For Colorado Republicans, last Tuesday’s “blood moon” symbolized a political bloodbath — and a clean sweep statewide for Colorado Democrats in the midterms.

Nationally, the GOP’s much-anticipated red wave collided with a giant blue wall. No matter what happens in next month’s U.S. Senate runoff in Georgia, Democrats will maintain control of the upper chamber. Republicans will hold the majority in the U.S. House, but at best by an estimated three-vote margin.

Historically, the incumbent president’s party almost always takes a big hit in the midterms. Not this year for President Joe Biden.

With the economy perpetually immersed in an inflationary spiral, parents incensed over cratering educational achievement in schools, crime (especially auto thefts) running rampant and multiple foreign policy crises, this was a ready-made year for Republican success.

Unfortunately, instead of an election about substantive issues, the midterms descended into a battle of narratives. If GOP leaders, activists and associated media outlets (including my own medium of talk radio) insist on perpetuating the wrong takeaways — such as the idea that mail-in voting is to blame — then the Colorado GOP will ultimately be rendered permanent outcasts.

Surely thanks to unsubstantiated doubts in Colorado’s election system, turnout among Republicans appeared depressed compared to the 2018 midterms — perhaps because some voters believed their voices would be shut out by a rigged system. Local leaders and activists — most notably in the El Paso County GOP — expressly discouraged votes for disfavored Republican candidates.

More importantly, Democrats weaponized the mythos of the “stolen election” into one of the most effective national narratives in memory — one amplified significantly by Colorado’s own secretary of state, Jena Griswold.

As I’ve reported extensively, Griswold serves as chairwoman of the partisan Democratic Association of Secretaries of State (DASS). She has established DASS as “the epicenter of a network that shifts around millions of dollars among organizations that either don’t have to report their donors or hide contributors and expenditures within multiple layers.”

While claiming to champion transparency in campaign finance, Griswold and her network funneled millions of dollars in dark money for both the secretary of state and various county clerk races to perpetuate the narrative that Republicans were attempting to destroy democracy and suppress votes.

In Colorado, more than $2 million was spent by Defend Democracy Fund (DDF) to run ads falsely characterizing Griswold’s opponent, Pam Anderson, as a MAGA candidate bent on restricting the right to vote. A substantial chunk of DDF’s funding came from the organization End Citizens United, which contributed $300,000 to DDF, maxed out to Griswold and works closely with DASS.

DDF’s blatantly bogus ad — which ran on both TV and social media — was pilloried by CBS4’s Shaun Boyd for being a “completely baseless… shameless smear tactic.” Yet, for many Colorado voters who don’t pay close attention to politics but want to move on from election talk, those smear ads worked.

They made Anderson, of all people, out to be the candidate of “voter suppression.” She was the farthest thing from a “MAGA election denier.” Time Magazine included Anderson — not Griswold — in a cover story about candidate defenders of elections.

Anderson — not Griswold — secured almost every newspaper endorsement in the state, and received widespread endorsements from across the aisle, including Democrats who were fed up with Griswold’s self-serving and hyper-partisan nature.

Prior to the election, Democrat sources privately shared that internal polling indicated Griswold was the most vulnerable statewide Democrat. Yet in the end, Griswold and her allies were able to deceptively leverage their narratives of “election deniers” and “democracy at stake” against her opponent, painting the anti-MAGA Anderson into a corner.

Rep. Lauren Boebert, on the other hand, was already known in Colorado and across the country as one of the most Trump-aligned members in the House. I’m a Boebert fan and am pleased she’s holding on – but her district expanded Republicans in redistricting by 9 points, and she had a significant financial advantage over opponent Adam Frisch. Boebert should not be hanging on by a thread.

Of course, Trump lost Colorado by nearly 14 points in 2020. He is unpopular here. Boebert’s association with the former president undoubtedly hurt her. Numerous other Trump-backed or Trump-associated candidates faltered bigly or performed worse than non-Trump candidates.

As Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone summarized, “relitigating the 2020 election is a backward-looking posture and a vote-loser.” You cannot separate Trump and backward-looking election claims. Colorado voters have moved on from that.

Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision on abortion was a big factor that derailed the GOP across the country. Democrats were able to produce a narrative that Republicans were anti-abortion extremists. They even made out social moderate Joe O’Dea to be extreme because he joined hundreds of thousands of Coloradans in voting for the eminently reasonable late-term abortion ban in 2020.

Republicans failed to effectively counter that Dobbs doesn’t ban abortions, the practice isn’t going anywhere in Colorado and, in fact, Democrats are the extremists for supporting the nation’s most radical abortion laws.

Whether it’s the stolen election narrative or the abortion narrative, Republicans either threw fuel on the fire or failed to counterattack. With Trump’s bid for the presidency now looming over 2024, the GOP will be faced an even steeper challenge. Will Republicans learn the right lessons — or will they be eternally doomed to defeat by Democrats?

Jimmy Sengenberger is host of “The Jimmy Sengenberger Show” Saturdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. on News/Talk 710 KNUS. He also hosts “Jimmy at the Crossroads,” a webshow and podcast in partnership with The Washington Examiner.