In a few days, the 400 members of the Colorado Republican State Central Committee will meet to elect a successor to the failed and corrosive leadership of Dave Williams.

Unfortunately, whoever gets elected might not be any better and could very well be worse as the party continues its destructive drive to cancel the 2026 Colorado Republican primary election.

Most of the candidates for state chair are either openly committed or silently compliant to the scheme to steal the votes of 950,000 registered Republicans from voting in a primary election. Canceling the Republican primary would also mean nearly 2 million unaffiliated voters would receive only the Democratic primary ballot in the mail in 2026.

Rather than several hundred-thousand Republican and unaffiliated voters choosing Republican nominees for governor, U.S. senator, secretary of state, attorney general, state treasurer, eight congressional seats, 65 state House seats, 17 state Senate seats, and county elected offices of county commissioner, sheriff, clerk and recorder, treasurer and assessor in 62 of 64 counties in 2026, the absolute power to nominate Republican candidates for every one of these offices would be placed in the hands of a few thousand Republican activists who attend precinct caucuses and party assemblies.

Proponents of canceling the primary defiantly and dismissively say any Republican who wants to participate in the caucus-assembly nomination process can do so as long as they commit to attending a precinct caucus during an evening in March and then attend their county assembly and ultimately the state assembly which are all day events.

In other words, play by our narrow, exclusionary rules or you don’t get to play at all.

Memo to those who want to abolish the primary and force people to participate in an antiquated, irrelevant process that only serves the interests of party insiders: you want to shut out people in law enforcement, the military, public safety, health care, hospitality, retail, transportation and education who are either unable to participate because of their schedules or cannot financially afford to take an evening off or devote a couple of weekends to this laborious process.

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If you are a cop, a soldier, a health care worker in a hospital or nursing home, a firefighter, a restaurant worker, a long-haul trucker, a store employee or a teacher or coach, or work at an airport and you are required to work evenings and weekends, attending evening caucuses and weekend assemblies is simply not possible.

Conversely, primaries allow everyone to vote and participate in the nomination process regardless of their personal and professional commitments.

Taking away the right to vote in a primary election is exclusionary and terribly elitist. 

Of course, Dave Williams and his supporters don’t actually want hundreds of thousands of voters who do not meet their standards of ideological purity to interfere with their tight little fiefdom. Keeping control of the nomination process, not winning elections, is the only thing that matters.

The same people who want to eliminate the 2026 primary also talk about doing away with the all-mail ballot process and going back to only in-person voting on Election Day.

Colorado adopted the all-mail ballot in 2013 after more than 85% of voters proactively signed up for the “permanent absentee ballot” which left precinct voting locations barely used. Voters themselves said they wanted the convenience of a mail ballot so they could vote when and where they wanted.

Meanwhile, the state party is spending tens of thousands of dollars to go to federal court to try to overturn Proposition 108 which was passed by voters in 2016. Proposition 108 allows 1.9 million unaffiliated voters to choose to vote in one of the two major party primary elections. 

What kind of message does it send to unaffiliated voters who make up half of the Colorado electorate that Republicans want to rip away their right to vote in a primary election?

Dave Williams and most of the candidates for state chair want to bury their heads in the sand and refuse to believe Colorado has dramatically changed with unaffiliated voters making up nearly 50% of the electorate with Democrats at 26% and Republicans at only 23%.

Perhaps the Colorado Republican Party should consider changing its mascot from the elephant to the ostrich. My apologies to ostriches everywhere.

Dick Wadhams is a former Colorado Republican state chairman who managed campaigns for U.S. Sens. Hank Brown and Wayne Allard, and Gov. Bill Owens.  He was campaign manager for U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune when Thune unseated Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle in South Dakota in 2004.