The Colorado GOP is threatening to try to withdraw from Colorado’s Republican presidential primary in March — or ignore the results — if Donald Trump isn’t on the ballot, heaping uncertainty onto the fast-approaching contest and setting up a possible legal showdown with state elections officials.
The Colorado Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Trump can’t appear on the ballot because he engaged in an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol and therefore is disqualified from holding office again. The decision will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but there’s little time for a resolution before the Jan. 5 state deadline to set the ballot. Ballots start being mailed to military and overseas voters on Jan. 20. Election Day is March 5.
Colorado GOP Chairman Dave Williams told The Colorado Sun on Tuesday night that if Trump isn’t on the ballot, the party would ask the state to cancel the Republican presidential primary. Instead, Republican voters would caucus to select delegates to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee next year.
There are 37 delegates up for grabs from the state.
“’I’m not going to let these sons of bitches dictate who we’re going to nominate,” Williams said in an X Spaces event Tuesday night on the site formerly known as Twitter.
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Williams told The Sun that if Trump isn’t on the ballot and the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office won’t cancel the Republican presidential primary, “we will ignore the primary” results.
The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office said the Colorado GOP couldn’t withdraw from the presidential primary and that it has doubts about whether the party can ignore the primary results.
“Colorado law does not allow a presidential primary election to be canceled at the request of a political party,” the office said in a written statement Wednesday. “If the Colorado Republican Party attempts to withdraw from the presidential primary or ignore the results of the election, this would likely be a matter for the courts.”
State law says “each political party shall use the results of the (presidential primary) election to allocate national delegate votes in accordance with the party’s state and national rules.”
The legal and political uncertainty highlights how the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling marks the first time that the insurrection clause has been used to block a presidential candidate from appearing on the ballot.
The Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling is stayed until Jan. 4. The court ordered that the stay remain in place, and that the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office must place Trump’s name on the ballot, if its decision is appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Since an appeal is imminent, the U.S. Supreme Court would have to block Trump from Colorado’s primary ballot in the next three weeks for Williams’ threat to be relevant.
Before it could even try to use a caucus process to pick delegates to the national convention, the Colorado GOP would have to get a waiver from the Republican National Committee. The Colorado GOP filed an alternative delegate apportionment plan with the RNC as an insurance policy against the Colorado case challenging Trump’s spot on the ballot.
The waiver appears likely to be granted.
RNC Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel said on X on Tuesday night that the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision was “election interference.”
“The Republican nominee will be decided by Republican voters, not a partisan state court,” she said.
A similar situation is playing out in Nevada, where both a Republican presidential primary and caucuses will be held in February. That state’s GOP said it will only honor the results of the caucus.
The Nevada GOP has barred any candidate who participates in the primary from also participating in the caucus.
The caucus system has a long history in Colorado and it’s still used to place candidates on the ballot in lower-tier races.
Colorado’s presidential primary this year will be just the fifth-ever in the state. Voters overwhelmingly approved ditching the caucus system in Colorado for a presidential primary in 2016.
Previously, Colorado has had presidential primaries only in 1992,1996, 2000 and 2020.
Still, quickly organizing a last-minute caucus process would likely be immensely difficult and costly. The Colorado GOP would have to find and reserve spaces throughout the state for Republicans to gather. The party would also have to draft and agree upon rules for how the system would work.
The Colorado GOP could try to combine the presidential primary caucus with its already scheduled caucuses in March that are set to select which candidates are on the state’s June primary ballot for lower-tier races, like congressional and state legislative contests.
If the Colorado GOP were to somehow withdraw from the primary or ignore the results, doing so would invalidate the opinion of unaffiliated voters, who make up the largest share of the state’s electorate and are allowed to cast ballots in partisan primaries.
Colorado’s 37 delegates to the Republican National Convention are electorally unimportant. Polls show Trump has plenty of support to secure the GOP nomination without backing from the state.
Additionally, the former president is unlikely to win in Colorado in the general election. President Joe Biden beat Trump by 13 percentage points in 2020.
But Williams said exiting the primary is a matter of principle. “We’re not going to take this lying down,” he said on CNN.
In addition to Trump, several other candidates have filed to appear on Colorado’s Republican presidential primary ballot. They include Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
Ramaswamy late Tuesday posted a video on X promising to withdraw from the Colorado GOP ballot unless Trump is part of the primary and “demanding” that DeSantis, Christie and Haley do the same.
The Colorado Supreme Court’s 4-3 decision to block Trump from the ballot stems from the so-called “insurrection clause” in the U.S. Constitution.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars “officers of the United States” who took an “oath … to support the Constitution of the United States” and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” from holding federal or state office again.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal political nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., sued Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold in September on behalf of a group of Colorado Republican and unaffiliated voters, arguing that the former president shouldn’t be allowed on the state’s presidential primary ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6 riot.
The four Colorado Supreme Court justices who voted to block Trump from the ballot wrote in their opinion that Trump clearly engaged in an insurrection on Jan. 6.
“The record amply established that the events of Jan. 6 constituted a concerted and public use of force or threat of force by a group of people to hinder or prevent the U.S. government from taking the actions necessary to accomplish the peaceful transfer of power in this country,” the court’s majority wrote. “Under any viable definition, this constituted an insurrection.”
The majority also wrote that “Trump did not merely incite the insurrection.”
“Even when the siege on the Capitol was fully underway, he continued to support it by repeatedly demanding that Vice President (Mike) Pence refuse to perform his constitutional duty and by calling senators to persuade them to stop the counting of electoral votes,” the majority wrote. “These actions constituted overt, voluntary and direct participation in the insurrection.”