Next weekend Colorado Democrats will descend on Pueblo and engage in an anachronistic, inefficient and costly exercise of political theater. A few weeks later Republicans will do the same.
It is time the parties realize that the caucus and assembly process has got to go.
I know this is blasphemy to many. It is the way Colorado has nominated its candidates — at least for the two major parties — for decades. Many of the grassroots activists circle the dates on their calendars. It gives candidates the chance to address a big crowd of supporters.
But the time for both has passed. Caucuses and assemblies are stuck in a time when landlines and the big three news networks dominated politics. Not only have they not kept up, but they have hung like a weight around the necks of the parties.
For example, a major impetus behind caucuses was to get neighbors together to talk about politics and share their views. Over the past 20 years that process has shifted online to Facebook and Twitter and Nextdoor.
Instead of engaging once every couple of years, people now post with abandon multiple times a day. That is even more true for the politically engaged activists who show up to caucus; they tend to be the same folks driving the online discussions.
People willing to sacrifice several days to attend party caucuses and subsequent county, district and state assemblies are not casual political observers.
Worse? State parties already struggle to fundraise under artificially low campaign finance contribution limits in Colorado. Having to spend a large percentage of the precious dollars to gather and address only a few thousand folks — who were already in your corner — seems like an awful waste of resources. I am sure that both parties would love to have those dollars available in the fall when voters submit ballots.
Given that Colorado Republicans only had $64,000 in the bank by the end of January, and owed more than $236,000 in debts, they are likely spending money they do not have and digging a bigger hole by hosting the assembly. They might need to consider hosting it in the Boot Barn parking lot again.
Even when the comparatively functional and future forward Democratic Party tries to pull caucuses into the present, things go horribly wrong. This year the party moved away from paper ballots and in-person voting to app-based procedures. It did not go well. Glitches abounded and the chairman was stuck explaining that the system struggled under higher than expected turnout.
Even the end result of the assembly process, nomination of candidates to the ballot, is increasingly unnecessary and counterproductive. Many candidates choose to either skip the assemblies and petition on to the ballot or dual-track the process. Those going the assembly route alone tend to be the most ideologically extreme due to the hyper-partisan makeup of assembly attendees.
The choice made by a few hundred assembly goers is rarely representative of the primary electorate as a whole. To the contrary, not only do exponentially more people cast votes in the primary, but importantly unaffiliated voters do as well. A hyper-partisan winner at assembly may be a big loser to the larger electorate.
In a state where unaffiliated voters now compose more than half the voting population, relying on a process that purposefully shuts them out to nominate candidates becomes a liability.
Those voters have already forsaken political parties, so those parties trotting out their most extreme avatars reinforces the divide.
The outsized influence of unaffiliated voters has been so influential that far-right activists attempted to take an opt-out vote at their central committee meeting a few years ago. When that failed, they sued the state. That failed, too. And then Republicans failed in the elections after that.
Nonetheless both Republicans and Democrats cling to their caucus and assembly system.
Luckily for both major parties, they are stuck in the same boat. State law mandates that the major parties pay for and hold both caucuses and assemblies. Neither can simply throw its hands up in the air and walk away from the chaos.
However, between them they also control the entire legislature. Because Colorado does not have a proportional representation system that would award seats to smaller parties, Democrats and Republicans hold every seat under the golden dome. They could change it if they wanted.
I will not hold my breath. Each made it through the process, even if several likely abhor it. But none want to become the focal point of ire from the activists who see the assemblies as the social event of the election cycle. It is a self-reinforcing system, even if it is terrible.
Consequently the 2024 caucuses and assemblies will not be the last. Two years from now both parties will gear up for another round, one turbo-charged by a presidential primary season. Both parties will dedicate thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars to host each event. More than likely they will have more problems and more headaches.
At some point maybe they will learn. The caucus and assemblies? They belong in the past.
Mario Nicolais is an attorney and columnist who writes on law enforcement, the legal system, health care and public policy. Follow him on BlueSky: @MarioNicolais.bsky.social.
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