Voters stopped both of the state’s major political parties from walking off a cliff in Tuesday’s primaries. They resoundingly rejected most of each party’s fringe candidates — the noisemakers and rabble rousers who by and large had offered only radical rhetoric and baseless fear-mongering rather than addressing the pressing policy issues on voters’ minds.

Conventional wisdom holds that primary elections play to the extremes, but Colorado voters were having none of it this time. In races left and right — in Democratic-dominated Denver as well as rock-ribbed Republican Colorado Springs — the fringe went down in defeat.

It was refreshing and reassuring to see each party’s rank-and-file faithful keep its bearings in dismissing candidates who had jumped the rails.

Perhaps most telling was the crushing loss — by a two-to-one margin — of controversial state Republican Chair Dave Williams to Jeff Crank in Colorado’s 5th Congressional District primary. Though Crank still must face River Gassen, the likely winner of the yet-undecided Democratic primary in the district, Crank’s victory Tuesday makes him the presumptive successor to retiring U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn in a district that only sends Republicans to Congress.

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Despite Williams’ clumsy attempts to outflank Crank on the right and cast himself as somehow more conservative, voters weren’t buying it. Crank’s conservative bona fides were too well known, and Williams wound up coming across as a fast-talking, say-anything pol.

Williams already had stirred controversy with his reckless control of the state party before throwing his own hat in the ring in a bid for the 5th. He refused to step down as party chair despite the glaring conflict and, in unprecedented disregard for a chair’s duties, proceeded to hijack the state party apparatus to promote his own candidacy and smear his opponent.

Voters’ overwhelming rejection of Williams in the Republican heartland of the Pikes Peak region amounted to no less than a repudiation of his dubious party leadership.

He employed the same outrageous tactics he used to bolster his own congressional campaign in promoting his allies running in other Republican primaries around the state. And for the most part they fared as poorly as he did.

Fourteen of 18 candidates the state party ill-advisedly endorsed in contested races were defeated. Williams’ losers included legislative hopefuls and at least a couple of other congressional contenders. The victors in those two congressional races — Gabe Evans, who won the Republican nomination for the 8th Congressional District, and Jeff Hurd, who became the GOP’s pick in the 3rd Congressional District — are highly qualified and capable candidates who can credibly face their Democratic opponents in very competitive races in November.

Across the political divide up in Denver, fringe candidates fizzled, as well.

In two highly publicized legislative races in historically Democratic Denver, voters had lost patience with two members of the state Legislature who reflexively embraced radical political causes and routinely stoked hot-button issues with bombast and invective. Denver Democratic Reps. Elisabeth Epps and Tim Hernandez were shown the door and got the boot.

It served as a gauge of sorts for just how much further Democratic voters are willing to let the Legislature’s ruling progressives veer to the left. The answer, it seems, is not that far.

That seems to capture the mood of primary voters in both parties. As if to say, “spare us the radicalism, the rhetoric and the reckless campaign politics.” What voters crave is solutions to the concerns the candidates will have to face if and when they win in November.

Denver Gazette Editorial Board