Less than a week after ending her second term as chair of the Colorado Libertarian Party, Hannah Goodman changed her voter registration to become a Democrat, the Holyoke resident announced on Monday.

Goodman, whose tenure chairing the state’s largest minor political party featured an agreement with Colorado Republicans to help GOP candidates win close races, told Colorado Politics that she decided to join the Democratic Party in an effort to restore balance to state politics by pushing Democrats to embrace what she called the party’s historic principles.

She’s also returning to her political roots, Goodman said in an interview after changing her affiliation on Friday afternoon.

Describing herself as the kind of “Truman Democrat” represented by generations of her forebears in rural Phillips County on the Eastern Plains, Goodman said she believes the modern Democratic Party has “lost the plot” but is still the party looking out for “the little guy,” including farmers and working-class Americans.

“Their legacy built rural Colorado and united voters,” Goodman said in a social media post announcing her party switch, referring to her Democratic ancestors, who helped found the Colorado Corn Growers Association and served on the county commission, in the legislature and the Colorado Rocky Mountain Farmers Union.

Goodman said she doesn’t agree with Democrats about a lot of things but hopes to help invigorate the party in rural parts of the state, where Republicans dominate, by “kind of mixing up the landscape.”

The Democratic Party’s hard-left tilt in recent decades has left rural Colorado behind, she said.

“The good thing about the Democrats that I’ve always seen, and even though I may disagree with a lot of progressive policy, is they can be really solid coalition builders among different factions,” Goodman said. “Whereas the Republicans are eating themselves completely, because they don’t know how to coalesce even within their own party, right?”

Goodman characterized her move as “strategic” in a changing political landscape.

“I think that it shows I can be adaptable to my surroundings, right?” she said. “If your goal is to make Colorado purple, bringing the Democratic focus out onto the rural plains aligns with making counties purple. Democrats say they hate monopolies, right? I also hate monopolies. I hate them a lot.”

Goodman said Democrats need to broaden their message to reach her neighbors and she’s anxious to help them do it.

“As a former (Libertarian Party of Colorado) chair, I know liberty messaging; jobs, farms, freedom resonates,” she said in a statement. “Dems must shift to win. I’m bringing that fight inside the party to reclaim the party’s heart for all Coloradans. Join me in pushing Dems toward common sense, not mandates, sound fiscal policy, not unlimited spending, uniting people against corporatism, not divisive critical theory.”

Goodman, who ran on the Libertarian ticket last year against Republican U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, credited Boebert’s Democratic challenger, Trisha Calvarese, with helping change her mind about the Democratic Party.

“Debating with Trish, and then talking after (the debate) with her and watching her social media, it was really refreshing, because I hadn’t met a Democrat like her for a very long time,” Goodman said. “And I’m like, ‘Yes, this is home.’ It was such a homecoming sort of feeling for me to hear a Democrat giving that perspective, that Truman-style perspective of the Democratic Party.”

Calvarese, a former speechwriter for the National Science Foundation, is one of three leading Democrats hoping to challenge Boebert next year in the 4th Congressional District, the state’s most heavily Republican seat. Also seeking their party’s nomination are retired Rear Admiral Eileen Laubacher, a former member of the National Security Council under President Joe Biden, and engineer John Padora, who also ran last year but lost in a primary to Calvarese.

Goodman said she plans to dive into her new party with both feet, including potentially filling the vacant Phillips County Democratic Party chair position and considering a run for the legislature.

“If you do the same thing over and over, expecting different results, but nothing happens, that’s insanity,” she said. “I’m sick of trying to fight them when all I want is coalitions and moderation, right? We don’t actually have to butt heads for that. There’s a more democratic way of going about, a nicer way of going about that, and that’s simply by trying to get involved, by trying to get your ideas out there in a less combative manner, right? I think you catch more flies with honey than you do vinegar.”