The Douglas County Republican Party held its annual assembly Saturday, drawing 282 delegates to nominate candidates and select party leadership. The day would include election fraud claims, a mailer calling a fellow Republican a traitor, and a credentials meltdown that nearly led to a revote.
But first, Joe Oltmann arrived by helicopter.
“I told everyone that I wanted to make the assemblies fun again,” the podcaster and Republican gubernatorial candidate told the delegates gathered at the Douglas County Fairgrounds in Castle Rock, “so I went and got a helicopter and landed just outside.”
The crowd laughed. Some applauded. Then Oltmann, who has been fined over $90,000 while fighting liability for defamation over his false claims about a Dominion Voting Systems executive after the 2020 election, told the same assembly he had just flown in to make fun again that Colorado’s elections are not free or fair. “You cannot get to a place where we’re at for the state if you had free and fair elections,” he said.
The crowd was receptive, applauding Oltmann’s claim even as they acted as the party insiders who help decide which Republicans voters will send to the general election in November. In February, he made the same case at a Douglas County GOP governor forum, where he claimed Elon Musk sent a “strike team” to stop Serbia from stuffing American ballot boxes.
A party at war with itself
But the helicopter was not the only spectacle on offer.
The same delegates who had cheered Oltmann’s claims about rigged elections were greeted at the door with a mailer from Rocky Mountain Gun Owners’ super PAC calling Republican state Rep. Anthony Hartsook, who represents House District 44 in Parker, a “traitor.”
The mailer cited three Republican-sponsored bills, including one RMGO claims would let the state freeze gun sales and another that would share concealed carry permit holder biometrics with the FBI.
“Don’t let him get away with it,” the mailer read.
RMGO has been targeting Hartsook since he sponsored legislation that would adjust the operating hours of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation’s firearms background-check unit, which RMGO frames to members as a bill to “freeze gun sales,” and after the group’s director says Hartsook had him removed from the Capitol when he confronted him about the bill. The group has since called for Hartsook to resign and celebrated that he now faces a primary challenger.
Reality Check
Party Second Vice Chair David DiCarlo had a message for the room.
Who’s here for a candidate they love? Hands went up. Who wants to beat the Democrats? More hands. Who made a social media post this week? Hands again. “Who thinks that changes anyone’s mind?”
The silence was his point.
“It is not enough to get out the base,” DiCarlo told delegates. “The base has shrunk. We are not a 50% plus one Republican county anymore. We are a 34% Republican county.”
In October 2016, Republicans made up nearly 46% of active Douglas County voters. By October 2024, that share had fallen to 32%. Over the same period, the county’s unaffiliated voter population nearly doubled, from roughly 67,000 to nearly 140,000, and now outnumbers registered Republicans by almost 50,000. Unaffiliated voters are 48.6% of the active electorate.
“I need folks brave enough to do that,” DiCarlo said of the push to win over unaffiliated voters. “We lost House District 43 four years ago for a variety of reasons. We have the ability to win it back this year.”
The political consequences of the shift have been visible at the ballot box, according to official Douglas County canvass reports and statewide election results. Trump carried Douglas County by more than 18 points in 2016. In 2024, his margin was roughly 7 points. In 2022, the governor’s race was effectively a tie, with Republican Heidi Ganahl winning by less than one percentage point.
Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R-CO) won CD4 overall by double digits in 2024, but her margin in Douglas County was just 0.57 percentage points, according to official county and statewide election results. Douglas County voters also passed a school bond with nearly 60% support, approved abortion rights and backed same-sex marriage in 2024.
Democrat Bob Marshall has won HD43, which covers parts of Douglas County, in recent election cycles, making it a competitive general-election seat. Republican candidate Nate Marsh, who says HD43 is “one of the most winnable seats” for Republicans in 2026, attended the assembly and secured the nomination unopposed. He’s running on a platform of tougher criminal penalties, eliminating cashless bail, reducing regulations and opposing what he describes as government and school interference with parental rights.
Marsh spoke in front of a sign soliciting contributions to the “Fighting 43rd Victory Fund,” which appears to be a reference to the “HD43 Victory Fund,” a party committee created in January to support “qualified Republican persons to Colorado’s House District 43.”
DiCarlo’s cold-water assessment landed squarely between two cheerful fundraising pitches from the party’s other newest officers. First Vice Chair Matt Smith, who was recruited by the Douglas County GOP last year to run for school board on a slate focused on parental rights and culture war issues, kept his message upbeat. “Douglas County is certainly a target for Democrats hoping to pick off any seat that they can,” he said. “We have to fight hard for every single seat.”
Treasurer Keaton Gambill, also a former GOP-recruited school board candidate who lost in November, closed with a fundraising appeal. “We have great candidates, we have the right messaging, the right policy,” he said. “There is money in the bank, but there’s not enough.”
Ballot confusion
The assembly hit a snag midway through the commissioner’s race when officials realized they had miscounted the number of eligible delegates. The initial credentials report listed 282 voters, but after the committee ran the numbers twice, first by calculator, then by hand, credentials chair Anne Gill returned to the stage with a correction. The two methods had initially disagreed. The correct total, she said, was 332 eligible voters.
“Don’t trust machines,” she told the room.
After a long delay, Gill said the assembly didn’t need a revote, and the results stood, sending both County Commissioner candidates, Jake Bockenfeld and John Diak, to the primary race.
Also in the room was Douglas County Clerk and Recorder Sheri Davis, who last year canceled an appearance alongside election deniers after a CTR inquiry. She kept her remarks brief, thanking her team and calling them the best election staff in the state.
Boebert and Marx
Boebert made a brief appearance in the afternoon, telling the crowd it was her sixth county stop of the day. “You guys are amazing,” she told the room. “You have such a fight on your hands to keep Douglas County red.”
She urged candidates to focus on policy over personality, an echo of DiCarlo’s earlier plea for pragmatism, and to avoid attacking fellow Republicans on social media. “Most of the folks that you comment about, you have their cell phone number,” she said. “Text them, pick up the phone and call them.”
She also announced that Scott Presler, the national MAGA voter registration activist, QAnon promoter, Jan. 6 participant and 2020 election denier who is leading the push to pass the SAVE America Act, would appear at both the CD4 assembly and the state assembly in Pueblo.
Adding to the mix of characters, gubernatorial candidate Victor Marx also took to the microphone during the day. Marx, who has raised $1.6 million since October and submitted more than 28,000 petition signatures to the Secretary of State’s office, described himself as a non-politician who could unite the party and win over unaffiliated voters.
“This is a race that we can’t trust to a politician,” he said. Marx did not mention that his frontrunner status on political betting markets had taken a sharp hit days earlier, after state Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer, another candidate for governor, filled her petition signatures ahead of schedule, and her odds surged.
At the end of the day, delegates filed out past a mobile anti-abortion clinic parked in the lot. Inside, the credentials committee had miscounted its own voters, a congresswoman had urged civility in a room full of traitor mailers, and an election denier had already flown away to his next stop. DiCarlo’s math problem, meanwhile, would still be there on Monday.
