Give credit to the Colorado Springs judge who ruled that the vote to remove Dave “God Hates Flags” Williams as head of the Colorado Republican Party was invalid.
I don’t know if justice was served — I’ll leave that to the legal analysts — but the story, in all its vainglory, demanded that Williams survive what he calls an attempted coup to remain in office.
The controlling narrative — that the state GOP is determined to do whatever it can to sink ever deeper into irrelevance — was definitely served.
You can call it a soap opera, as many have.
I would call it a death march. And, believe me, there’s no one more qualified than Williams to continue to lead the state GOP off any available cliff.
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And as if to make the point, when Williams learned that the judge had decided that the rump-party vote to replace him with former El Paso County GOP chair Eli Bremer was invalid, he threatened to take vengeance.
Of course, he did.
Williams is, first and foremost, a Donald Trump acolyte. And isn’t promising revenge what Trump would do (WWTD) in this case?
And so, Williams named Bremer and El Paso County Vice-Chair Todd Watkins, who organized the attempt to remove him, as subjects for retribution “in and out of court.” And I’d imagine he’ll add every other central committee member who voted against him and maybe all the state and national GOP politicians who have publicly said they want him removed.
Here’s the email Williams sent to GOP central committee members following the ruling:
“Please know that your true state party officers will seek all legal accountability, in and out of court, against Watkins, Bremer and those who worked in the shadows to sow chaos and orchestrate an unlawful coup against the majority will,” Williams wrote. “While we will seek legal accountability against these failed usurpers, the rest of our state party must unite to defeat the radical Democrats with the remaining time we have left before November.”
There are a couple of problems there, of course. The party couldn’t be less united. What we have now — one faction of the central committee voting to keep Williams, another faction voting to oust him — is basically a civil war. And Williams wants to make sure there are as many casualties as possible.
And there’s this: The state party under Williams has raised very little money while, in fact, making almost no effort to defeat radical Democrats or any other kind of Democrats.
As the Sun’s Jesse Paul noted in a recent Unaffiliated newsletter, the party paid $34,000 in August — its biggest expense that month — to Williams’ consulting firm. It also reported that it sent $25,000 to a trust account for the legal firm representing Williams in his cage match with Bremer.
And how much was spent in August by the party to help GOP campaigns for the state legislature or for Congress?
If you guessed nothing, you’ve obviously been paying attention.
And whether or not you noticed that the state GOP reported it had raised only $26,500 in August, compared to $563,693 by state Democrats, you couldn’t have been surprised by the fact. The state party dysfunction couldn’t be more obvious.
How did the Republicans get to this point — the lowest point for the party in Colorado, by any and all measures, since, well, forever?
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It seems that Williams — a corrupt, self-serving, election-denying homophobe — was so notorious as a state delegate and so flawed as a failed congressional candidate that the state party must have thought it had no choice but to elect him chairman.
Of course, it did.
State Republicans seemed to have hit bottom by the time they named Williams as chair in 2023. But in choosing Williams, they found a way to go lower.
The GOP, as you know, has no statewide elected officials. In the legislature, the Dems have a supermajority in the House and are one vote away from a supermajority in the Senate. When Trump lost the 2020 vote in Colorado by more than 13 points, it was the biggest presidential blowout in the state since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 rout of Walter Mondale.
And then came Williams, who split the party by endorsing a bunch of MAGA losers (including himself) in contested GOP primary races, who sent out hateful anti-LGBTQ mailers, who routinely attacks members of his own party, who is so toxic that he inspired a late-term intraparty revolt.
In March, the party’s central committee will meet to vote — legitimately, one hopes — for party chair. Who knows if they’ll keep Williams then? But it seems certain now that he’ll remain in place at least through the November election.
And for now, Kamala Harris is leading Trump by double digits in state polling while Trump promises (threatens?) to come to Aurora to claim, falsely of course, that Venezuelan gangs are prepared to take over the “whole damn state” unless he becomes president.
Maybe you heard about the billboard on I-25 as you enter Colorado from Wyoming — placed there courtesy of Trump billionaire donor Tim Mellon — which warns, “Venezuela Ahead. BE PREPARED.”
Does that sound like a winning message to you in Colorado?
Of course not. But what do Colorado Republicans know about winning? If they knew anything at all, they would never have made anyone remotely like Dave Williams their state party leader.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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