The Colorado Republican Party plans to hold its 2026 state assembly in Pueblo in April, marking a return to the largest city in the only county in the state that’s flipped from Democrat to Republican to Democrat to Republican in the last four presidential elections.

The state GOP convened two years ago in Pueblo on the state fairgrounds, but this year is slated to conduct party business on April 11 inside an arena on the Colorado State University Pueblo campus named for a longtime Democratic state lawmaker and newspaper publisher who immigrated to Southern Colorado from Italy when he was a teenager and rose to prominence as a union organizer, vocal anti-fascist and advocate for his fellow immigrants.

Built in the early 1970s under then-state Sen. Vincent Massari’s tutelage, CSU Pueblo’s Massari Arena is also the site of an enduring piece of folklore involving one of the most popular rock bands of the last century and their contractual scorn for brown M&Ms.

State GOP Chairwoman Brita Horn announced the location earlier this month, emphasizing Pueblo’s recent shift from a reliably Democratic county to one more open to electing Republicans.

“Why Pueblo?” Horn asked in an email to GOP central committee members. “That’s easy. Pueblo has served as a blueprint for turning historic counties RED. But the work is far from done. We have huge opportunities in Pueblo to flip more seats!”

The Republicans’ state assembly is scheduled to land in Pueblo two weeks after state Democrats hold their state assembly across town on March 28 at Memorial Hall near the city’s Historic Arkansas Riverwalk. It’ll be the first time since 2018 that Colorado Democrats will nominate statewide candidates and conduct other party business in person, after meeting virtually during the pandemic and in the two election years since.

State Democratic chair Shad Murib said the party picked the city because it “represents the grit, heart, and resolve of Colorado’s working people. Holding our state assembly here isn’t just about geography, it’s about values.”

At their respective biennial assemblies, the state’s two major parties will nominate statewide candidates to June primary ballot, which features open races for every state-level executive office — governor, attorney general, secretary of state and state treasurer — and one of Colorado’s U.S. Senate seats, held by Democrat John Hickenlooper, who is seeking a second term. Candidates can also qualify for the primary by petition.

The assembly process kicks off in the first week of March with precinct caucuses, followed by county and district assemblies. Both parties plan to hold multi-county legislative, congressional and judicial district assemblies in Pueblo the day before their state assemblies.

While the Democratic nominees have won the state’s electoral votes in each of the last four presidential elections, Pueblo was the only county in Colorado to flip from Democrat to Republican in the 2024 presidential election. County voters backed Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by a little over 5 points that year, after siding with Joe Biden by just under 2 points in 2020.

It was a return to form for Trump, who stunned the state by carrying Pueblo County in 2016 — albeit by an even slimmer, half-point margin — marking the first time the GOP nominee had won the county since Richard Nixon’s landslide reelection in 1972.

Long known as one of the state’s largest reservoirs of Democratic votes — nicknamed “Steel City,” Pueblo was a hotbed of union activity a century ago — the county has taken on a purple tint in the last dozen or so years, with Republicans winning legislative and local seats for the first time in living memory. Two years ago, the county’s namesake city elected Pueblo’s first Republican mayor, Heather Graham, though, to be sure, she’s only the second person to occupy the nonpartisan office, following the city’s adoption of a strong-mayor system almost a decade ago.

In gubernatorial races, however, the county has retained its ancestral lean, voting for the Democratic nominee in all but one election since World War II.

Incumbent Gov. Jared Polis won Pueblo County over Republican Heidi Ganahl by just under 12 points in 2022, after winning the county by about 6 points in 2018. Polis’ predecessors, Democrats John Hickenlooper — currently the state’s junior U.S. senator — and Bill Ritter also won Pueblo by comfortable margins in 2014, 2010 and 2006, respectively.

Underscoring its Democratic roots, the county was one of only a handful statewide carried by Democratic nominee Rollie Heath in his overwhelming 2002 loss to incumbent Gov. Bill Owens, the last Republican to occupy the office. The last time Pueblo voted for a Republican in the governor’s race was 1962, and before that, it was a couple of times in the early 1940s.

Celebrated for the punchy and pungent Pueblo chile — a regional variety that holds its own against the better-marketed rival from New Mexico’s Hatch Valley, according to local palates — Pueblo is also known as the Home of Heroes, as it’s the hometown of four Congressional Medal of Honor recipients. With a current estimated population of 111,000, Pueblo ranks as Colorado’s 10th-largest city, according to the most recent available estimates, barely lagging Greeley and just ahead of Centennial.

Remembered fondly as “Mr. Pueblo” and dubbed the Italian Lion, Massari represented Pueblo for five terms in the state House and three terms in the state Senate from 1955 until his death in office at age 77 in 1976. Born in a small town in central Italy in 1898, he left for the U.S. in 1915, following his father through Ellis Island to Trinidad, where they worked the coal mines. Soon after, the family moved to Pueblo, a celebrated ethnic melting pot — some 40 languages were spoken at the CF&I Steel plant, the largest steel mill west of the Mississippi — where Vincent became a renowned voice speaking out against fascism and Mussolini in the pre-war years as editor and later part-owner of L’Unione, an Italian-language newspaper with national circulation.

Once in office, Massari became Pueblo’s most effective advocate at the State Capitol, shepherding the transformation of a local community college into the University of Southern Colorado, which later became CSU Pueblo. Following Massari’s death, the school’s arena was named in his honor.

About those M&Ms: In the aftermath of rockers Van Halen playing the arena in 1980, newspapers reported the band had caused $85,000 worth of damage after discovering brown M&Ms in the “munchies” provided backstage, contrary to a passage in the band’s booking contract that said local organizers had to remove the brown ones from the bowl of candy they provided.

Mocked as an example of rock stars’ persnickety excess, the band said the instruction was instead a clever test to make sure concert promoters had read the entire contract, including crucial technical requirements, according to Snopes. If they found brown M&Ms, they knew the facility might not have been prepared properly.

In his autobiography, singer David Lee Roth acknowledged that he trashed the dressing room after discovering brown M&Ms — causing some $12,000 in damage — but blamed promoters for the rest, since the arena floor hadn’t been adequately prepared to support the band’s heavy equipment, proving they hadn’t read and understood the contract.