Where will Colorado conservatives draw a red line along the Front Range and stop the bleeding?

The current and growing battleground is Douglas County, where liberals have scored some wins but also where center-right government focused on common-sense conservative solutions – standing up to progressive pushes – holds promise to persuade all-important unaffiliated voters.

The history of formerly red suburban counties – Jefferson and Arapahoe – is a sobering precedent for the Front Range GOP. Counties where Democrats struggled to even be heard just a few years back are now firmly in the hands of the left.

Today, Douglas County, where Democrats comprise 19% of voters, and unaffiliated voters hold a plurality of 43%, is governed top to bottom by Republicans. The team of elected officials have been irritating liberal activists while responding to voters who want to “keep Douglas County Douglas County” in the oft-repeated phrase of conservative Sheriff Darren Weekly.

Here are two great examples.

Remember COVID and the liberal push for massive restrictions on personal freedoms, pushing to mask everyone everywhere including in churches, schools and restaurants? Turned out the Tri-County Health Department had powers to impose its anti-freedom policies over the will of local citizens and their elected leaders.

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So Douglas County said “no thanks,” responding to the outcry from people eager to follow science who wanted their freedom back. The county took the tough step of withdrawing from Tri-County and standing up its own health department – a department that is now functioning well. How do we know?  Liberals aren’t squawking about it and the media aren’t writing about it.

As the British say, “Done and dusted.”

Fast forward to 2022 and Castle Rock Pride held a drag show at the public Douglas County Fairgrounds that went off the rails, including songs with sexually explicit lyrics and a drag queen’s “wardrobe malfunction.”

With kids present. Not cool.

Time for the county, which owns and operates the fairgrounds, to not just field the firestorm of complaints and nod knowingly, but to find a solution.

So the county came up with a use policy that prevents sexually explicit events and nudity at any county facility. The answer, which had to balance constitutional protections with the common-sense imperative to safeguard kids from NC-17-level content, is a practical way to address a very serious, and red-hot controversial social issue.

No matter where folks are on the political spectrum, they saw local government getting the facts about an unacceptable event on taxpayer-owned ground, and then making sure that such abuses don’t occur again.

This type of leadership is why county Commissioner Abe Laydon coasted to re-election last year in the same year a big blue balloon crash landed in Highlands Ranch.

In a district less than one-fifth Democrat, voters in 2022 elected the eccentric leftist Bob Marshall to a House seat that had never been held by a Democrat. And, while the county school board is safely in the hands of conservatives for the next few years, the board has periodically flipped to a majority of teacher-union liberal mouthpieces.

So what does this portend for 2024?

The question for super-majority legislative Democrats will be how much they’re willing to spend to defend the seat of a controversial irritant who sued his own leadership. Or will their concern about the optics of the seat flipping back to red outweigh their desire to kick Marshall to the curb?

Two of the three county commission seats are up, ripe for big liberal money to flood in. The highly effective and affable George Teal is seeking a second term. And for an open seat, a solid candidate has emerged in conservative Priscilla Rahn, who may clear the field. She’s already launched a campaign focused on solid, county-focused solutions to crime, poverty, water and other key issues.

The daughter of a Black veteran dad and a Korean mom, Rahn is an educator, musician, entrepreneur and a person of deep faith. The GOP is not overrun with these types of candidates.

Holding the red line against the left and its buckets of ready cash won’t be easy. But despite some real divisions among county leaders, the record shows confronting very controversial complex challenges with solid, conservative solutions that defend deeply held values really works.

If unaffiliated voters see and understand these facts, the chances of stopping the blue wave – and keeping Douglas County Douglas County – are solid.

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.