Top political stories in Colorado add up to a topsy-turvy 2024 | YEAR IN REVIEW | Elections

In a year marked by reversals, switches and unprecedented twists, Colorado’s political players barreled through month after month of historic firsts in 2024.

While he lost Colorado by double digits, former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies loomed over much of the news that shook the state through the year — from a round of congressional musical chairs that left every Republican House incumbent either out of office or in a different district by year’s end to a still-raging battle over control of the state GOP’s direction.

Through it all, Colorado’s ruling Democrats kept their grip on power, though not without some setbacks, narrowly losing both the most expensive race ever in the state’s most competitive congressional district and the party’s super-majority status in the Colorado state House.

In roughly chronological order, these 10 stories distinguished an unparalleled political year.

Ken Buck, Lauren Boebert set off congressional dominos

The new year dawned just days after U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert declared she was moving from the Western Slope to Colorado’s Eastern Plains in an effort to hang on to a congressional seat after the divisive Republican came close to losing in the last midterm.

Massively outraised by Democrat Adam Frisch — the Aspen Democrat who nearly upset Boebert in 2022 and was steadily knocking down state fundraising records in his bid for a rematch — Boebert jumped from the GOP-leaning 3rd Congressional District to the safely Republican 4th Congressional District, which had become unexpectedly open when U.S. Rep. Ken Buck announced he wouldn’t seek a sixth term.

Boebert’s unprecedented switch set off a scramble for both seats, leaving her former primary challenger, attorney Jeff Hurd, in the pole position in her old district, while flustering the troupe of Republicans already running for Buck’s seat, including state House Minority Leader Mike Lynch, House Republican Whip Richard Holtorf and former state Sens. Jerry Sonnenberg and Ted Harvey.

Buck threw another curve ball in March, when he abruptly resigned his seat, citing what he described as the GOP’s inability to face facts and tackle problems at the national level. The move teed up a rare special congressional election, which by law would coincide with the June primary. Buck’s timing created a dilemma for Boebert, who would have had to resign her current seat if she won the 4th CD’s special election, potentially endangering the 3rd CD, with Frisch poised to tap his enormous war chest for a special vacancy election in that district.

Her solution was to recruit Republican Greg Lopez, who unsuccessfully sought the governor’s office twice and who didn’t have his eyes on the fall election, to run for the remainder of Buck’s term — and both the GOP vacancy committee and the district’s voters obliged.

By November, Boebert’s new opponent — first-time candidate Trisha Calvarese — had tapped into the same anti-Boebert enthusiasm that fueled Frisch’s fundraising dominance, but both Democrats lost on Election Day, as voters sent Boebert and Hurd to Washington.

Donald Trump stays on Colorado’s ballot

After hearing arguments in early February, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously a month later that Colorado couldn’t disqualify Donald Trump from its presidential primary ballot.

The decision reversed a December Colorado Supreme Court ruling that found Trump ineligible under a Civil War-era constitutional provision that bars anyone who has “engaged in insurrection” from holding certain federal offices, occasioned by a lawsuit brought by state Republican and unaffiliated voters.

The high court’s majority opinion said states can’t remove presidential candidates without congressional authorization but justices didn’t address the Colorado courts’ conclusions that Trump’s actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol violated the 14th Amendment.

The decision came a day before Colorado voters finished casting ballots in the state’s March 5 presidential primary, which saw Trump trounce former North Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, his former U.N. ambassador.

“BIG WIN FOR AMERICA!!!” Trump posed in response to the ruling on Truth Social.

The Colorado Republican Party, which had joined the the lawsuit, likewise applauded the outcome, declaring on X: “Joe Biden and his crooked allies don’t get to engage in election interference by violating our right to vote for the candidate of our choice. On to November!”

In the wake of the decision, Republican state lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to impeach Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who had been the plaintiff in the lawsuit that initially led to Trump’s disqualification, since it was up to her to certify the ballot. After hours of heated testimony before a state House committee, majority Democrats shot down the attempt.

State GOP takes sides in primaries

Trump’s convincing victory in Colorado’s Super Tuesday primary followed the state GOP’s decision months earlier to bestow a formal endorsement on the former president, marking the first time in memory the state party had weighed in on a contested primary. It wouldn’t be the last time.

Under the leadership of Trump loyalist Dave Williams, a former state lawmaker who unsuccessfully ran for Congress, Colorado Republicans discarded the party’s longstanding tradition of staying neutral in primaries. Instead, the GOP put its figurative thumb on the scales, issuing endorsements in more than a dozen races and spending heavily in a handful of them — including Williams’ second bid to represent the El Paso County-based 5th Congressional District.

Fresh off losing his challenge to incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn in 2022, Williams jumped in the primary again this year just days after Lamborn announced in January that he wouldn’t seek an 11th term.

Even with endorsements from Trump and the state GOP, Williams lost by a wide margin to conservative radio personality and longtime Americans for Prosperity executive Jeff Crank, who first ran for the 5th CD seat in 2006 — the last time it was open — against Lamborn and three others in a crowded primary. Crank easily won the reliably Republican district in November.

Nearly every other candidate endorsed by the state GOP suffered a fate like Williams in their primaries. Although Boebert handily won a six-way primary in the 4th CD with the party’s backing, the GOP’s chosen candidates lost elsewhere around the state, from Williams’s loss to Crank in the 5th CD to former state Rep. Ron Hanks, who lost the 3rd CD primary to Hurd, and former state Rep. Janak Joshi, who lost the 8th CD primary to state Rep. Gabe Evans.

Dave Williams survives ‘coup’ attempt

The Colorado GOP’s move to endorse in primaries — on top of Williams’ refusal to step aside while running in his own primary — exposed a long-festering rift between Republicans who consider themselves to representative of the grassroots and those they deride as part of the establishment, but the state party’s attacks on the LGTBQ community kicked the squabble up a notch and nearly cost Williams his chairmanship.

At the beginning of June, the state Republican Party marked the start of Pride Month with a flurry of emails and social media posts, including a broadside headlined “God hates flags,” echoing an infamous homophobic slur used by the Westboro Baptist Church, and an instruction to “Burn all the #Pride flags this June.”

An outraged Valdamar Archuleta, the president of a Repubican LGBTQ advocacy group and the GOP’s presumptive nominee in Denver’s heavily Democratic 1st Congressional District, rejected the party’s endorsement over Pride Month messages he called “disgusting and offensive” and called for Williams to resign.

Soon, Archuleta was joined by other candidates and multiple county GOP chairs, who said the attacks threatened Republicans’ attempts to make up ground in a tolerant state with a gay governor. Williams, however, held his ground, saying the party would not apologize for “opposing the woke Pride Month agenda as it ultimately harms children and undermines parents.”

By the end of June, Jefferson County GOP Chair Nancy Pallozzi and El Paso County GOP Vice Chair Todd Watkins turned in a petition signed by state central committee members to force Williams from office, but Williams and his fellow state GOP officers threw up roadblocks that lasted through the summer.

The overthrow attempt was ultimately quashed in court. but not before rival Republican factions launched dueling lawsuits and staged competing central committee meetings — including one convened with only a few participants in the far southwest corner of the state under a bridge in a rainstorm and another held informally at a church in Brighton after Williams obtained a restraining order that the judge ultimately reversed.

Along the way, Williams’ foes elected a replacement slate of party officers led by former El Paso County GOP Chair and former U.S. Senate candidate Eli Bremer at a meeting — also held at the church in Brighton — denounced as “illegal” by Williams.

A judge ruled in late September in El Paso County District Court that Bremer and his supporters didn’t follow party bylaws when they tried to oust the incumbent party leaders, effectively ending the challenge.

Slamming the uprising as a “failed coup,” Williams kept the dispute going in late December by unveiling a committee helmed by one-time leading state party critic Matt Arnold, who was charged with seeking “full restitution from those responsible,” potentially including filing lawsuits against the rebels.

Libertarians throw weight around

Colorado’s largest minor political party, the Libertarians, tried to have an outsized effect on the vote this year — first by entering into an agreement to support certain Republicans in competitive races and later by rejecting the national party’s presidential ticket designation and instead backing independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

As part of an agreement worked out last year between Williams and Colorado Libertarian Chair Hannah Goodman, the third party stipulated that it wouldn’t run potential “spoiler” candidates if the GOP nominee signed a pledge to adhere to a set of principles said to promote liberty.

Although the party initially had few takers, by the fall a handful of Republicans in critical legislative and congressional races signed off, including Evans in the battleground 8th Congressional District, who agreed to a modified version of the Libertarians’ pledge. When all the votes were counted, the Republicans who’d prevented Libertarians from splitting the anti-Democratic vote prevailed in enough races to consider the gambit a success, prompting Goodman to declare mission accomplished.

Meanwhile, the party’s attempts to give its ballot line to RFK Jr. and his running mate — instead of the Libertarians’ national presidential nominee, Chase Oliver, and his vice presidential pick — were derailed when a national Libertarian Party officer who happens to live in Castle Rock submitted paperwork naming Oliver to Colorado’s ballot. But by the time that tug of war was sorted out this summer, RFK Jr. had derailed his own presidential campaign and endorsed Trump, though the one-time Democrat decided to stay on the ballot as an independent candidate in some states, including Colorado.

Tina Peters convicted, sentenced

Following numerous delays that postponed her criminal trial by more than a year, former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters was found guilty in August by a jury on seven of 10 charges, including four felonies, related to the Republican’s involvement in an election equipment security breach in May 2021 that resulted in an electronic copy of her county’s voting software being posted on the internet.

Since the story broke and throughout the trial — as well as running unsuccessfully for secretary of state in 2022 — Peters maintained she had done nothing wrong, insisting she was merely creating an archive of election records in an attempt to prove that the voting system was rigged.

Peters rose to celebrity status among Americans who believe the 2020 elections were rigged, making appearances on podcasts, in documentaries and at Mar-a-Lago, buoyed by Trump’s claims that he won that year’s presidential election.

Mesa County District Court Judge Matthew Barrett was having none of it when he sentenced Peters in early October to six months in the county jail and 8 1/2 years in state prison.

Calling Peters’ various explanations for her actions “preposterous,” Barrett, who was received death threats after presiding over the trail, delivered a withering assessment of the convicted felon’s character when he handed down her sentence.

“No, at the end of the day, you cared about the jets, the podcasts, and the people fawning over you. You abdicated your position as a servant to the constitution and you chose you over all else,” Barrett told Peters from the bench. “Yes, you are a charlatan and you cannot help but lie as easy as it is for you to breathe. You betrayed your oath for no one other than you.”

In December, Peters was transferred from Grand Junction to Larimer County Jail in Fort Collins after she told deputies she was concerned for her safety at the Mesa County Detention Center, though the sheriff’s office said an investigation didn’t find that Peters was in imminent danger. She’ll remain in Fort Collins until she’s transferred to the Colorado Department of Corrections.

Trump vows to launch ‘Operation Aurora’

Trump thrust Aurora, Colorado’s third-largest city, into the national spotlight during his lone debate with Vice President Kamala Harris in September, when the Republican doubled down on remarks he’d made a week earlier asserting that “Venezuelans are taking over the whole town.”

Trump was referring to activities by suspected members of Tren de Aragua, a transnational gang with origins in Venezuelan prisons commonly known as TdA, though critics — including the city’s Republican mayor, former U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman — assailed Trump’s remarks as “grossly exaggerated,” maintaining that the group’s activity was limited to a few apartment buildings in the city of more than 400,000.   

In the televised debate, Trump name-dropped Aurora twice, both times in the same sequence as Springfield, Ohio, where Trump declared that Haitian immigrants were eating residents’ pets.

“You look at Springfield in Ohio. You look at Aurora in Colorado,” Trump said, facing Harris. “They are taking over the towns. They are taking over buildings. They’re going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country.”

A month later, Trump made good on a vow to campaign in Aurora. The massive rally took place at Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center on the city’s outskirts, near Denver International Airport. Trump declined invitations issued by Coffman and Gov. Jared Polis to visit Aurora, which they argued was a safe city not “overrun” by Venezuelan gangs. 

Flanked by enlarged mug shots of alleged Venezuelan gang members and signs that said, “Deport illegals now” and “End migrant crime,” Trump told an estimated 10,000 cheering supporters that he would “rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered,” including by kicking off a mass deportation program he announced dubbed “Operation Aurora.”

Speaking at the rally, Aurora Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky said police officers told her about the gang’s activities in the city and asked her for help. 

In response to Trump, Coffman again protested that Trump’s characterization of the city’s plight was overblown, saying, ”The city and state have not been ‘taken over’ or ‘invaded’ or ‘occupied’ by migrant gangs.”

Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet said: “Donald Trump has invited himself to Aurora to do what Donald Trump does best, which is to demonize immigrants, to lie, and to serve his own political purposes.”

Initially, Aurora officials publicly denied the gang’s footprint for the city’s decision to shut down an apartment complex, whose owners insisted had been taken over by the Venezuelan gang. The city blamed the rapidly deteriorating conditions on absentee landlords. But internal police emails, an investigation by the lender and letters to state and city officials showed the authorities had been aware of TdA’s presence for about a year. This month, the Aurora police arrested gang members in connection to allegations of home invasion, kidnapping and torture at another Aurora apartment.    

Jena Griswold’s office leaks voting machine passwords

Just over a week before ballots were due, the Colorado Republican Party revealed in late October that the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office had posted voting equipment passwords online, sparking a furor over Democrat Jena Griswold’s oversight of an election system she has repeatedly boasted is a “gold standard” nationally.

Griswold and her staff acknowledged that hundreds of passwords had been “improperly included” in a hidden column on a spreadsheet published on her department’s website but insisted that “countless layers of security” protected the system, including another set of passwords required to access the equipment, which was kept under round-the-clock security in secure locations.

Numerous county clerks howled in protest when it emerged that Griswold hadn’t intended to notify them about the breach until after the state GOP spilled the beans, with some Republican clerks and legislators calling for Griswold’s resignation.

Polis made the state airplane available so Griswold’s staff and other qualified state personnel could change the leaked passwords in a three-day scurry in 34 counties with affected equipment, but Griswold’s political foes weren’t mollified.

The state Libertarian Party sued, asking that the affected equipment be recertified before counting votes for the November election, but a Denver District Court judge declined to rule against Griswold.

A pair of investigations into the breach — one conducted by a law firm hired by Griswold and another by Denver’s district attorney, Democrat Beth McCann — both concluded that the lapse had been inadvertent, leading prosecutors to determine that criminal charges weren’t warranted. The outside probe, however, determined that the department had violated state security policy and made several recommendations to prevent a similar occurrence.

Ranked-choice voting measure fails

On election night, Colorado voters rejected a statewide ballot measure that would have drastically overhauled how the state elects candidates, even though voters routinely deride the current system and have been clamoring for a change.

The defeat of Proposition 131, backed by former DaVita CEO Kent Thiry, marked the political heavyweight’s first setback at the ballot box after sponsoring a slew of changes to the way Colorado votes over the past decade.

Despite backing from Polis and U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper and polls showing wide support for Thiry’s proposal — which would have stripped political parties of their dominant role nominating candidates to the ballot and instituted ranked-choice voting for general elections — the measure lost by a 10 point-margin on sharp opposition from both the Democratic and Republican political parties.

Critics of the plan argued that Proposition 131 was “overly complicated and overly expensive” and warned that implementing the system would confuse voters.

It was a different outcome than Thiry has been used to after steering a stream of initiatives into law, including creation of Colorado’s semi-open primary system, a revived presidential primary and establishment of independent redistricting commissions for drawing congressional and legislative boundaries.

Thiry said his vision of election reform will eventually win over enough voters, telling Colorado Politics, “We’ve started an important dialogue.”

Noting that the measure won among voters under age 50, Thiry added: “We don’t aspire to a world where everybody’s a centrist. We don’t need candidates who live in the middle. What we need is candidates who are willing to meet in the middle when common sense dictates.”

Kamala Harris carries state, as Yadira Caraveo falls

Amid all the hullaballoo, Harris won Colorado’s 10 electoral votes in November by double digits just over 100 days after she replaced President Joe Biden on the ticket, becoming the fifth consecutive Democratic nominee to carry the state since 2008, and it wasn’t close.

Harris beat Trump by 11 points — the second-widest margin for a Democrat since LBJ’s 1964 landslide, trailing only Biden’s 13.5-point win four years ago — in a state that has trended increasingly blue at the presidential level this century after decades of Republican dominance.

Although state Republicans claimed Trump had a chance, Colorado wasn’t on either nominees’ list of targets, as evidenced by neither ticket spending much time in Colorado. While vice presidential picks JD Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio, and Tim Walz, Minnesota’s Democratic governor, each attended a fundraiser in Denver this fall, Trump’s Aurora rally in October was his only public event he held in the state since early 2020. Harris, for her part, visited a few times during her term in office but didn’t campaign in Colorado this year.

At the same time, though, the Colorado Democrat whose campaign drew the most national spending by far — first-term U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo — lost her bid for reelection by a whisker in the closely divided 8th Congressional District, which she won two years ago by nearly the same close margin.

In just his first term in the legislature, Evans was one of only a handful of challengers to unseat a Democratic House member this fall, helping the GOP cling to its slim majority in the chamber.

It didn’t come easily, with more than $40 million poured into the are in one of the most expensive House contests in the country, pitting the incumbent, a pediatrician, against a former police officer and Army helicopter pilot.

Before the ink was dry on Caraveo’s concession and Evans’ victory declaration, national Democrats made clear the 8th CD will unsurprisingly be a targeted race in the 2026 midterms.