Colorado’s Caucus System and the Fight Over How Candidates Reach the Ballot

In this episode of the Straight-Up 30, host Ross Izard sits down with Deborah Flora to unpack one of the least understood parts of Colorado politics: the caucus and assembly system. From precinct captains and state assemblies to petitions and primaries, the conversation breaks down how candidates actually make it onto the ballot and why many voters feel disconnected from the process. They also explore the growing debate over whether Colorado’s caucus system still reflects a representative democracy in a state where most voters are now unaffiliated.

What we cover:
• How Colorado’s caucus and assembly system works
• The difference between caucuses, petitions, and primaries
• Why voter participation in caucuses has steadily declined
• The growing influence of unaffiliated voters in Colorado
• The debate over representation, party control, and reform
• What a move to a straight primary system could look like

About the guest:
Deborah Flora is a longtime Colorado radio host, commentator, nonprofit founder, and former congressional and U.S. Senate candidate. Through her work in media, public policy, and civic engagement, she has spent years covering Colorado politics and advocating for greater public understanding of the political process.

Resources:
• Colorado Secretary of State: Colorado Secretary of State
• Colorado Republican Party: Colorado GOP
• Colorado Democratic Party: Colorado Democrats

Leave a review and stay in touch:
If you enjoyed the episode, please rate and review the show. It helps more listeners find us. Have feedback or questions? Email straightup30@xiphosstrategies.com.

Straight facts. Straight talk. Straight to the point.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:09

We make policy makes sense in 30 minutes or less. I'm your host, Ross Izzard, and today we're gonna talk about not policy, but politics, and more specifically, how the heck all those people that you vote for in November actually get onto the ballot, which is something that I think a lot of people don't understand, possibly including me at some level. And so to do that, we have Deborah Flora with us. We actually had to have a discussion about how to introduce Deborah because she has been involved in politics in some form or fashion for a very long time, running for office, starting nonprofits, serving on governing boards, just generally being all over the place. And at one point, made the mistake of actually getting deeply involved in the political process in a way that's afforded you with a pretty cool view, or maybe a not so cool view of how it actually works. And so thanks for joining us today.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

Absolutely. You got yes, I call it the temporary insanity period, where I she ran for office. Always like to say I am not a politician. I'm someone who deep believes deeply in civic engagement and public service. But if anyone uh watching this does not understand the caucus system, they should feel okay. I'd been on the radio on and off for 15 years, talk deeply about policy. And I didn't understand Cholera's caucus system even up to that point until I chose to run for office. So if you want in a nutshell, I can just kind of outline what a caucus is, because you ask most people and they have no idea. They have no idea.

SPEAKER_01 1:32

I mean, if you're at a backyard barbecue and somebody's talking about elections, you're like, yeah, I was at caucus. They're like, what's a I know, I know.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

It sounds like you know the Elk Club or something.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

Right. So I mean, so what the heck is a caucus? Okay. And how does it work and why do we do that?

SPEAKER_00 1:45

Okay, it's a great question. So there's only a handful of states in the country that actually have a caucus, and I think it's it's getting smaller and smaller. And I want to clarify up front, we have a caucus system when it comes to certain races, but in 2016, the presidential race went from a caucus to a primary. That was a ballot initiative, I believe, that passed. What a caucus means, and it harkens back to the early days when what it would be is neighbors would literally get together, they would discuss in their caucus, because if you look at color of there's 64 counties, 64 counties are then broken down into districts and then into precincts. So a precinct is like the smallest area in a caucus system that's basically your neighborhood. I don't know exactly how many people. And at first it had a great idea. Neighbors would get together, they talk about politics, and then they would elect one or two of them, depending on when it was, to represent that neighborhood, that precinct to go and select a candidate. Um it started in a great way because it was neighbors. It was really at the beginning a representational form of government. You meet with your neighbors and go, hey, Bob represents our viewpoints, let's elect him, because we all don't have the time to go. So then you become a precinct captain, then there are district captains over that, and then in that process, it's very complicated. But you can run to be a delegate for the county assembly or the state assembly or a congressional assembly. And what that means is it's kind of like a funnel. And you go from, I don't know how many thousand precinct captains to district captains, to then what most people care about is a state assembly. You know, you get a ballot in the primary and you say, How did these two or three candidates get on my Republican ballot or my Democrat ballot? And that's usually when people pay attention. But what happened before that is there was a state assembly, if it was a statewide race or a congressional assembly, if it's a congressional race, and a handful of people chose those candidates. Um, to make it even more complicated, if we want to go there, in Colorado, now take it from the candidate perspective. So I ran for Congress, and before that I ran for the U.S. Senate. And I have done this process two different ways. The first time I went just through the caucus, the assembly route. And to get on the ballot in Colorado, a candidate can do one of three things. You can either go just through the caucus, the assembly route, meaning if I went to the state assembly, let's say when I was running for the U.S. Senate for the nomination for the Republican Party, I would have to get 30% of the votes at that state assembly. Um I got 38 votes short, who's counting? I did, we did numerous times.

SPEAKER_01 4:37

But it turns out everybody counts in those situations.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

Yes, they do. Yes, they do. So I tried it that way. Um there is another way to get on the ballot, which is called the hybrid route, which means you can also get petitions. The amount of petitions you have to get uh depends on the race. Like if it's a statewide race, you need to get a thousand signatures valid for your party.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

Petition means signatures. You've got to go out and get that many people to sign a piece of paper saying, yes, this person should be the candidate for this office.

SPEAKER_00 5:06

100%. Those are the people you see in front of King Supers or wherever you go, and they're asking you, will you sign this petition if you're a registered Republican or a registered Democrat for this person to get on the ballot? And it depends on the size of the race. And you can go straight petitions, means you have to have a certain threshold of petitions. You can do a third way, which is called the hybrid, where you get the petitions, but then you only need 10% at the assembly versus 30%. So it's very complicated. And that's one of the issues with it. Now, I did a different route the second time when I when I went through uh to run for Congress, and we just did the petition route. And I want to debunk a couple of things here. There are people that are very vested in the caucus system. I was a fan of it when I first ran for office. I thought this is grassroots, this is, you know, getting your neighbors to vote for you and persuading them. But what I began to realize was, first of all, I couldn't do petitions at that point in time because we would need to reform our petition system. To get petitions statewide for a statewide race, I was quoting like half a million dollars. I mean, it can be prohibitive. I am not independently wealthy, which is also why it was probably somewhat insanity to run. I just wanted to serve. But then the second time, I did just petitions. And there are arguments about which is more grassroots, which is more representative, which is easier, which is pay for play. And I just want to set the record straight on this. People can say that getting petitions is somehow just paying to get on the ballot. That may be the case for some people, but if you are not independently wealthy, like most candidates are not, that means you have spent hours on the phone asking well-meaning fellow citizens to give up of their treasure to donate to your campaign, persuading them on the phone why your policies are the right ones that represent them. Then they give you money, then you hire some uh petition gatherers, and you also have volunteers. It was harder to get on the ballot that way because I was running for the 4 CD, which has 21 counties. We got petitions in every single county by choice. We had volunteers, we and we had to get more than would have been at the assembly. So that's an overview. Now we can break it down a little bit more and talk about you know some of the challenges and some of the strengths.

SPEAKER_01 7:27

Yeah, and I think, you know, the big kind of takeaway is that a lot of folks just don't realize that this stuff is going on, right? So by the time a candidate shows up on your ballot, which shows up in the mail in mid-October, and then probably you put it off until the last possible minute, and people are beating on your door to turn in your ballot and you're deciding what you're doing. Before any of those people got on there, they had to go one of these three routes. And, you know, like almost everything in politics and elections, there are there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Right. There are things that work and things that don't work. And the caucus system in particular has been criticized pretty heavily for allowing folks to have an outsized voice and an outsized role in the process that maybe they wouldn't have otherwise, especially if we were just dealing with one of these other routes or a pure primary system. And on the other hand, you have people that say, as you said earlier, that the original conceptual framework for this was that it's grassroots, it's neighborhood level, this is how it's supposed to work. But the reality is not a lot of people do caucuses, right? Very few people know what the heck a caucus is, and even fewer are actually showing up and doing it. And that's led to a really interesting series of arguments, and I might even say fights about do we want to still do that? And if not, what would we do instead? Maybe you could walk us through some of the arguments around the caucus system and how we might start to address those.

SPEAKER_00 8:53

Yeah, and I want to start by saying there's a lot of really great Colorado citizens that have given so much time to the caucuses, to the assemblies, to district meetings, and my hat is off to them because I mean we do need more people to get involved. But the question is when the caucus started long, long ago, things were very different. First of all, what it takes now, it's no longer meeting in the neighborhood, so you're not talking to your neighbors. It's at municipal buildings, it's at fairgrounds, it's at places like that. So you've removed that element already. The number of meetings it takes is pretty exorbitant. In a in an economy where you need two incomes pretty much to raise a family anymore, it's very hard for many people to get involved. Some people argue, well, you know, get over it, it's your civic duty. Other people are like, yeah, does it really fit anymore? By the way, you know, the Democrats many times do it online through Zoom. That has its own issues because how do you vote? And there's all kinds of problems, right? So there are arguments for and against it. But here's what I would say that has changed most drastically in Colorado. We now have 51% unaffiliated voters. Um, that and and 86% of them choose to be unaffiliated because they think the parties don't represent them. So when you're talking about this caucus system, only 24% approximately of Colorado voters are Democrat. 22% are Republicans. How many of that 22% actually go through the caucus system and are at the assembly? It's less than probably by some estimations, half of a percent. So at the end of the day, you have half a percent of 22% of Coloradans choosing the Republican candidate. Um it's the numbers are hard to absorb, but put it another way. There's 900,000 approximately registered Republicans. Out of those, the caucus system has been shrinking. Not too many years ago, 3,500 people were at the state assembly. Uh when I ran in 2022, it was 3,000. This year it's barely over 2,000. So it's shrinking, and the representation is getting to be less and less. And I'm a representative government person. That's what our republic is based on. And what it does allow, and the Democrats are seeing this on their side, by the way, also, those who sometimes tend to be more focused and able to give the time or they make the time because this is their number one cause, tend to be more homogeneous in their viewpoints. And it does not as much represent necessarily the full swath of who are Republicans or the full swath of those who are actually Democrats. And I think that is a huge challenge with it. As far as how else to do it, I mean, the reality is only a handful of states do a caucus, the vast majority do a straight primary, which would be probably reforming our petition system so it's not quite so expensive to get on. So you don't just have, you know, millionaires running for office or people with, you know, huge ties to big PACs or something like that. So that's some of it.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

Right. And I I think we're sort of in this phase in Colorado, definitely, but also in the U.S. generally, where there is uh a strong level of distrust and misalignment with the political parties, right? So there's already a question about uh does the Republican Party represent me? Do the Democrats represent me? Uh and a lot of folks have just said, no, I hate you all and I want to be an independent, right? And that's understandable for a lot of reasons that we don't we can't talk about in the U.S.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

two-party system will be the death of the Republic. That is what George Washington said. Trevor Burrus, Jr. It's probably true.

SPEAKER_01 12:24

And so and it's flipped many times. We can get into that at another point.

SPEAKER_00 12:27

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

In the meantime, I think it's important to really sort of break down what you said there, which is that you have all of these people, 51% of the state, of the voters in the state, are now unaffiliated. They're not Republicans, they're not Democrats. But there aren't really there are some exceptions to this, but not many, any serious candidates running as independents on the ballot. So all of these unaffiliated people have left the parties because they believe that the parties don't represent them or their interests. But they still have to vote for somebody from one of the two parties and they're really not involved in the process for selecting who those people are, which is part of why you get to these elections and people look at their ballot and they sort of go, huh, I'm not excited about anybody, because they didn't really have much of a voice or a say in doing it. So from the very beginning, we're selecting candidates who probably are not reflective of what this massive swath and majority of voters are. But then they're stuck voting for them anyway. And that has some pretty serious ramifications for how we govern.

SPEAKER_00 13:32

It it absolutely does. And and when I ran for Congress in CD4, we had a 25% voter turnout for the primary. And I thought, my gosh, that is incredibly low, but actually that's fairly average. Now, what I would say is anyone who wants to save the the caucus system, here would be the goal. How do I educate people and encourage them to get involved? There's not a lot of efforts going on, by the way, on either party to actually get more people involved. And why is that? It's human nature actually to want to oftentimes contract to the people who agree with you. And I'm gonna give you a personal story, and this is was just our own experiment. In our own neighborhood, my husband and our daughter at 18 years old ended up being our precinct captains because nobody else showed up. Nobody. This year we weren't able to be there because um we were out of town uh traveling. And so afterwards, when we realized nobody showed up, and our own neighborhood, our precinct, was not represented. We're like, okay, we're pretty busy, you know, but we'll volunteer to do it. We put our names in to be voted on, to volunteer. It wasn't even a competition between us or anyone else. And the people who made that decision chose to vote us out because we didn't agree with them on 100% of the issues. So, well, what's the problem with that? Then you're actually saying in principle, I'd rather have less representation. I'd rather have an entire neighborhood precinct not represented than have someone in the system that maybe I agree with as 95% of things, but I don't agree with 100%. So I'd rather have them out. So this is the problem. There are people that love the caucus system, but I would challenge them, if you love it, then why not make the point then of your local party, your local district to encourage more people to get involved, not push people out. This is how we've gone from 3,500 to 3,000 to 2,000 at the state assembly. And then what happens, like you're saying, is people then see the candidates come along, and yeah, to a certain extent, we they should get more involved. But I'll tell you how you don't get them involved. Don't say either you join our party or we're shutting you out.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

Right. Because if I'm an unaffiliated voter and I roll into the caucus, what what I mean, I get told to go home.

SPEAKER_00 15:41

Yeah, you can't, you can't do that.

SPEAKER_01 15:42

I can't do that.

SPEAKER_00 15:43

So so is the here's here's the bigger question too, Ross. What is actually the job of the parties? If you look at it from my perspective growing up, before I knew what the caucus system was, and I grew up here on Lowry Air Force Base, had no idea what it was. I always thought the goal of the parties was to educate the local citizens on why they should join the party and why they should vote for candidates that stand on their platform. If that's it, then there's not enough effort being put on that, and all the rest of the effort is being put on infighting, attacking, pushing people out instead of inviting them in. So that's my challenge to people who like the caucus system. That's not where the focus from my experience has been in the party. It's this is why this person can't be in it because they don't agree with this on X, Y, or Z. When you agree on 95% of things. And Republicans, and I'm I've been voting lifelong as a Republican, used to be about the big tent. We don't have to agree on everything because that's groupthink. That's George Orwell's groupthink. We just have to agree on the constitutional principles, you know, limited government, greater freedom, you know, parental rights, these sorts of different things. Um, but this is why it's shrinking instead of growing. And it really comes down to a fundamental question: is this representational?

SPEAKER_01 16:57

Aaron Powell Right. And the truth is, if the parties aren't representing the voters, then it it becomes a really interesting sort of large-scale question of what are we doing, right? We're operating in a representative republic. We would assume that the parties are there to represent the people who are within the republic, and they may not be, right? And they're some of what you're describing about the infighting and and just the general nastiness of this is part of why I don't go to like when I said what would happen if we're going to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_00 17:27

I didn't see you at our caucus right now.

SPEAKER_01 17:28

I would rather saw off my own legs with a butter knife than do that.

SPEAKER_00 17:31

And so because I'll watch that.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

Because it's hideous, it's really ugly. And there's a reason for that, right? So when you remove all the people in the middle, right, all the folks who have uh varied views and who are sort of able to moderate this to some extent, you are left with the hardest core, die hard people who are gonna show up and do this stuff. And that is, by nature, gonna generate really ugly purity testing and philosophical arguments and a bunch of other stuff. Now, does that mean every single person involved in the system is that way? No, it doesn't, right? We can't generalize. But we can say that people are people everywhere you go. And if you concentrate the hardest side of either end of the political spectrum into very small groups of people, you are unlikely to have anything that looks like measured, thoughtful discourse. And then we all have to live with it on the backside. So if we look at that and we're like, okay, well, maybe this isn't doing what we would like it to do in a representative system of government. How do we fix it?

SPEAKER_00 18:29

Yeah. Well, here's what I would say. I think, I think this is the conversation of our day. I think, you know, the Democrat side, they're realizing that when you look at it, Hickenlooper Bennett did not go through their assembly system. Dania Deget, who's been in office for um, I think it's 30 years now, um, almost didn't make it out of her assembly. And there was somebody that was, you know, from the far left flank who figured out how to organize and work the system. So I think this is the conversation. And I would simply say, if you like the caucus system, then it's time to turn around and say, then we need to persuade other people to keep it. We need to invite more people to be involved, because right now that's not what's happening. It's it is contracting completely. So the other option that a lot of people are talking about, is it time to move to a straight primary ballot? You know, there was a petition last uh ballot initiative last year that didn't go through because it involved ranked choice voting, and that's very, very, very confusing. We would need, you know, five times the show just to unpack all of this. Um, but that's what all most of the other states actually do. So this is the this is the moment that we're at. And I think the fallacy and the argument, there is also we didn't even talk about closing the primary. There's a movement only on one side because there's a ballot initiative 108 in 2016 that has a semi-open primary, which means unaffiliated voters can vote either for the Democrat or the Republican.

SPEAKER_01 19:53

But they have to pick one. They have to pick one.

SPEAKER_00 19:55

You can't do both, yeah. Unless you're dead and then you can vote seven times, right? I don't know if that's a that's a Chicago joke as much as anything. But anyway, um, that's what it did because the vast majority are there. Now, some people say, oh my gosh, why should we let unaffiliated voters vote in our primary? I would ask a bigger question. Why are you not persuading unaffiliated voters that you're the party that best represents them? Because if we can't persuade an unaffiliated voter, then how are we ever going to win a general election? We meaning either side of the aisle, how can you ever win a general election when it's 51%? And let's say you turn out every Republican voter, that's 22%. 22%. And you're already shutting out 900,000 of them, 90 uh 99.5% in the decision making on the uh the candidates. Um, so I think that this is where we are at. This is what people are really talking about now. Does it work anymore? Does it represent everyone? Does it work in Colorado, which is, you know, you look at ballotpedia maps, and you have red states, blue states, and then you have yellow states now, not purple states. Purple states are where you have like almost a 50-50 split between the two swing states. Colorado is considered to be a yellow state now because we're over 50% unaffiliated voters. And when you you see some polls, there was a great Let Colorado vote poll, a great Magellan poll. And in Colorado, the vast majority, 86% of unaffiliated, choose to be, as they call themselves, independent. They don't like either party, they don't think it represents them, they think both are extreme, but they tend to break for the Democrats because really it's the Republican Party that is fighting so much. And if you're an independent, do you really want to go into a tent where everybody's throwing punches at each other? It's hardly a welcoming environment. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 21:44

Well, the optical problems of the Republican Party are we're going to need a longer show for that.

SPEAKER_00 21:48

Yeah. That's for sure.

SPEAKER_01 21:49

So let's say we look at this. Because the other side of that is that you know, if the primaries were not semi open, then none of those unaffiliated folks would have any say at all in who's actually on the They just they whoever's on there is on there and they just get to pick from what they have. So if we were to go to just a straight primary, which as you said is the norm, right? And I think in Colorado sometimes people get stuck in this because we believe that the way that we do it is best. And I'm sure every state feels that way to some extent, but like this is actually the normal way to do it that most states do. How does that work? What would be different and how would it open the doors?

SPEAKER_00 22:24

Well, I'll say two things. First of all, I think the reason why it's staying this way is because there's a small group of people that are very vested in it, because it gives them a large say in what happens in our states. And then the vast majority of the rest have no idea we're even having a caucus system. They just get the ballot and there it is and they don't even pay attention. So that's why this is which is terrifying.

SPEAKER_01 22:44

So yeah.

unknown 22:45

I know.

SPEAKER_00 22:45

I am so I've done radio for radio for so many years. Please, please know what you're doing when you vote. But the the big danger is this on the Republican side, there is a movement to opt out, saying it's unconstitutional. Recently a judge said the threshold for a party to uh to opt out was 75% of their central committee. They said that's unconstitutional, going to go lower than that. But the problem is that doesn't mean both sides will opt out. What would happen if the Cara GOP opts out unilaterally of the caucus system? Of the caucus system, of the assembly system, and opts out actually of the open primary, meaning that they will now only choose the the GOP, choose their candidates through the assembly, no petitioning on. And when it comes to the primary, nobody gets a ballot. Not even the other 900,000 Republicans. The independents, unaffilials will not get a ballot. The only ballot they will get will be Democrat. That's it. Now, if this is going to change, you want to close the open primary, semi-open primary, then you've got to do it on both sides. Otherwise, it's really, it is really the existential threat to one side that's already becoming so minimalized. But the other way to do it is if is if there is a movement of the citizens to get rid of the caucus system, it could either be done in the legislature, it could be done as a ballot initiative. It would simply go to either um it would go basically towards someone petitioning to get on the ballot, on the primary ballot.

SPEAKER_01 24:15

Via signatures.

SPEAKER_00 24:16

Via signatures. That's what the petition means. Get enough signatures. I would argue that if you do that, you got to then reduce the number. So we don't just have multi-gazillionaires running for office who really don't know how the rest of us live, you know. But that's all it would be. So what would happen is then you'd get your ballot and it'd be here's the Republican candidates, uh, the nominees who worked in a different way. And I want to say that again to anybody who thinks one is grassroots and one isn't. I worked harder with our volunteers to get signatures in 21 counties for getting on the ballot through the petition, the signature method. So that's what would have to happen. It'd either be a ballot initiative or it would go at the legislature. I think that's highly unlikely because the legislature is really, really not moving forward on anything that's real necessary reform. But that's how it would happen. Then we would just be like other states.

SPEAKER_01 25:05

Yeah. And so you would just skip the craziness.

SPEAKER_00 25:08

There'd be no more caucus system.

SPEAKER_01 25:09

We would just you go out, you get your signatures. Maybe it's 500, maybe it's a thousand, whatever the number is. And then they're on the ballot. Yeah. And everybody gets to go through the primary process.

SPEAKER_00 25:18

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And here's the other thing that I would argue a lot of people who've been so vested in the caucus system are like, well, well, gosh, what does the party do then? What do we actually do? I would argue it frees the party to do what it should be doing along, persuading people.

SPEAKER_01 25:32

Including the unaffiliated voters.

SPEAKER_00 25:34

Exactly, including your neighbor. And by the way, when you look at those unaffiliated voters, I know firsthand, having talked to people when we were offering to be our precinct leaders, the vast majority of conservative neighbors that we have are all independent, even though they vote Republican. But the party would free up, and by the way, it would solve a lot of fiscal issues. Doing the caucus system is really expensive. The Republican Party was, I don't know the exact numbers, but a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt, only had $46,000 approximately dollars on hand in January, and they still have to put on a huge assembly. That takes so much time and manpower. Imagine if you channel all of that great energy of people who spend all of it, you know, you know, trying to purify and, you know, purge their party and uh and and then spend all that time in this system. What if that got unleashed into talking to your neighbors, persuading them to either join the party or vote for conservative candidates? We would just go back to a system or we would enter into a system that most of the other states do.

SPEAKER_01 26:36

Yeah, I mean that sounds terrifying. It sounds like it sounds like democracy. We can't we wouldn't want to do anything.

SPEAKER_00 26:41

Representative democracy, even better.

SPEAKER_01 26:43

Absolutely. We can't have that. We won't go too far into that. There's a lot to be said about the parties. I have strong opinions. Deborah might too. We'll get into the party structure and sort of the drama around that at some other point. But for now, if somebody wanted to learn more about the caucus system or about the primary system, or just how the heck all of these states do this stuff, where would they start?

SPEAKER_00 27:06

Oh, that's a great question. Because man, I learned it on the go. I learned it as a candidate. I mean, you can check it with your local party. You know, your your county party usually handles this process.

SPEAKER_01 27:17

Um They'll give you completely unbiased information, definitely.

SPEAKER_00 27:21

So that's yeah, that's a whole nother conversation. But they could go to the party, the secretary of state has it. Um it's it's it is complicated. Um, and I think that is part of the problem. Um, and like I said, if somebody's an advocate, then how about a public service campaign to explain how someone does it? Because most people have a hard time finding out. Um, and here's the last thing I would say is, you know, as far as the two parties, which is a bigger, a bigger conversation. I've always said I'm a constitutional conservative. And I think that is the best way. And that's what the Republican Party has been about previously, which is pulling back government so people can disagree and all this other stuff in the public square. That's what we've got to get back to no matter what.

SPEAKER_01 28:05

That's right. Well, look it up. There are a lot of ways to start here. You can Google it, you can go to the Secretary of State. There are a lot of different places where you can start. This is not a full-blown movement yet to change it, but it is a conversation, and it's going to be a big conversation in the coming years in Colorado. So if you're not paying attention to it, now is the time to start paying attention to it. Deborah, thanks for joining us today. This is really interesting. I'm sorry we didn't have more time to talk about it.

SPEAKER_00 28:27

That's okay. We could fail four hours, but you know, I'll be back.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

Or maybe longer. But thank you. So thank you very much. Please do look into this. It's a huge issue. That'll do it for today's episode of the straight up 30. We'll see you back here next week for another policy conversation about it.