If the Colorado Republican Party desires to retain any relevancy, let alone wrest back any of the levers of political control in the state, it needs to elect Barb Kirkmeyer in the June 30 primary.

To be sure, Kirkmeyer would be a solid candidate for governor in any case, whether or not she shared the ballot with an embarrassing slate of opponents who are making the Republican primary election into one with existential implications for the party. Kirkmeyer has the experience, temperament, and acumen to do the job, and the political instincts and moxie to give her a fighting chance at getting elected to do it. She comes armed with a well-thought-out conservative program for the state, and a comprehensive understanding of policy more than sufficient to go head-to-head with whomever her Democratic opponent turns out to be in the general. In what is now a very blue state with a strong majority of unaffiliated voters, she presents as an acceptable alternative, the grown-up in the room. In terms of candidates, it doesn’t really get much better than this.

And yet, if the polling reports are accurate, Colorado Republican voters seem willing to give all of that up. It makes no sense to me either.

What are the knocks on Kirkmeyer? The most common is she is “not conservative enough.” By what measure? The accusation is leveled with little if anything to back it up. Across the policy constellation her voting record stacks up along traditionally conservative lines. Are there a couple bipartisan votes sprinkled here and there? Yes, but that’s called governing. “But what about the budget?” cry the naysayers, trying to show her work on the Joint Budget Committee as evidence she is a crypto-communist. Yes, she is on the JBC, and yes, the budget — by her own account— is too big. But the JBC is constitutionally required to, well, pass a budget, otherwise very bad things happen. The JBC has six members. Only two of those are Republican. The far better question to ask is: “what would the budget look like without the moderating hand of Sen. Kirkmeyer? (And her counterpart, Rep. Rick Taggart for that matter.) The answer to that is the stuff of fiscal nightmares.

Some have said she comes across at times as, well, prickly. So did Margaret Thatcher, and she worked out pretty well. In any case, the critics are the same ones who clamor about how the Republican Party “needs a fighter.”

The most stinging indictment is she represents The Establishment. Again, meaning what exactly? That she has amassed the years of policy expertise required for the job of governor of a state of 6 million? Besides, I’m still trying to figure out when conservatives decided to join the hippie left in deciding that “establishment” was a bad thing.

So much for the criticisms, which leaves us with the fact as a gubernatorial candidate, Kirkmeyer fits the William F. Buckley axiomatic political formula — the rightward most candidate who is electable.

And it’s not as though the state doesn’t need that. There is a growing realization, even among some Democrats, that something of a course correction is in order. Virtually every issue — the economy, crime, business climate, education, transportation — is crying out for a conservative check on the increasingly extreme progressive pressures they are absorbing. When Gov. Jared Polis — and credit to him for doing this from time to time — has had to assume the role of moderating the left, something is out of kilter.

And that’s really what the GOP governor primary is about, the shaping of an alternative to the status quo. Scott Bottoms’ rigidity has painted him into a corner, and his acceptance of his friend Joe Oltman is a very bright red flag. Meanwhile, Victor Marx sports more red flags that a May Day parade in Moscow in the 1980s. His most public appearances — the debate and the Kyle Clark interview — are exercises in secondhand embarrassment. I felt almost precisely the same thing watching him as I did watching President Joe Biden in his disastrous debate with Donald Trump.

The conservative movement draws from deep wells, and a respected intellectual tradition, which the Republican Party has fostered as the movement’s political home for decades. Buckley and the other giants of the time were successful in creating and driving the conservative movement in part by feeding the intellectual side and simultaneously rejecting the kooks — the Bircher’s, the antisemites, and so forth. Rejection of that model would be the party’s death knell.

The Colorado Republicans need to decide which way they will go — remain the standard bearer of conservatism, offering a trusted, respectable, reliable, adult alternative to the increasingly chaotic excesses of the left’s revolutionary zeal; or abandon all that for a shiny and exciting, but rootless and equally chaotic, populism.

The state desperately needs a mature conservative alternative that has the trust of the voters. If the Republican Party is to provide that alternative, it’s last, best hope may well be with Barb Kirkmeyer.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.