To get an intimate and terribly disturbing look at the decline of the Colorado Republican Party, one should watch the YouTube video from Saturday, Sept. 27. The Colorado Republican State Central Committee met to decide whether to “opt-out” of the 2026 Republican primary election and to nominate candidates solely through the exclusionary caucus-assembly process.

Yes, that’s right. Rather than having a primary election where more than 900,000 Republicans and more than 2 million unaffiliated voters could decide who Republican nominees should be from county commissioner to state legislator to members of Congress to governor and United States senator, a majority of the 428 members who voted said they wanted to empower just a few thousand activists, including themselves, to nominate these Republican candidates.

The only thing worse than this self-inflicted act of political destruction was the thuggish behavior of those who want to make the Colorado Republican Party into a narrow, irrelevant sideshow only they can control.

Over the course of this five-hour political pigsty, “opt-out” advocates constantly yelled and screamed at the new state chair, Brita Horn, as they peppered her with invectives and shouts of “point of clarification” and “point of order” to derail the meeting. At times, “opt-out” opponents responded in kind but make no mistake about it, most of the garbage was being thrown by those who tolerate no deviation from their self-defined “principles” of exclusion and purity.

The law that prompted this debate, Proposition 108, which was passed by voters in 2016 and which gives unaffiliated voters the right to vote in one of the two major-party primaries, requires a vote of 75% of the full membership of a party’s state central committee in order to cancel the primary.

The committee narrowly voted in favor of “opting-out” 226 to 196, which is far short of the legally required 75% to cancel the primary. But the “opt-out” crowd, knowing they would not hit 75%, laid the groundwork to distort and ignore the clear requirements of state law.

“Opt-out” proponents contended the 2024 Colorado Republican State Convention rammed through a resolution directing the state party to “opt-out” and steal the right of Republican and unaffiliated voters from voting in primaries in 2026. State law clearly and only empowers the Republic State Central Committee, not a convention from two years earlier in a totally different election cycle, to decide the question of “opting-out.”

Knowing they would never hit the 75% threshold, the “opt-out” faction preemptively filed a lawsuit in district court to try to force the state party to notify the Secretary of State the Republican primary had been canceled, but it is highly doubtful this suit will be taken seriously. Throughout this debate, which has been festering since the passage of Prop 108 in 2016, “opt-out” advocates have contended allowing unaffiliated voters to participate in Republican primaries has resulted in massive Republican losses and nefarious Democrats have influenced the results.

Beyond all the legal arguments about canceling the primary, this is the most nonsensical and disturbingly naive thinking by those who do not or cannot understand just where the Colorado electorate is today.

Democrats have dominated elections since 2018 because President Donald Trump is immensely unpopular with the vast majority of the more than 2 million unaffiliated voters who make up half of the Colorado electorate and Republicans have paid the price. Those defeats were driven by unaffiliated voters who voted against Republicans because of their opposition to Trump.

Trump lost to Hillary Clinton in Colorado by 4 points in 2016. He lost by 14 points to Joe Biden in 2020. And he lost by 11 points to Kamala Harris in 2024. Throughout this time, Trump’s approval rating was mired in the mid 30s and his disapproval in the mid-to-high 50s. No Republican candidate in any competitive race could withstand this drag on their campaigns.

“Opt-out” advocates are right Democrats have tried to influence Republican primaries. During the 2022 Republican primary for U.S. Senate, Democrats spent money attempting to help stolen-election conspiracist Ron Hanks defeat business leader Joe O’Dea. In other words, the “opt-out” crowd was on the same side as the Democratic intruders.

When “opt-out” advocates harken back to the days of major Republican victories before Prop 108 was enacted, they fail to understand why U.S. Sens. Bill Armstrong, Hank Brown, Wayne Allard, Ben Campbell and Cory Gardner, and Gov. Bill Owens won tough elections in a very competitive purple state also dominated by unaffiliated voters.

Those winners ran aggressive campaigns on mainstream conservative issues that attracted unaffiliated voters rather than repel them. Even while winning competitive primaries, they homed in on getting unaffiliated votes in the general election.

Today, these previous winners would probably be disdained as “Republicans in name only” because of the kind of winning campaigns they ran.

Solid Republican candidates who understand the Colorado electorate are starting to emerge for statewide office in 2026. Polling shows Democrats are increasingly unpopular as their policies drive Colorado into decline.

But Republicans who contend the 2020 presidential election was stolen, who want criminally convicted Tina Peters released from prison, or who want to steal the right of 2 million unaffiliated voters from voting in a primary, are sure losers. The meeting on Sept. 27 dramatizes this choice.

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 of South Dakota in 2004 when Thune unseated Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle.