After three devastating elections that rendered Colorado Republicans irrelevant throughout state government, three congressional primaries can begin to turn that tide – or dig the hole even deeper in 2024.

All three congressional seats held by Republicans will have competitive primaries after two longtime incumbents, U.S. Reps. Doug Lamborn of El Paso County and Ken Buck of Weld County, announced they will not seek reelection. U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert will attempt to make an unprecedented switch from the 3rd Congressional District to the 4th Congressional District.

The 5th CD and 4th CD are strongly Republican and the eventual nominees are virtually assured to win the general elections. The 3rd CD has a nine-point Republican performance advantage but Rep. Boebert only won by 564 votes in 2022 against a Democrat who was disowned by state and national Democratic leaders.

Facing probable defeat in the general election even if she survived a strong primary challenger in 2024, Boebert will now run in the more heavily Republican 4th CD to try to save her tattered political career. 

But winning these three Republican congressional seats is not the most important issue. It matters who wins these elections because they will be the most visible examples of what defines Colorado Republicans going into the 2026 election cycle, when statewide elections for governor, U.S. senator, attorney general, state treasurer and secretary of state will be on the ballot.

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

Former President Donald Trump lost Colorado by four points to Hillary Clinton in 2016, and he was deeply unpopular in 2018 when Republicans lost every statewide election along with their state Senate majority. Trump lost by 14 points to Joe Biden in 2020, which also took down Republican U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner. Republicans were again defined by anti-Trump sentiment in 2022, when Democrats won every statewide election, five-out-of-eight congressional elections, and massive state legislative majorities.

Driving these Democratic victories were the more than 800,000 people who have moved to Colorado since 2011, which dramatically changed the Colorado electorate. For decades, Colorado was roughly a third Republican, a third Democratic, and a third unaffiliated. But now unaffiliated voters are 48% of the electorate with Democrats at 27% while Republicans are only 24%. Polling shows Trump is deeply disliked by a clear majority of unaffiliated voters, making it virtually impossible for Republicans to win in competitive races.

The only way for Republicans to start climbing out of this anti-Trump hole is to nominate and elect new members of Congress who can articulate mainstream conservative agendas that attract voters rather than repelling them with Trump’s stolen-election conspiracies and plans to pardon the rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

All three congressional primaries have candidates from both of these disparate points of view.

Even though Boebert is no longer running in the 3rd CD, an even more polarizing figure, former state Rep. Ron Hanks, is moving into the district to run. Hanks ran a failed primary campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2022 by saying the Chinese infiltrated Colorado’s Dominion Voting Systems election equipment and stole the state’s electoral votes from Trump in 2020. To dramatize his conspiracy, he released a video of him shooting a defunct copy machine emblazoned with a “Dominion” sign.

Fortunately, a strong mainstream conservative candidate in the tradition of the 3rd CD, Grand Junction attorney Jeff Hurd, is in a very strong position to win both the primary and general elections.

Boebert is not the only MAGA stolen-election conspiracist in the large 4th CD primary field, but she is the most prominent. Chaos seems to follow Boebert, and if she wins, there is no indication the self-imposed controversy during her four years representing the 3rd CD will go away.

Rep. Lamborn’s decision to leave Congress after 18 years might be the most glaring example of what Colorado Republicans risk in 2024.

The current state party chair, Dave Williams, who was soundly defeated by Lamborn in the 5th CD primary in 2022, has announced he will remain as chairman while running again for the open seat.

The Colorado Republican State Central Committee, the statewide governing board of the state party, has existed for more than 100 years, and this is the first time a state chairman has blatantly violated the policy of neutrality in Republican primaries. He announced his candidacy using state party resources.

Williams has been chairman for less than a year but during that time he has prioritized trying to deny 1.7 unaffiliated voters and 940,000 Republicans from voting in a Republican primary. He regularly attacks Republicans he disagrees with, such as Lamborn and conservative policy organizations including the Independence Institute and Advance Colorado.

Williams has a long history of promoting stolen-election conspiracies and recently said there are no fair elections in Colorado.

Republicans in these three open congressional seats have the opportunity to elect strong conservative members of Congress who can counter a Democratic Party increasingly influenced by Democratic Socialists on the anti-Semitic lunatic left. Or they can elect stolen-election conspiracists who will continue to define Republicans as outside the mainstream, thereby strengthening the Democratic hold on Colorado.

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.