If conservatives are going to find a path back to power in Colorado, the key is to pick the right fights – with the right people. 

While the Colorado Republican Party is eagerly picking fights with itself, the center-right crusaders at Advance Colorado are launching missiles at governing Democrats and their failing policies, getting the attention of Coloradans across the political spectrum. 

Advance Colorado is the leading opponent of the cynical sleight of hand, TABOR-slaying Proposition HH. This fight, which I wager they will win, will consume most of the political conversation in Colorado for the next 12 weeks. 

But wait, there’s more!

Advance Colorado’s legal arm scored an almost instantaneous surrender from legislative Democrats in a legal battle over a hidden electronic internal voting system. Senate President Steve Fenberg ran up the white flag so fast he’d make the French proud.

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Here’s what the Democrats were doing out of the glare of public attention. 

To keep their fights private, Democrats had a voting system called “quadratic voting” that let members anonymously rank bills and budget priorities in secret.

It’s a very handy system for legislative insiders and a really bad system for transparent, open and accountable government. 

Not only does it give them a ready roadmap for caucus priorities – without having to hash those out in the sunshine – it also tells them what bills, and spending priorities, most of their members find wrong-headed, weird, or politically toxic. Then they can avoid drawing too much attention to their own members’ bad ideas or store them up for an eleventh-hour legislative push to see if they can be dragged across the finish line.

And, voila, the Dems can emerge from the quadratic voting booth appearing organized, efficient, unified and ready for prime time. 

When Advance Colorado filed a lawsuit, Sen. Fenberg – like a kid caught with hand in the cookie jar – said the system is of course perfectly legit, but he’s shelving it anyway because it might make Coloradans more skeptical of legislative Democrats. 

You think? 

He told the media that one alternative might be to hold “a public caucus meeting.” Or, in other words, exactly what state law intends them to do. 

But wait, there’s still more!

Advance Colorado has political artillery shells lined up, ready for ballot battles ahead.  

It’s hard to find an issue that has more universal concern than Colorado’s spiking crime rate. Liberal legislators believe one approach is to get more criminals out of jail faster. Most regular folks think that’s backwards.

So why not a “truth in sentencing” ballot measure that would ask Coloradans if they would require violent criminals to serve at least 85% of their sentences, a way to reduce Colorado’s 50% recidivism rate – one of the highest in the nation?

If this one makes the 2024 ballot, watch it launch a very important conversation about anti-crime policy, and likely roll to a big win. 

What is the strategic thread that unites these and other center-right efforts, including putting a cap on property tax hikes? Unlike a lot of conservatives banging pots and pans, Advance Colorado is deliberately appealing to a wide spectrum of Colorado voters. 

What does work is to focus on solving real problems – and exposing real misdeeds – that average, non-ideological Coloradans would find persuasive.  Once again, they will see the contrast between the common sense of right-leaning public policy and the perennial failures of loony liberal laws.  

We have seen this roadmap before, and it works. In fact, it was used by a previous group of political activists who were shut out of the halls of power in Colorado, struggling to find a solid foothold.

They are called Colorado progressives. 

In ages past, when Colorado was a deep red state, progressive activists launched their embryonic efforts and made it clear they weren’t very concerned about who ran the state Democratic Party – or even what it tried to do.

Instead, they stood up a network of activist groups – an infrastructure that continues to roll along – and has been gigantically effective. The central fact, now often overlooked, is they were playing the long game, talking to the whole spectrum of voters, stretching their strategy over many years.

This is the way to be effective in politics. Hey conservatives, want to get back off the turf and start to climb the political 14ers again? Get behind the Advance Colorado banner and roll up wins.

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.