our own party.” He has certainly been true to his word in his unprecedented attacks on Republicans by a Colorado Republican state chairman. But his attacks on the “radical left” have been embarrassingly amateurish and ineffective.

Comrade Dave wants to ban 1.7 million unaffiliated voters – 47% of the Colorado electorate while Republicans languish at 23% – from choosing to vote in a Republican primary election even while they would still receive the Democratic primary ballot. Now, his fellow stolen-election conspiracists are pushing a Soviet-style scheme to steal the votes of some members of the Colorado Republican State Central Committee (CRC) to make this happen.

The CRC will vote this weekend on whether or not to forcibly take the votes of absent members and, without their permission, count them as votes in favor of canceling the 2024 Republican primary election. This is the only way they might achieve the required 75% of the membership of the CRC to kill the 2024 Republican primary. A citizen of the failed Soviet Union would find this distortion of the ballot terribly familiar.

Stay up to speed: Sign-up for daily opinion in your inbox Monday-Friday

But Comrade Dave’s purge of the Colorado Republican Party goes way beyond stealing votes and canceling the primary. 

He attacks Republican 5th Congressional District U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, whom he challenged in the primary election in 2022. Williams was defeated by 14 points.

While Comrade Dave throws his sore-loser temper tantrums, Lamborn has fought to increase military pay and to enhance our nuclear deterrent and missile-defense capabilities as the only Colorado member of the House Armed Services Committee, where he chairs the Subcommittee on Strategic Forces.

Lamborn has worked with Colorado’s two Democratic senators to reverse Trump’s decision to politically punish Colorado and move the U.S. Space Command from Colorado Springs to Alabama. Fighting for Colorado’s role in a strong national defense clearly makes Lamborn a RINO (Republican in name only) who deserves to be part of Comrade Dave’s purge.

A recent target of Comrade Dave’s attacks is Republican County Commissioner Lora Thomas of Douglas County, who voted to financially support a teenage suicide prevention program by Castle Rock Pride. Commissioner Thomas, who was the first woman to be promoted to captain and major in the Colorado State Patrol during her stellar 26 years in law enforcement, just doesn’t know her place in the purist world of Comrade Dave.

Despite a clear prohibition in the Colorado Republican bylaws of a state chairman getting involved in Republican primaries, Comrade Dave openly attacked and dismissed state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer as a possible candidate for the 8th Congressional District in 2024 after she narrowly lost in 2022. 

In addition to the effort to steal the votes of absent members, the CRC will also elect a new state vice chair on Aug. 5. Most of the candidates are in lockstep with Comrade Dave. One candidate urged voters not to vote for Republicans because Democrats were preferable to RINOs. Another led a rally where RINOs were called “traitors, liars, whores and ass wipes” and former Colorado Republican Chairwoman Kristi Burton Brown was disparaged for allegedly having work done on her face for a “plastic smile.”

Meanwhile, the Weld County Republican Executive Committee passed a resolution condemning the plan to steal votes. A prominent national conservative magazine, National Review, included Colorado in a piece by Jim Geraghty entitled “The Quiet Collapse of Four Key State Republican Parties.”

In Comrade Dave’s narrow little world of ideological purity and stolen-election conspiracies, there is no room for any independent thought for Republican candidates and elected officials. The defeated former president, Donald Trump, and other stolen-election conspiracists do his thinking for him and every Republican must conform.

Dick Wadhams is a former Colorado Republican state chairman who worked for U.S. Sen. Bill Armstrong for nine years before managing campaigns for U.S. Sens. Hank Brown and Wayne Allard and Gov. Bill Owens.