The Republican Party wields no official power at the state level in Colorado. Since 2020, the GOP has been shut out of every statewide office and control of either chamber of the state Legislature. Despite the party’s ouster from official authority, though, one group of Colorado Republicans has figured out how to work within the new reality, and has succeeded in driving conservative issues forward at the state level without a governor, attorney general, or state Legislature on their side.
“They came to the obvious conclusion that they can no longer win elections because people with Rs next to their names on the ballot are largely unelectable in Colorado, for good reason,” Democratic consultant Ian Silverii told me. “But they didn’t just give up and walk away. … They said, Okay, we’re going to find a new way to fight and we’re going to win.”
The organization achieving unlikely success for disempowered Colorado Republicans is named Advance Colorado, helmed by conservative consultant Michael Fields. But Advance is only part of the story. The organization’s real power comes from a network of satellite groups which Advance employs to shape political narratives, and from the anonymous donor or donors pumping millions of dollars per year into the system.
Since its founding in 2020, originally under the name Unite for Colorado, Advance has employed its network of co-managed organizations to exert influence on Colorado politics beyond the minority voice the state’s voters have given to Republican officials. Fields and his allies have run successful ballot initiative campaigns, directed large sums to local school board races, and repeatedly backed the state legislature into a corner on property tax cuts.
While anonymous donor funds have been integral to Advance’s success, so too has the self-contained ecosystem Fields oversees. With the money circulating through his network of related organizations, Fields can promote favorable narratives around issues like crime or taxes, support those narratives with methodologically flawed think tank papers, and then direct millions of dollars to campaigns running on those self-generated narratives. Many of Advance’s satellite organizations either have Fields as an officer or receive the bulk of their funding from his organizations, and most of them are administered by conservative financial compliance expert Katie Kennedy.
Neither Fields nor Kennedy agreed to speak with me for this piece.
The playbook has been successful. In recent years, Advance has maneuvered the Democratic Legislature into two separate special sessions to cut the state’s already low property taxes (Colorado has the third-lowest property taxes in the nation). Advance also marshalled a statewide campaign in 2023 to defeat Democrat-backed Proposition HH, which – ironically – would have cut property taxes, but not in the way Fields’ backers preferred. Currently, the state is dealing with a budget shortfall caused by the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in D.C., and Fields is actively exerting influence to stop the gap from being filled
Advance Colorado’s influence stretches beyond persuading voters and outplaying legislative Democrats, though. The organization also takes an active role in managing the state’s dwindling cohort of Republican lawmakers, even keeping a number of them on payroll. State House Minority Leader Rose Pugliese — the highest ranking Republican in Colorado — receives one salary from the taxpayers of Colorado, and another from Advance for her role as a “fellow.” She is not alone. State board of education member Yazmin Navarro is also an Advance fellow, as is former state board of education member Debora Scheffel.
Though Fields has worked to position Advance Colorado and its attendant organizations as serious, business-minded conservatives who stay above the fever swamps in which the actual state party has become mired – QAnon, election denial, endless conspiracizing – few in the local press have ever pushed Fields to account for Advance’s documented ties to extremists, Russian oligarchs, and other unsavory influences.
While some have raised concerns about Advance helping anonymous donors exert undemocratic influence on Colorado’s politics, Silverii sees the group as primarily opportunistic: an entity that inevitably emerged from the state’s broken, largely unenforced campaign finance laws. “They’re taking advantage of a system with a bunch of holes in it,” he said.
Advance’s operations present an unprecedented challenge to the systems meant to insure transparency and accountability in Colorado, and the group shows no signs of stopping any time soon.
“They’re testing the fences,” Silverii told me. “How much of this can we get away with? How much can we hide the money? And how much can we obfuscate our original sources of income and achieve our policy goals with as few fingerprints as possible?”
Those questions remain unanswered.
Key to the Advance Colorado network’s effectiveness is a constellation of organizations that allow Fields and company to move large sums of donor money to the causes or campaigns where it will have the largest impact, all while concealing the identities of the donors who provided the funds. What Fields and Kennedy have built is a black box that allows wealthy donors to exert enormous influence on politics and government in Colorado while avoiding any risk of accountability.
Using tax filings, I have mapped the cluster of groups that Advance Colorado uses to bring donor money into the campaign finance system anonymously, and the purposes to which that money is ultimately applied. Because tax-exempt organizations file their tax documents on a delay, though, 2023 was the most recent year for which a complete analysis was possible.
The process of mapping and documenting the millions of dollars flowing through the system has limitations, however. Section 501 organizations – primarily 501(c)(3)s, donations to which are tax-deductible and therefore must focus on charitable and educational purposes, and 501(c)(4)s, which have more leeway to engage in explicitly political activities because contributions to them can’t be written-off – are not required to disclose where their funding comes from. They are, however, required to disclose where their funding goes, including donations made to other organizations. By working backwards, so to speak, I have been able to reconstruct cash transfers within the Advance Colorado network by looking at the donor side, as opposed to the recipient side.
Using that process, I have been able to determine that there are six or seven organizations that make up the backbone of Advance’s network. Though peripheral groups shift into and out of the Advance network as needed, the central cluster of organizations is composed of two (c)(3)s – Advance Colorado and the Colorado Opportunity Foundation – and a handful of (c)(4)s, including Unite for Colorado, Defend Colorado, Colorado Dawn, and Ready Colorado.
Unlike the other (c)(4)s in the network, Ready Colorado predates the creation of Advance Colorado. Run by conservative education policy specialist Brenda Dickhoner, Ready Colorado is an independent organization that exists to promote education reform. In recent years, though, Ready has received the bulk of its funding from organizations in the Advance Colorado network, and serves a role similar to the network’s other (c)(4)s in the movement of the network’s money.
Another major limitation in documenting the network stems from IRS rules about the disclosure of donations from private individuals. When one tax-exempt organization gives money to another tax-exempt organization, it is required to declare the contribution on a publicly available form. When a private individual gives money to a tax-exempt organization, though, there is no publicly available form. The contribution would appear on the individual’s private tax returns and nowhere else, unless the recipient organization chose to declare it. For Advance, this seems to be more of a feature than a bug.
Even this layer of opacity can be pierced to some degree, though. We cannot identify who those private individuals are, but we can identify where they insert cash into the system: if a 501(c)(3), for example, declared raising $2 million one year, but there only exist records of other section 501 organizations giving $1.75 million to that organization, it’s all but certain that a private individual, or group of individuals, provided the remaining $250,000 – hence its absence from publicly available tax documents.
Private individuals have other ways of giving anonymously, too. On the 501(c)(3) side of things, individuals commonly employ donor-advised funds, which allow charitable gifts to be made through another organization in order to conceal the original donor’s identity. A wealthy individual could, for example, put $1 million into the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, and then tell Fidelity where they wanted that million dollars sent. When tax filings come due, the Fidelity Gift Fund will have to declare the donation they made to the individual’s preferred cause, but they will never be required to disclose the individual.
In 2022, the majority of the funds circulating in the Advance Colorado network entered the system in one of these two ways. That year, a little over $2 million was given to the Colorado Opportunity Foundation – run by Fields and Kennedy – by four different donor-advised funds. More than $1 million of that was then given by Colorado Opportunity Foundation to Advance Colorado, also run by Fields and Kennedy.
On the (c)(4) side, meanwhile, Advance’s (c)(4) sister organization, Unite for Colorado Action (run by Fields and Kennedy), received $8.85 million from an organization named Colorado Stronger Alliance, which in turn received that money from a private individual or group of individuals.
After that, things got complex. The initial $8.85 million received by Unite for Colorado turned into contributions from Unite to a variety of other organizations in the network, including $560,000 to Ready Colorado, and $3 million to a (c)(4) named Colorado Dawn, which was helmed by state board of education member Steve Durham, former state Senator Paul Lundeen, and Fields. Colorado Dawn then gave $1.5 million to Ready Colorado and another $500,000 to a group named Defend Colorado, which Ready Colorado also contributed $750,000 to. Meanwhile, Defend Colorado also received $150,000 from the Colorado Opportunity Foundation 501(c)(3) which Fields and Kennedy used to bring tax-deductible donor money into the system.
Back on the 501(c)(3) side of things, two more donor-advised funds entered the picture – the Walton Family Foundation and the Donnell Kay Foundation. Together, they contributed $375,000 to a group named High Hopes Colorado, which then gave nearly $337,000 to Ready Colorado.
After various additional rinses, millions of dollars flowed out of the section 501 portion of the network into the Colorado campaign finance system in the form of four independent expenditure committees, or IECs. IECs are Colorado’s version of a superPAC: they cannot give money to candidates, but they can spend unlimited money in support of candidates. In the case of the Advance network in 2022, four related IECs spent nearly $8 million supporting Republican candidates and causes.
In 2023, the network looked much the same, with the substitution of an entity named CO Business Alliance taking the place of Colorado Stronger Alliance as the entry point for a large sum of money from a private individual. That year, without statewide races at the top of the ticket, much of the network’s funding, after swirling through the pipes a few times, ended up being spent on local school board races and in successful opposition to Prop HH, which would have made Colorado’s property tax system more equitable and shored up school funding. Unite spent more than $1 million opposing the initiative, while Defend spent roughly $600,000, and Ready contributed an additional $150,000.
With this well-funded and opaque network of organizations, Fields and Advance Colorado’s financial backers have been able to drive successful political narratives in Colorado. In recent years, those narratives have primarily revolved around property taxes.
Between 1982 and 2020, Colorado’s property taxes were locked in place by the Gallagher Amendment to the state Constitution, causing Colorado to have among the lowest property tax rates – and among the lowest per-pupil education funding rates – of any state in the nation. In 2020, Colorado voters repealed the amendment.
With the pandemic-related housing speculation bubble driving property values up at the same time as Gallagher was repealed, though, property tax rates looked set to rise.
For the average Coloradan, the increases were negligible: someone owning a $500,000 home in Denver, for instance, saw their property taxes increase by about $25 per month. For ultra wealthy Coloradans with vast real estate holdings, though, the difference would cost serious money. Enter Advance Colorado.
Generally speaking, voters are not particularly attuned to the needs of a small handful of billionaires. So, when the Gallagher Amendment was repealed and assessment rates looked set to rise, Fields and his network needed more than the truth. They needed panic – so they generated it.
“This network of organizations was able to manufacture the narrative that this is some kind of emergency, some kind of crisis,” Silverii said.
Starting in 2021, shortly after Gallagher was repealed, Fields and his organizations started assailing state Democrats with what they framed as the urgent need to cut property tax rates before assessments went up. With the help of network-adjacent organizations like the Common Sense Institute – which receives funding from Fields and his groups but also from other monied interests outside of Fields’ fiefdom – Fields was able to drive that narrative into the local press, and, from there, into the minds of legislative Democrats nervous about their own reelections.
“The fact that [the Common Sense Institute] can put out these cooked-books reports constantly – which are methodologically suspicious or obviously flawed and working backwards from their stated conclusions on every level – but they get a lot of local press to breathlessly cover it, is a victory for them,” Silverii told me.
Fields and the legislature sparred over property taxes throughout 2021 and 2022, before the issue escalated in 2023 with Proposition HH. Ostensibly sick of being worked up and down the court by Fields on the issue, legislative Democrats hatched their own plot to cut the state’s already-low property tax rates in exchange for freeing up revenue which would otherwise have been refunded under the state’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR).
Having fought the idea in the legislature and the media for years from his perch at Advance Colorado, with the help of affiliated organizations like the Common Sense Institute, Fields finally found himself needing to fight it at the ballot box. And he did. In the summer and fall of 2023, Fields and the Advance network mustered more than $2 million in spending against Proposition HH, decisively defeating it in the final tally.
Fields’ victory did not stop at the ballot box, though. After Prop HH failed, and still responding to artificially generated panic about property tax increases that would be in the double-digits for most Coloradans, Gov. Jared Polis called a special session of the Legislature in which the Democratic majority once again acceded to Fields’ wishes and cut property taxes.
In the years since Prop HH, Fields and Advance have continued sparring with Colorado Democrats at the ballot box, achieving a split record – but still more successes than the Republican minority in the state legislature would ever be able to deliver.
“Even if they lose on the ballot half the time, they’re able to manufacture and direct so many narratives that the Legislature is then reacting to, instead of the Democratic supermajority who runs the entire state of Colorado being able to set the terms of engagement itself,” Silverii told me.
Advance has flexed its muscle on other issues as well, cementing itself as the chief conservative organization in Colorado. Right now, the group is behind several initiatives aiming to make next year’s ballot, including one to increase criminal penalties for drug crimes. In all of Advance’s endeavors, though, the north star remains the same: cutting taxes for the wealthy.
All of these efforts cost money. Supporting or opposing ballot initiatives costs more than the millions which Fields and his network have directly spent on them. Running this network also includes the cost of propping up and staffing each organization involved. Overhead. Infrastructure. Payroll. Someone – the anonymous donor or donors at the top of the Advance Colorado pyramid – has clearly deemed it worth the expense.
But who?
On one level, the identity of Advance Colorado’s primary funder is a mystery. Advance has never disclosed it, the IRS has never disclosed it, and it will never appear in tax documents, thanks to the loopholes and structures described above.
Maintaining that mystery has been a chief priority for Fields and the network. Since 2021, Unite for Colorado – the 501(c)(4) at the heart of the Advance Colorado network – has been engaged in legal battles to avoid having to disclose the name or names of its donors. What started as a complaint filed with the Secretary of State by Scott Wasserman, former president of the Bell Policy Center, has evolved into a sprawling fight which has gone through multiple appeals and reversals, and still awaits a final disposition.
As Quentin Young of Newsline Colorado put it on the eve of the legislature’s 2024 special session, which was called once again over the issue of property tax: “We have no idea who forced the Colorado Legislature back to work this week.”
On another level, though – the level of rumor, loose lips, and open secrets – everyone in Colorado politics has a pretty good guess as to where the bulk of the Advance Colorado network’s money is coming from.
To be clear, the network is not funded by a single source. In fiscal years 2022 and 2023, funding flowed into the network from the conservative Bradley Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and a handful of donor-advised funds.
Despite that array of funders, though, the Advance Colorado network does appear to have one primary benefactor. In 2022, Bradley, Walton, and the donor-advised funds contributed a combined $2.25 million to the network. The individual who funded the network via Colorado Stronger Alliance, meanwhile, contributed nearly $9 million.
In 2023, Colorado Republican Party Central Committee member Chuck Bonniwell gave voice to the longstanding rumors. Advance Colorado, he said, is “all funded by Phil Anschutz,” the state’s wealthiest man. Bonniwell made the comment in conversation with District Attorney George Brauchler, former president of Advance Colorado. Brauchler did not dispute the assertion.
Though a great many institutions in the state bear his name, Anschutz is an unusually media-shy billionaire. And, while he is known for his conservative views – embodied daily in his local media properties like the Colorado Springs Gazette, Denver Gazette, and Colorado Politics – he is also known for his penchant for concealing his political giving to the greatest extent possible.
He has been burned before.
In 2018, revelations of his conservative political spending caused a business-threatening controversy for Anschutz, whose Clarity Media Group owns properties like the Coachella music festival. The controversy, which surrounded his funding of anti-LGBTQ and anti-marijuana causes, was no minor incident for Anschutz, who makes much of his money from young entertainment audiences: he apparently took the threat to his reputation seriously enough that he contributed $1 million to the Elton John AIDS Foundation after the news broke. Since the dust-up, most of Anschutz’s political spending has either ceased or, more likely, gone underground.
Unite for Colorado was founded a year and a half after the controversy, just ahead of the next major election cycle.
Many Colorado conservatives are critical of Anschutz, seeing him as too moderate, and believe that his reported influence over Advance Colorado has been detrimental to conservative causes in the state. “These organizations hurt our state with the help of big-dollar donors like Anschutz who couldn’t behave conservatively if he were given black and white instructions,” Colorado GOP State Central Committee member, Darcy Schoening, told me.
Schoening is particularly critical of many of the Republican elected officials who have embraced the Advance Colorado network. “Feckless Republicans elected with the help of Advance & Ready caused this mess we are in, and they continue to exacerbate the downfall of our state,” she said.
If indeed Anschutz is the man behind the curtain, the primary anonymous funder of the Advance Colorado network, then his impact on Colorado politics has been unparalleled by any individual in the state’s history. In the last five years, if the rumors are true, the state’s wealthiest man has purchased multiple tax cuts for himself.
“I wish that this was a story about somebody lighting $10 million on fire and us pointing and laughing and saying what idiots they are,” Silverii told me, “but at least $5 million of that bought them some policy goals they really wanted.”
Though that would appear to be the full picture – a network of organizations allegedly funded by the state’s wealthiest man and run by Michael Fields to the benefit of his wealthy benefactor’s interests – another long-time Colorado powerbroker is also involved behind the scenes, and has brought some serious baggage with him.
Bill Owens was the last Republican governor of Colorado, serving from 1999 to 2007. He has been involved with Advance since its original founding as Unite for Colorado, and remains an important asset in the group’s arsenal, despite rarely sporting a formal title within the organization. A Wall Street Journal editorial described Advance as “backed by Bill Owens and Terry Considine,” another longtime politically-minded Colorado businessman who is also known for founding Leadership Program of the Rockies. Owens appears at the group’s events, has helped animate their ballot access efforts, and is rumored to help bundle donors from his wealthy friends and the network he built during his own political career.
Owens’ personal network, though, is where the baggage lies. In between his two terms as governor and his current stint as a de facto conservative kingmaker in the state, Owens entered the private sector, as many politicians do. Unlike most politicians, however, Owens entered the private sector in Russia.
From 2012 to 2022, Owens served as chairman of the board of the Credit Bank of Moscow, one of the country’s largest banks. He maintained the role through the 2014 Donbas conflict triggered by Russian President Vladimir Putin, through the 2016 Russian election interference scandal, and through the entirety of President Donald Trump’s Russia-tinged first term. In fact, Owens only resigned his role at the bank in February 2022, three days after the bank came under U.S. sanctions as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
During his time as the board’s president, Owens served alongside the bank’s then-owner, Roman Avdeev, who is “known to have close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin,” and British businessman Richard Glasspool, who now co-owns an energy company with Russian “arms tycoon” Alexander Temerko.
That Owens now finds himself near the helm of a dark money machine powered by anonymous donors so shortly after the decade he spent in the company of Russian oligarchs has raised eyebrows.
“It raises important questions about what the ideological project here really is,” Silverii told me, “to say nothing of the fact that it is legitimately important to know where the money comes from. Because, if some of it is being influenced by people with ties to foreign banks, that seems bad.”
Owens is not Advance Colorado’s only connection to unsavory elements, though. Despite efforts to position themselves as no-nonsense, business-minded conservatives, Fields and his allies have found themselves in the company of bona fide extremists.
Former Colorado GOP chairwoman Kristi Burton Brown serves as the executive vice president of the Advance Colorado Institute. Prior to that, she served as the president of a group named FEC United, founded by Joe Oltmann, a Douglas County activist best known for his conspiratorial claims about Dominion voting machines, and his well-publicized fantasies about executing his political opponents. Oltmann originated claims which became central to the Trump team’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
FEC United has also attracted controversy for its militia wing, the United American Defense Force, or UADF. According to Mary McCord, a visiting professor at Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP), whom the Colorado Times Recorder interviewed in 2022, UADF likely constitutes an illegal armed group under the law.
During her time at Advance Colorado, Brown has been a primary voice advocating for school choice and “parents’ rights” policies supported by the organization – policies which closely mirror the “education pillar” of FEC United’s platform.
Schoening, who is also involved in education activism, views Brown’s involvement more cynically, saying that Brown is simply attempting to “sway the public to donate more money to pay her salary.”
At the center of the Advance Colorado network is a challenge to Colorado’s established framework of campaign finance laws meant to ensure transparency and accountability. By pushing ill-defined boundaries, flaunting years of norms, and flooding the system with anonymous money, Fields and his organizations have exposed and exploited the state’s fractured and impotent enforcement measures. Even the courts have not succeeded in exposing the group’s donors, despite four years of litigation.
Colorado Democrats are not free from so-called “dark money.” In fact, they are famous for it, thanks in large part to the book The Blueprint, written by journalist Adam Schrager and former Republican state legislator Rob Witwer. The book chronicles how the Democratic takeover of the state, starting in 2004, was powered by a network of aligned progressive organizations and major donors.
The difference between Advance Colorado and the network described in The Blueprint, however, is vast. The Blueprint and the events it chronicles occurred in a world before the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United v. FEC unleashed unprecedented torrents of money into American politics, before McCutcheon struck down contribution limits, and before 501(c)(3)s were allowed to conceal their donors. Unlike the organizations described in The Blueprint, the Advance Colorado network has been able to take advantage of those dramatic slackenings in transparency and accountability. In many ways, it is a product of them.
The Democratic machine of The Blueprint also notably differed from Advance Colorado in that its focus was primarily on aiding the election of Democratic candidates. Today, despite having put some token effort towards training candidates like now-congressman Gabe Evans (Advance Colorado Institute New Leader Program, Spring ’22), Advance Colorado operates in contravention of the minority role Colorado’s voters have assigned to Republican candidates, pursuing and often achieving policy priorities without submitting to the republican process of governance via representation.
In a twist the authors of the 2004 book might be amused by, conservatives like Schoening would prefer Advance Colorado look more like the network described in The Blueprint, focused more on candidates and electoral success than on delivering donors’ wish lists. Advance, Schoening says, should “try doing something conservative and helping elect good candidates, then maybe we won’t have to do this again next year.”
Billionaires have wielded outsized influence in American politics for decades, often in exchange for the kind of public disdain experienced by well-known donors like the Koch brothers, or the taste of opprobrium Phil Anschutz received in 2018. The model put forward by Advance Colorado is an evolution in that influence, increasing the directness with which money can be applied to policy goals, while eliminating the threat of public blowback or even public awareness.
Through Advance Colorado and its network of connected organizations, someone has figured out how to have a louder voice in Colorado’s democracy than everyone else. Rumors aside, we may never know their name.
“If someone is going to spend an extraordinary amount of money trying to convince you of something, I think the spirit of the law is that you should know who is talking,” Silverii said.
For now, the spirit of the law is being lost through the cracks in the law. Transparency and accountability have taken a backseat to clever accounting and legal maneuvering. Laws do not make themselves, though. Nor do they fix themselves. The slow crumbling of Colorado’s campaign finance framework under the weight of anonymous cash is not inevitable; the Legislature has the power to address it, to build a legal framework for a post-Citizens United world, a post-McCutcheon world. It has the power to build a 21st-century system which does not leave them – or the spirit of the law, or the taxpayers of Colorado – subject to the whims and wishes of billionaires they will never meet.
“All of this money is hidden and dark on purpose,” Silverii told me – and it will remain that way until the legislature chooses to change it.
