Can The Colorado Republican Party Recover From The 2020 Blue Wave?
DENVER (CBS4) - The Colorado Republican Party will likely do a post mortem after the 2020 election. For the first time in more than 80 years, Democrats control the majority of the congressional delegation and both chambers of the state legislature, and hold every statewide elected office except a University of Colorado Regent seat.
President Donald Trump's unpopularity in Colorado is a big factor in Republicans' losses, but another factor is more significant and will be harder to overcome. Dick Wadhams -- regarded by many as the patriarch of the Colorado Republican Party -- says the state has added 1.8 million new voters in the last few years and many of them are young and liberal.
"I don't think any state had that influx of new, young voters like we have in Colorado over past eight years."
Wadhams has been active in the state party since the 1970s. Republicans faced a massive beating back then too, after Watergate.
"And literally Shaun, the entire generation of Republican-elected officials were wiped out."
Republicans didn't recover nationally until Ronald Reagan in 1980, and in Colorado, Bill Owens in 1998.
"We always talk about reinventing, redefining and looking in mirror, searching our souls and all that stuff doesn't matter," said Wadhams. "Voters, when they look at a political party, they don't look at the Republican platform. What they look at are the people we put up."
Wadhams says, in the short term, newly-elected Congresswoman Lauren Boebert will be the face of the state party.
"But long term it will be who we nominate for governor in 2022. It will be who we nominate for U.S. Senate. It's elected officials and candidates who define a party."
And the right candidate, Wadhams says, can sweep the party back into power in Colorado. It's happened before, and he says, it will happen again.
"Got to look at it that way, We can't just quit."
Much of what happens in 2022, Wadhams says, will depend on who wins the presidency -- historically the party of the President doesn't do well in midterm elections. He says it will also depend on whether Democrats at the state legislature move too far left because the majority of voters here are still unaffiliated.
