Hey, Colorado Democrats! All the fun you’ve had watching Republican dysfunction in Colorado for the last 20 years was just a preview of what is about to happen to you.

The Colorado Republican Party no longer exists as a competitive institution.

Republicans did it to themselves. They built a culture around purity tests, with no curiosity about winning elections. Anyone suggesting an appeal to unaffiliated voters was identified as a Republican in Name Only and bounced from the building.

Deep-pocketed conservatives kept funding candidates while neglecting the boring, unsatisfying work of winning future elections: community organizing, door knocking, recruitment and ballot chasing. They wanted crops without planting seeds.

The result? Colorado’s political press will document every embarrassment of Victor Marx’s doomed campaign, following his clown car while letting the left’s armored truck drive off with the state.

A 29-year-old socialist defeated Rep. Diana DeGette. She defended calls for eliminating Israel and declined to call the Boulder firebombing of pro-Israel demonstrators antisemitic.

That deserves more scrutiny than whatever Marx said to his dog between breakfast and Kyle Clark’s deadline.

So does the growing socialist faction in our legislature. So does Phil Weiser, a progressive law professor and activist. Nobody makes government simpler than law professors.

When Republicans tried putting the Ten Commandments in classrooms, Colorado’s media understood people wielding government power deserved scrutiny.

Now Democrats have elevated misgendering to legal discrimination. School employees must use a student’s chosen name regardless of parental approval, while some policies permit social transition without informing parents.

Moses entering a classroom is a constitutional crisis, but keeping parents in the dark is mandatory compassion.

The coming Democratic Party meltdown? Quite simply, too many factions inside the party are at odds with their own stated goals.

Consider the gay-rights community. It became a juggernaut winning marriage equality. But, like the French Revolution, its victory produced a movement out of control.

The LGB part of the LGBT team is at odds with the T part because they want fundamentally different things.

The LGB part wants to make it easier for gay kids to come out as — now get this — gay.

The T faction has built an apparatus to tell gay kids they’re the wrong gender — eerily similar to what anti-gay bigots once told homosexuals.

So kids need social transition, puberty blockers, hormones and lopping off healthy body parts.

A growing number of gays and lesbians privately fear this system can take children who might become comfortable gay adults and place them on a path of lifelong medicalization. Privately is the operative word. Nothing says “pride” quite like being terrified to say what you believe.

The old Christian-right message was that a gay child should become straight. The new Democrat message is a gay child should change bodies.

Different pitch. Same refusal to let a gay child simply be gay.

Today’s Democrat party is anti-gay.

Hey, Colorado Democrats! All the fun you’ve had watching Republican dysfunction in Colorado for the last 20 years was just a preview of what is about to happen to you.

The Colorado Republican Party no longer exists as a competitive institution.

Republicans did it to themselves. They built a culture around purity tests, with no curiosity about winning elections. Anyone suggesting an appeal to unaffiliated voters was identified as a Republican in Name Only and bounced from the building.

Deep-pocketed conservatives kept funding candidates while neglecting the boring, unsatisfying work of winning future elections: community organizing, door knocking, recruitment and ballot chasing. They wanted crops without planting seeds.

The result? Colorado’s political press will document every embarrassment of Victor Marx’s doomed campaign, following his clown car while letting the left’s armored truck drive off with the state.

A 29-year-old socialist defeated Rep. Diana DeGette. She defended calls for eliminating Israel and declined to call the Boulder firebombing of pro-Israel demonstrators antisemitic.

That deserves more scrutiny than whatever Marx said to his dog between breakfast and Kyle Clark’s deadline.

So does the growing socialist faction in our legislature. So does Phil Weiser, a progressive law professor and activist. Nobody makes government simpler than law professors.

When Republicans tried putting the Ten Commandments in classrooms, Colorado’s media understood people wielding government power deserved scrutiny.

Democratic congressional candidate Melat Kiros speaks after winning the Democratic nomination during a primary election night watch party at The Broadway on Tuesday, June 30, 2026, in Denver. (AP Photo/Rebecca Slezak)

Now Democrats have elevated misgendering to legal discrimination. School employees must use a student’s chosen name regardless of parental approval, while some policies permit social transition without informing parents.

Moses entering a classroom is a constitutional crisis, but keeping parents in the dark is mandatory compassion.

The coming Democratic Party meltdown? Quite simply, too many factions inside the party are at odds with their own stated goals.

Consider the gay-rights community. It became a juggernaut winning marriage equality. But, like the French Revolution, its victory produced a movement out of control.

The LGB part of the LGBT team is at odds with the T part because they want fundamentally different things.

The LGB part wants to make it easier for gay kids to come out as — now get this — gay.

The T faction has built an apparatus to tell gay kids they’re the wrong gender — eerily similar to what anti-gay bigots once told homosexuals.

So kids need social transition, puberty blockers, hormones and lopping off healthy body parts.

A growing number of gays and lesbians privately fear this system can take children who might become comfortable gay adults and place them on a path of lifelong medicalization. Privately is the operative word. Nothing says “pride” quite like being terrified to say what you believe.

The old Christian-right message was that a gay child should become straight. The new Democrat message is a gay child should change bodies.

Different pitch. Same refusal to let a gay child simply be gay.

Today’s Democrat party is anti-gay.

The same contradiction is consuming women’s equality, one of the strongest pillars of the old left. It is why the left fought so hard for Title IX, so girls would have an opportunity to play sports.

Now that same left must welcome boys onto the girls’ court and into their locker room. Again, it is working against its own stated goals.

Today’s Democrat party is anti-female.

Environmentalists face a similar split. Colorado is increasing electrical demand through electric vehicles, data centers and forced building electrification while eliminating reliable fossil-fuel generation.

Colorado’s war on natural gas is equally backward. More than 2.3 billion people still cook with wood, charcoal, crop waste or dung — you know, the stuff that is the most greenhouse-gas emitting.

If Democrats really cared about reducing emissions, they would use American natural gas to help poorer countries replace smoky fires with clean burning stoves.

“Transition Colorado to nuclear! Send our natural gas to Africa!” is a bumper sticker you’ll never see on a Boulder Subaru.

Today’s Democrat party is anti-clean energy.

Fights between Colorado Democrats over these issues along with fights over their anti-business agenda will begin to break out in a way the press cannot ignore.

None of this means Colorado Republicans will return to power anytime soon.

It means Democrats will experience the ravenous and public factionalism Republicans enjoyed for 20 years.

Just watch.

Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute in Denver and hosts “The Devil’s Advocate with Jon Caldara” on Colorado Public Television Channel 12. His column appears Sundays in Colorado Politics.

If the goal is reliable, carbon-free electricity, nuclear power is the obvious answer — no emissions and it works when the wind stops and the sun sets.