The year is 2024 and your Colorado ballot has just arrived in the mail. The envelope is thick, another year’s ballot loaded not just with candidates, but with state and local initiatives. You fill in the bubbles next to the candidates you like, take a deep breath, then turn to the page where the initiatives start.
You have never heard of most of them — you have bills to pay, kids to carpool, a life to live — and the only explanation on the ballot is a thick hedge of legalese covering each proposed law. So you do what a responsible voter does, and set out to educate yourself. You pull up a new tab in your browser and search for one of the initiatives: “Proposition 130.”
There are plenty of results: editorial page endorsements, opinion pieces advocating for a yes vote, even think tank papers supporting the initiative. They make the proposal look like common sense, uncontroversial, incontrovertible.
And that’s exactly what they were designed to do.
Without realizing it, you have read editorials in papers owned by a major funder of the group pushing the ballot initiative, opinion pieces by people who work for other organizations he funds, and even papers from a think tank he has supported financially. In the process of being a responsible voter, you stumbled into a trap created specifically for people like you – and you are not the only one: at the nexus between the organizations pushing the ballot initiative, the think tank producing supposedly independent research, and some of the state’s largest media properties, lies a political machine designed to convince voters like you to support policies to benefit Colorado’s wealthiest citizen.
Last year, we reported on the tangled web of right-wing consultants and organizations – 501(c)(3)s and (4)s, family foundations, and donor-advised trusts – which constitute the Advance Colorado network. Together, they circulate millions of anonymous dollars per year through Colorado’s political arteries, backing ballot initiatives and short-circuiting the legislative process in constant pursuit of one goal: cutting taxes for their wealthy benefactors.
Despite the lack of conservative majorities anywhere in Colorado’s government in recent years, Advance Colorado has nevertheless succeeded in driving its agenda forward in the state. Launched by former Gov. Bill Owens and real estate mogul Terry Considine, and under the leadership of conservative strategist Michael Fields, the network has extracted multiple tax cuts from the Democrat-majority state legislature, and has repeatedly used ballot initiatives as bargaining chips in negotiations with Democratic legislative leaders and Governor Polis, notwithstanding the minority voice the state’s voters chose to give Republicans.
Our reporting last year focused on the network’s money: where it comes from, how it circulates, and where it ultimately ends up. We revealed that the organization has ties to major right-wing organizations like the Bradley Foundation and mega-donors like the Walton family. We also reported what has been rumored for many years: that the main hand funding and puppeting the network’s actions is that of Phil Anschutz, the state’s wealthiest man.
Now, we are taking a closer look at where the network’s rubber meets the road: not just how it funds its vast array of right-wing efforts, but how it persuades voters in a blue state like Colorado to support them.
Founded in 2011 as the Common Sense Policy Roundtable, the Common Sense Institute has always had an agenda: to bestow donor-friendly right-wing ideas with a vaguely academic patina, then launder them into the mainstream media.
“One of the most beneficial things about a lot of people in the media, from the perspective of the Common Sense Institute, is that a lot of journalists, with all due respect, are going to be lazy,” Fox News’ Guy Benson said at a Common Sense Institute event in 2023, laying the game bare. “You can come to them with a report that is relevant, that will be plugged in easily into a graphic. They’re like ‘great, thank you, let’s put that on the air.’”
Taking advantage of two decades of funding cuts across mainstream media outlets, CSI produces publication-ready content and shoves it at overworked, underpaid local journalists, making the bet that most outlets will not spare the time to fact check or examine that content for long enough to realize that its methodology is suspect and its conclusions are warmed-over GOP talking points.
Often, the bet pays off: as a 2024 Colorado Times Recorder investigation revealed, most media outlets citing the think tank make no mention of its conservative agenda. Nor do most mention that the organization’s major funders, like the Walton Family Foundation, rank among the largest conservative donors in the country.
“Newsrooms have been decimated, newspapers are closing — they don’t have people able to do this kind of work,” Benson told the friendly crowd.
Another rarely mentioned strike against the think tank’s credibility: the Common Sense Institute is a member of the State Policy Network, a controversial assemblage of right-wing think tanks, many members of which sat on the Project 2025 advisory board. A fellow State Policy Network think tank, the Heartland Institute, infamously led the charge against regulations on secondhand smoke in the 1990s. In 2013, long-time State Policy Network president Tracie Sharp admitted to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer “that the organization’s often anonymous donors frequently shape the agenda” put forward by its member think tanks.
In the case of the Common Sense Institute, which has spread to a number of other states, its roots are in Colorado, and so are its most loyal donors. Since its inception, the organization has received significant funding from two of the biggest names in Colorado Republican politics: Coors and Anschutz. In almost every year of its existence, the organization has received money from the Adolph Coors Foundation, and either the Anschutz Family Foundation or the Christian P. Anschutz Foundation. And, in keeping with what Sharp confessed to Mayer 13 years ago, the think tank has consistently advocated for policies which would disproportionately benefit those loyal donors.
Despite its wide array of right-wing ties, the Common Sense Institute’s playbook for slipping its content into the mainstream media still works largely how Benson explained it in 2023: outlets publish what the group gives them, passing off its donor-driven conclusions as fact. After all, “common sense” is right in the name.
This ability to pass as something it is not – neutral, or at least intellectually curious – makes CSI a vital node in Advance Colorado’s network.
Though the Common Sense Institute predates Advance Colorado on the political scene by a decade, the two groups are closely tied. Today, in addition to Advance Colorado directly funding the Common Sense Institute, the organizations have other major donors in common, like High Hopes Colorado, a 501(c)(3) which exists to move money between organizations in the Advance Colorado network, and which has received direct funding from billionaire Phil Anschutz. Common Sense Institute co-founder and board chair Earl Wright has also contributed significantly to High Hopes by way of his AMG Charitable Gift Foundation. Both Advance and CSI have also received funding from the Daniels Fund. Shortly after our reporting on some of these links in 2024, Advance Colorado removed the page on its website which listed the Common Sense Institute as a partner.
As two organizations driven by the interests of their overlapping donors, Advance and CSI have developed a productive symbiosis over the last five years: Advance has emerged as the state’s foremost conservative organization, and the Common Sense Institute has been there every step of the way, validating Advance’s whims with the appearance of academic rigor.
While the tag-team act between Advance Colorado and CSI forms the core of Advance’s persuasion apparatus, working to convince blue-state voters to support conservative initiatives, they are joined in the effort by a vital third partner. Advance might set the agenda, and the Common Sense Institute might legitimize it, but it’s Clarity Media who takes the news to the voters.
Phil Anschutz did not become the state’s wealthiest man overnight. He did not inherit all of the money necessary to fund think tanks and advocacy organizations, to turn an entire state into a policy lab for the lowering of his own taxes, though he did inherit his father’s oil company as the foundation of his fortune. Phil Anschutz made the rest of his fortune the old fashioned way: through rapacious capitalism, the ruthless exploitation of natural resources, and, ultimately, the development of a media empire. Or, rather, two of them.
AEG, the Anschutz Entertainment Group, is one of them: through it, Anschutz owns stadiums, professional sports teams, the Coachella music festival, and more. While his ownership of those properties has made him enormous sums of money, it has also exposed him to the kind of scrutiny the famously press-shy billionaire works hard to avoid. In 2017, when Anschutz’s donations to anti-LGBTQ organizations were revealed, he faced the threat of consumer blowback from the crowds of young people who make AEG so profitable. After that dustup, much of Anschutz’s political giving went underground.
It is Anschutz’s other, smaller media company, though, which plays an active role in the Advance Colorado network, and in the billionaire’s constant efforts to shape Colorado politics to his liking.
Through Clarity Media Group, a subsidiary of the Anschutz Corporation, the state’s wealthiest man is the sole owner of three Colorado news outlets: the Colorado Springs Gazette, the Denver Gazette, and Colorado Politics. Like the Common Sense Institute, the Clarity outlets are unabashedly conservative; and, like the Common Sense Institute, much of the mainstream media fails to identify them as such. Both the Gazettes and Colorado Politics have conservative editorial leanings. Until October of last year, the editorial page editor of all three was Wayne Laugesen, who was present with his wife for the events of January 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C.
In what would be a striking coincidence if the owner of one were not a funder of the other, Clarity Media Group outlets report on Common Sense Institute research far more than any other news outlets.
According to the journalism database Newsbank, which collects from more than 12,000 outlets, the Common Sense Institute received 4,608 press mentions between January 2020 and February 2026. The Denver Gazette mentioned CSI 678 times during that period, followed by the Colorado Springs Gazette, which referenced the think tank 647 times over the same period. Colorado Politics ranked third among all outlets for mentions of the Common Sense Institute. Overall, across more than 12,000 outlets, the three Colorado-based Clarity Media Group outlets accounted for 40% of all mentions of CSI.
By combining Advance Colorado’s political capacity, the Common Sense Institute’s laundered research, and Clarity Media Group’s willing cooperation, the Advance network has built a machine capable of transforming right-wing donor wishlists into laws, and it has already put that machine to use.
Colorado’s Proposition 130 was run through that machine in 2024.
When looked at objectively, it was a plan to force massive cuts to programs directed at affordable housing, healthcare, education, tax credits, and food security in order to fund a $350 million police slush fund. When it came out on the other side, it had transformed into a “Peace Officer Training and Support Fund” to combat rising crime in Colorado (at a time when the crime rate was already falling). The proponents never mentioned the cuts. That November, it passed with 52% of the vote.
Proposition 130 was not the first time the Advance Colorado network rolled out its persuasion machine. The Common Sense Institute and Clarity Media properties also collaborated with Advance to oppose Proposition HH in 2023, which would have made changes to TABOR (Colorado’s one-of-a-kind constitutional amendment limiting how much revenue the legislature can hold onto each year). On one side of that machine, Prop HH was a broad-based property tax cut and a reworking of the state’s revenue limits. On the other side, it came out as an initiative which would threaten education funding, permanently eliminate TABOR refunds, and cause chaos in the state budgeting process.
Like the spurious arguments in favor of Proposition 130, the arguments ginned-up against Proposition HH were dutifully amplified by Clarity Media Group outlets, and the proposition was defeated at the ballot.
The Advance network’s persuasion machine has achieved some noteworthy successes, but it has not been universally successful. In 2024, Advance Colorado championed Amendment 80, which would have created a constitutional right to school choice and severely jeopardized public school funding. Both the Colorado Springs and Denver Gazettes endorsed the amendment, Colorado Politics ran opinion pieces supporting it, and the Common Sense Institute produced multiple studies in an attempt to make it palatable to voters. They failed. In the final tally, Amendment 80 fell 6% shy of the 55% threshold required for amendments to the state constitution.
Now, as winter turns to spring and the midterm elections scheduled for November 2026 start coming into view over the horizon, Advance Colorado is preparing a whole slate of ballot initiatives. The process is not yet complete, meaning it is not yet certain which initiatives have formally qualified for the ballot, but Advance has its bases covered: the group is currently sponsoring 21 initiatives, mostly relating to crime, energy, and taxes.
We do not know which of those 21 initiatives will make the ballot, but some of them will, and we know all too well what will happen next. The funding machine we exposed last year will roar to life, feeding on fresh cash from the Waltons and Coors and Anschutzes of the world, distributing those funds to the consultants and apparatchiks and satellite organizations who keep the Advance ecosystem alive and well. Then the persuasion machine will kick into gear: the Common Sense Institute will reverse-engineer studies from the desired conclusions, Clarity Media Group properties will uncritically print their findings, and an unfortunate chunk of the Colorado press corps will repeat them uncritically.
Between January and November of 2026, the entire effort could cost upwards of $10 million – nearly 0.05% of Phil Anschutz’s net worth, and likely less than he will save if every tax cut Advance Colorado backs passes. Whatever it costs, though, and however often it fails, the donors-that-be seem to have determined that the juice is worth the squeeze, that they are willing to spend more in one year than most people will earn in a lifetime just to create and sustain the environment that you will stumble into when you open that ballot, turn to your computer, and research your options.
