EVERGREEN, Colo. — The Colorado Republican Party’s new chair pledges to grow the party and make it more competitive and inclusive. She has her work cut out for her.
While Republicans managed to flip Colorado’s 8th Congressional District in November, the last time a Republican won a statewide election in Colorado was in 2016, when Heidi Ganahl was elected to the University of Colorado Board of Regents.
When Ganahl ran for governor a few years later, she lost the election to Gov. Jared Polis by 20 points.
Republicans are also in a superminority in the legislature, with far fewer seats than Democrats.
A poll this past November by the Colorado Polling Institute found only 37% of Colorado voters had a favorable view of the party, with 66% of them describing it as “out of touch with me.” (55% of voters also described the Democratic Party as “out of touch.”)
Former Routt County treasurer Brita Horn hopes to turn things around.
Horn was elected as the new chair of the Colorado Republican Party this past weekend, beating out five other candidates.
Denver7 caught up with Horn on Wednesday in Evergreen, where she was speaking to local Republicans.
- You can watch the full interview in the video player below
Denver7's full interview with Brita Horn, new chair of the Colorado GOP
“I just wanna make it really clear, the job is to elect more Republicans and grow the party and then obviously fundraise for that,” Horn said. “And I think in the past years we've seeing everybody using it as a platform for their agenda and it isn't.”
Horn says she wants to grow the party, recruit better candidates, and help it become more competitive and inclusive.
“It's all on messaging,” said Horn. “We have to do better at messaging.”
Horn said 250,000 Colorado Republicans didn’t vote in the 2024 election.
She said the party must find a way to get them off the sidelines.
“We're going to be able to bring all the people who have left the party over the last two years, bring over some people that wanted to be a part of the party, but just couldn't pass their purity test,” said Horn.
Many Colorado Republicans blame much of the party’s problems on former chair Dave Williams.
They say his anti-LGBTQ messages last year made things worse. Many Republicans across the state called for him to resign.
Williams survived an attempt to remove him as chair last year.
In February, he sued several Republicans, including Horn, over their efforts to remove him.
Horn said there’s a lot of work to do uniting the party and putting it in a position to make electoral gains.
She said she extended an olive branch to the other Republican candidates who ran for chair.
“We're actually hoping those other people, those other candidates, will come join the party and do their piece, the piece that was really important to them,” said Horn.
Horn told Denver7 she believes Republicans should focus more on fiscal issues rather than divisive social issues.
“Absolutely fiscal issues, because that's something we can all agree on,” said Horn. “Social issues are gonna be all over the board. Let's do Reagan's 80/20 [rule].”
Former President Reagan’s 80/20 rule was based on the idea that anyone who agrees with you 80% of the time should be considered a friend or ally instead of an enemy.
While Horn said she’d rather the party focus on fiscal issues, part of her platform on her website mentions the Colorado GOP’s messaging strategy should include focusing on "woke gender ideology targeting children."
“We want to make sure those coalitions are working on that and that we'll work parallel with that,” Horn said when asked about it.
The Colorado Democratic Party chair Shad Murib wasted no time in criticizing Horn’s election.
“It’s no surprise that the Colorado GOP elected Brita Horn — best known for using her government job to extract political favors and cost Routt County millions of dollars through her failed job as treasurer — to their top leadership spot,” Murib said. “She’s a perfect fit for the new age of corruption that Trump requires of his puppets.”
Murib is referring to a mistake Horn’s office made when she was county treasurer in 2017, which resulted in late payments to schools and other local taxing districts, according to the Steamboat Pilot and Today.
In a letter to tax recipients, Horn took “full responsibility” and said “not one dime” of taxpayer money was lost due to the mistake.
Horn said she’s planning to close the Colorado GOP’s headquarters, which is located in Greenwood Village.
“We are always talking about having regional [offices],” said Horn. “We don't have to be right next to each other and share the same wall. We know how to use Zoom.”
Horn grew up outside Chicago and worked in Washington, D.C. before moving to Colorado in 1989. She said she married a rancher and became a Republican shortly after the move.
In 2001 after the September 11th terrorist attacks, she and her husband started a volunteer fire department, where she serves as fire chief.
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