Last week, Colorado Republican Party Chair Brita Horn announced that she will be resigning from her position following the Republican Assembly next month. Horn’s announcement comes after months of infighting, lawsuits, the resignation of two vice chairs and two no-confidence votes.
During an appearance Monday on the Dan Caplis Show, Horn said her tenure was doomed from the start. “I went up against seven other people [to be GOP chair], two rounds, won by 49 votes,” she said. “We knew it was short, it was gonna be tight and divisive.”
Former Colorado GOP Chair, and current Colorado Board of Education member, Kristi Burton Brown discussed the increasing hostility within the Republican Party during her appearance Monday on Ryan Schuling Live. “There’s often opposition in the party,” she said. “Most chair elections are close to 50%. It’s been unusual in a while that a chairman wins by anything more than about 55% of the vote. So you do often have 40-ish percent of the central committee — up to 50% — that wanted a different chairman, but usually they give you time and give you the opportunity to help our candidates and do good work and fundraise. It literally has been lawsuit after lawsuit and over fairly minute issues, I think just to get her in court and cost money for the party, but then blame her for spending legal fees defending herself, so it’s really disingenuous and doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”
Horn discussed issues with her own vice chairs, former Colorado Rep. Richard Holtorf and his predecessor Darrel Phelan. “They came in with an agenda, and their agenda was to get rid of me,” she said. “They just didn’t want to do what’s best for the party, even though they raised their hands and said they would. They were actively working to sabotage the party.”
Brown suggested the issues with Holtorf were more of a personality conflict. “I do know Brita’s second vice chairman, Richard Holtorf, and I would say that I do think he tends to always be focused on electing candidates and making the party better,” she said. “My assumption is that he and Brita both have strong personalities, and probably really weren’t able to get on the same page and align themselves, which is unfortunate for the party.”
The Colorado GOP has faced a tumultuous few years. Brown faced opposition from the grassroots, pro-Trump faction of the party before former Colorado Rep. Dave Williams was elected chair. In Brown’s own campaign for chair she called on Republicans to “go on the attack” against not only against Democrats, but also against Dominion Voting Systems. She also supported the two county parties, Jefferson and Boulder, that refused to certify their election results without a forensic audit of the Dominion machines. Brown did not mention her previous anti-Dominion statements in the radio interview.
“What happened part way through my term is Dave Williams and some people on that side of the party — Ron Hanks was on that side, he ran for Senate — a lot of their supporters, some of those people in particular, really, really, launched into the election integrity issues and demanded paper ballots for absolutely everything,” she said. “They didn’t acknowledge human error and the infeasibility of running state assemblies that way. And so sometimes, if you don’t do everything they want, how they want it, they will say, ‘We’re gonna take you down.’ I don’t think that’s appropriate when we’re supposed to be opposing Democrats and not each other. And when we agree on principles and we’re equally conservative, we’re supposed to get candidates elected. Unfortunately, people have lost sight of that. And then I think Dave Williams continued that as chairman, and that’s very dangerous when you are the chairman, and then oppose your own candidates and create complete incivility. And then that segment of the party has continued it against Brita from the very moment she got elected and gave her no chance whatsoever.”
Horn noted the intense opposition she faced. “They’ve gotten to a point where I didn’t feel safe,” she said. “I would go to meetings and somebody would escort me from the car to the building. But I always took my car on the way out. I’m always looking over my shoulder. There’s just so many people and some more than others that were just very dogmatic in their texts, in their emails, in their phone calls, in their messages that they just — what is it going to take to get me to quit?”
Brown also noted increased infighting over tangential issues within the party. “I’m definitely pretty much as conservative as you can get, but if you’re going to define that on whether or someone has paper ballots in an election or whether or not they support Tina Peters, then again you’re getting off on what’s truly conservative versus preferences,” she said. “I don’t like that our party has taken that dive and I think what we need to do is get back to truly conservative principles and let people in different positions do their job.”
