The regime that runs the Colorado Republican Party is succeeding in making the party not only irrelevant but also, in the case of younger voters, repellent.

The dramatic increase of unaffiliated voters over the past 10 years is well documented. After decades of the electorate being roughly divided into thirds, unaffiliated voters now represent 48% with Democrats at 27% and Republicans at 24%.

But the hole being dug with younger voters by Colorado Republican leaders obsessed with stolen-election conspiracies tells the real story of how far the party has fallen and where it is headed.

As of Aug. 1, among active registered voters between the ages of 18 to 34, unaffiliated voters are at a massive 64% while Democrats are 24% and Republicans bring up the rear at a dismal 14%.

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There are 685,000 unaffiliated voters, 238,000 Democrats and only 156,000 Republicans within the 18-to-34 age group.

Repeat: Only 14% of young voters between 18 and 34 years-old are registered Republicans.

Meanwhile, the regime led by Dave Williams is hellbent to make the party narrower and off limits to anyone who does not believe in their stolen-election conspiracies.

Williams has exploited his position as state chairman to attack any Republican who disagrees with him. Rejecting more than a century of state party neutrality in competitive primary elections, he endorsed 18 candidates including himself in his failed campaign for Congress in the 5th District primary.

Fourteen of the 18 endorsed candidates lost, with Williams losing by a 2-to-1 margin in the county that knows him best, El Paso County.

A large group of Colorado Republicans who have had enough of Williams and his corrupt, exclusionary “leadership” will have met on Saturday, Aug. 24 to seek his removal as state chairman along with the vice chair and secretary. State party bylaws require a super majority of 60% of the 400-member Colorado Republican State Central Committee to remove a state chair, and burgeoning opposition to Williams might hit that mark.

Williams went to court to try to prohibit the meeting from being held. After misrepresenting party bylaws to the judge he initially won a temporary restraining order. But after the judge learned of the deliberate distortion by Williams, the order was reversed.

Even if Williams is voted out, he has declared the meeting illegal and will ignore the results. 

Meanwhile, Williams has called a separate meeting set for Saturday, Aug. 31 to make another attempt to cancel the 2026 Republican primary election, thereby denying more than 800,000 Republicans — including the minuscule number of young Republicans — the ability to vote in a primary.

Republican candidates would be nominated solely through the caucus-assembly process where only a few thousand Republican insiders will determine Republican nominees.

All this is against the backdrop of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters being convicted of four felonies and three misdemeanors for illegally tampering with Mesa County election equipment. During the trial, an attorney for Peters admitted one of the objectives of these illegal acts was to prove the outlandish stolen-election conspiracies promoted by pillow magnate Mike Lindell.

The once proud and dominant El Paso Republican Party invited Lindell to speak at a dinner this month.

A Peters ally, conspiracist Ron Hanks, who recently lost in the 3rd Congressional District Republican primary, has contended for years China stole Colorado’s electoral votes from former President Donald Trump in 2020 even though Trump lost Colorado by 14 points to President Joe Biden.

Peters and Hanks need to get their conspiratorial stories straight because she now contends sinister forces in Serbia are manipulating Colorado’s elections.

Perhaps the next allegation from Peters will be that Denver Nuggets superstar Nikola Jokic, a citizen of Serbia, was placed here to engineer the theft of votes under the deep cover of playing basketball.

Tragically, Williams and Peters have emerged as two of the most high-profile Republicans in Colorado given their antics and abuses of the political process.

It is no wonder young voters are repelled by what they see from the Colorado Republican Party and are registering their disgust in hard numbers.  

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, Gov. Bill Owens, and U.S. Sen. John Thune of South Dakota.