Colorado Republicans elect new leader with an eye toward uniting a party upended by infighting

DENVER — Colorado Republicans have elected a former county treasurer as their new chairwoman as the party seeks to reverse recent trends of electoral losses and intraparty conflict.

Brita Horn, who previously served as the Routt County treasurer, was elected Saturday to a two-year term. She won on the second ballot at the party’s reorganization meeting in Colorado Springs, beating former state Rep. Lori Saine. Horn, who won out over a field of six other candidates vying for the state’s top Republican posting, succeeds former state lawmaker Dave Williams, who did not seek another term as chair.

In an interview Monday, Horn said her top priority was uniting the party to more meaningfully challenge Colorado Democrats’ gains in the Capitol.

“We’re just opening up the tent, bringing out the welcome wagon, rolling out the mat and saying ‘You’re all welcome,’ ” she said of different wings of the Republican Party.

She also said she supported closing Republican primaries — meaning that only registered Republicans would be able to participate. The state opened its partisan primaries in 2016, allowing unaffiliated voters — who make up a plurality of eligible voters — to participate in the primary of their choosing. Williams also had tried to close primaries.

On her website, Horn pledged to unite the party’s different factions, to audit the party’s finances, and to improve its leadership and infrastructure down to the “grassroots” level. Her election prompted celebratory social media posts from several Republican lawmakers and officials, including Williams’ predecessor Kristi Burton Brown, who now serves on the State Board of Education.

Horn said she wants to stand up field offices across the state, which will likely mean closing the party’s longtime office in Greenwood Village. The goal, she said, is to work more closely with local officials and to ensure a Republican candidate runs in every state legislative race.

Horn, who unsuccessfully ran for state treasurer in 2018, inherits a Colorado Republican Party at a key moment. As Colorado has settled into a steady shade of blue, the state GOP took a turn to the right under Williams, releasing anti-LGBTQ+ statements, doubling down on debunked election conspiracies and — most recently — inviting Steve Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump who recently performed a Nazi-like salute, to speak at a party gala Friday night. (Bannon has said he was waving.)

Fundraising slumped under Williams, and the party directed resources to the chairman’s own unsuccessful congressional bid last year. The party also took the controversial step of endorsing candidates in primary contests, including Williams.

Opposition to Williams — including from Horn — prompted an attempt to unseat him, unspooling a messy saga of dueling meetings and legal challenges that ended with a judge siding with Williams.

The Williams-led GOP then sued Horn and others over their efforts to remove the chairman; that case is ongoing.

Horn said Monday that the party would stop endorsing candidates during primary races. She also said she supported efforts to examine unproven “shenanigans” in Colorado elections and lawsuits challenging previous election results. State election officials have derided those lawsuits as a “sham.”

In November, against a national backdrop of Republican gains nearly nationwide, Colorado Republicans flipped three seats in the state House and broke Democrats’ two-thirds supermajority. Republican Gabe Evans beat then-U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo to nudge the state’s U.S. House delegation to a 4-4 Republican-Democratic split.

Still, much of Colorado remained insulated from the broader rightward shift, and the GOP remains just one seat away from superminority status in both the state House and Senate. No Republican has won a statewide election in Colorado in nearly a decade.

Immediately on Horn’s agenda will be preparing for the 2026 elections to try to buck that trend. All four statewide elected offices — held by Democrats since 2018 — will be open. The race for Evans’ 8th Congressional District seat in northern Colorado will again be one of the most contested in the country.

While Williams’ strategy for electoral success had prioritized backing hard-line conservatives in a blue state, Horn said she would pursue an approach focused on “opening up that tent and letting all types of Republicans be here.”

“You need a different kind of Republican” for different areas of the state, she said.

As for the party Horn will oppose, Colorado Democrats reelected party chair Shad Murib in mid-March. In a statement after Horn’s victory, Murib criticized Horn as a “perfect fit for the new age of corruption that Trump requires of his puppets.”

While some Colorado Republicans have lamented that Trump’s presence on the ballot hampers their chances here, Horn said the problem rests with the party’s infrastructure — not with the Republican standard-bearer.

“I think what the obstacle (has been) … is we had no foundation, no function,” she said. “We didn’t have any internal processes to go out and get the votes that I think were out there.”

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