06-27-24 Interview - Kelly Maher - It's Time to Fight For the Soul of the Colorado GOP

IT'S TIME TO FIGHT FOR THE SOUL OF THE COLORADO GOP And I've got Kelly Maher on to talk about the earth shaking results from this primary election and what it means for the current "leadership" of the party. Find out more about her PAC organization fighting to bring sanity back to politics here and her 504 here.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
She's a chief wackadoodle slayers. Iwould have business cards printed to say,
chief wack of doodle slayer is whatI'm gonna do. Because Kelly Maher a
long time politico, I tried toget out and raise goats and they pulled
her back in. I couldn't helpit. I couldn't help it. But
remember when I came on the showthe first time and I was like,
I'm back, Many, I'm back. I politics is the Hotel California,

(00:22):
right like he was radio. It'svery similar. Were like people will try
and leave radio and they're gone forlike a year, and they're like,
I could do it. I know, it's really problematic. And then Dave
Williams decided to run for Congress anddecided to cannibalize the party and decided to
just try to burn everything. Well, I mean, look, he did
burn many things to the ground.Yeah. Unfortunately, as part of that,

(00:47):
he also burned his congressional aspirations tothe ground. So thank you Dave
Williams for being so bad at thisthat you lost two to one. Let
me ask you this question, andthis is a loaded question based on those
people have said to me and thingsthat I believe you started a super pack
and a five O one four Ccalled restoring sanity, restoring standards. I

(01:10):
keep calling it sanity. I wantit, I know. Yeah, so
restoring standards specifically to go after peopleon the political fringes, and this is
Republicans and Democrats and have been veryclear. Although I have to say,
I want to say a big thankyou and a big round of applause to

(01:30):
democratic and independent voters who voted inthe Democratic primary who unseated Tim Hernandez and
Elizabeth Epps. I'm talking about takingout the trash. That was exactly thank
you. Tuesday was a very badnight for anti semites and homophobes. Yes,
you know what, Yeah, that'sgreat in my book. And I
want to be careful though, becausepeople keep talking about like, oh,

(01:51):
it was such a great night formoderates and we took out like the the
super progressives and the super conservatives,Like it's not progressive to be anti semitic,
right, and it is not conservativeto basically steal money from the Colorado
Republican Party for your own congressional aspirations, right, Like neither of those things
are in fact indicative of either progressivismor conservatism, and what this was about

(02:17):
to me was like a night whereit was the good faith, bad faith,
good people, bad people, andgood people largely won. I mean,
Jeff Crank is very conservative. I'veknown him for twenty years, hugely
conservative guy. He's a hunting buddyof mine, right like Christian conservative,

(02:38):
consistent, free market supported Donald Trumptwice, supports Donald Trump now despite the
fact that he endorsed his opponent whothen failed. Yes, Jeff was on
the show earlier today, and ifyou missed that interview, I'd urge you
to go back and listen to itbecause there was a lot of happy Warrior
in the conversation that I had withJeff. And that leads me to my

(03:00):
next question, which is the ColoradoRepublican Party is in a just disaster mode
right now. We have a petitionsigned by enough members of the Central Committee
to ask for a recall election againstDave Williams's chairperson. It's my understanding that
the by laws say that that meetinghas to happen in thirty days, but

(03:20):
Hope Shufflman is already indicated they wouldjust add it to an already scheduled meeting
in August. Yeah, and soweird by the way that after that shellacking
Tuesday night, she sent out acall at seven fifteen am on Wednesday morning
just being like, oh hey,we have a meeting. Oh hey,
by the way, no additional things. Well here's here's some by laws changes,

(03:43):
and no additional things will be added. The answer to that is no,
that's not how it works, right, They need to follow their own
bylaws period. But by laws havejust been an impediment to the Williams administration
in the GOP, and any bylawsthat he doesn't like he just ignores,
right, I mean, timately,what needs to happen moving forward is and

(04:04):
this is this is just my opinion, right, everybody's got their own opinions.
Is Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd,Lauren Bobert, Gabe Evans like those
four need to chat and talk aboutwho they think they would be comfortable with
in the chairman in the leadership position, because let's remind people, the role

(04:25):
of the Colorado GOP chairman is toraise money and get Republicans elected. That's
essentially that's that. And then Ialso think that the uh Paullendine and Rose
Puglici may be part of that conversation, and they're the leadership of the legislature
right now exactly, and and soit's time for and those and that,

(04:46):
by the way, is a groupof people who are are a lot they
they represent a lot of different partsof the Republican Party, you know,
and they and I think that theif they can come together and say,
here's a person which we can getbehind, here's a person who can lead
us moving forward. I think it'ssomebody that needs to understand the proper role

(05:09):
of the party, which is thestatutory nomination of candidates and not embarrassing us
on media. Somebody who can getgood faith back from the donors whose money
has essentially just been wasted and orI would argue, stolen for his own
political aspirations. And that needs tohappen almost immediately. And by the way,

(05:33):
in my mind, everyone who wascomplicit or apologetic for what was happening
and watched what was happening need toalso go. So I don't disagree with
anything you just said, but butand I'm going to play I'm going to
play a little post civil war orgaming here. Right. So we've been

(05:55):
talking a lot about the fact thatDavid Williams has run a lot of people
out of the party, correct andby design, right if he ran up
against him. And we saw theway he's responded to some of the legitimate
attacks on him by essentially saying,oh, oh you like pride, oh
you like gay people. I mean, it's been really juvenile and just pretending
it's not happening. Don't forget MarshallZellinger showed up at the Capitol Club and

(06:18):
said, Hey, what about thefact that the State Party is spending money
on your race? And he waslike, that's not happening. And then
that's a no. And then thenext day the State Party puts out the
FEC thing saying that they spent nineteenthousand dollars. By the way, the
limit is twenty And I will tellyou, as somebody who has been in
politics for a really long time,five mailers for yourself a little bit more

(06:42):
than twenty k. Yeah, oneround of mailers can be that much more
than twenty k. What I putI did one round restoring Sanderds did one
round of mail and it was thirtyfive thirty six. So you think he's
fudging the numbers? Oh, Icannot wait to get a friend sick accountant
in there to see exactly what's Ithink. I think we add how do

(07:04):
you? And this is the thingI want to know because there are there
are good people who have been,in my mind, swept into the Trump
culture personality at a level that madethem blindly support Dave Williams because he said
let's go Brandon and presented himself asthis trumpy guy. And we need those

(07:26):
people. We need them to comeback into the fold one hundred percent.
We need people who are moderate tostep up in the party and say we
want to make sure our voices arebeing heard too well. And that's the
thing, Mandy, is that II think that there are a lot of
trumpy people of good faith. Iknow there are tons of them, and
I think that we need to notjust embrace them, but we need to

(07:47):
have uh we like that's that's whoneeds to be turned out if you're a
Republican, right And for me,with restoring standards, what I'm interested in
right now is elevating all of politics. Right. I'm interested in like like
there has been not to get toonerdy, but I'm going to get nerdy
for a second. Like you know, game theory right. Yeah, you've
heard of the prisoner's dilemma, right, right, which is and I think

(08:11):
actually many of the forces behind theprisoner's dilemma can be extrapolated into the various
parties UH strategies to depress the otherparty in order to prisoner's dilemma. So
people that don't undertand what it is, we can bring them along. Okay,
So the one of the most ifyou study game theory, one of

(08:31):
the most basic UH games, iscalled the prisoner's dilemma, which is,
you and your friend are arrested.Right, you and I get arrested,
we have one hundred percent Actually,yeah, this is this is something that's
going to happen in the future.So we are gaming this out in this
moment. Right. So let's saythat the cops come into you. If

(08:54):
you rap me out and I don'tget ratted out, you get off and
I get all of the jail time. Right. If they come into me
and I rat you out, butyou don't rat me out, you get
all the jail time. If neitherof us rats each other out, neither
of us go to jail. Andif we both rat each other out,

(09:18):
then we both go to jail.Right, And so I look at the
parties similarly, right, Like Democratsare looking at Republicans and they're like,
let's help nominate the worst candidates,and they spent big on Ron Hanks,
they did. And Republicans in thepast have looked at, for instance,

(09:39):
a Hernandez or an EPs and thought, we could that's just we could beat
them, but like they are sobad for the Democrat brand that we should
help elevate them out of their primarybecause, as we've talked about many times
on the show, both parties getpainted with the worst actors of their respective

(10:01):
groups, right, And so froma Republican perspective or from a Democrat perspective,
it's actually better to have worse peopleon the other side. And my
hope is that what we saw inthat congressional race with Ron Hanks and Jeff
Hurd that like, we are finallygetting to a point where we're looking at
these incentives, and the incentive thatwas sent to Democrats hopefully is stop trying

(10:24):
to nominate the weakest candidate, becausesometimes you accidentally do and then they get
into office, or it blows backon you and everybody finds out that you're
trying to game the system and thenRon Hanks loses. Do you know who
else lost big in this last electioncycle that I'm super happy about Gun Owners
of America and philosophically I agree withwhat they are doing. But I don't

(10:48):
like Dudley Brown. I don't likehim. I like Taylor Rhodes, who
is running Rocky Mountain gun Owners now. But Taylor said, We're not meddling
in elections anymore because I'm not gonnasend my listeners to donate money to them
if they're going to use it inthe attack ads that they used it,
they got their asses kicked this time. I mean, I mean, and
this is the thing I am noticingmore and more that what we saw on

(11:11):
Tuesday was people voter saying, peopleof bad faith, yeah, you are
not allowed to do this anymore.And I think that is so good and
I feel so great about it becauseI think that that's something from which we
can build well and that this islike this this election in Colorado, it
did feel and I realized that insome of the especially democratic primaries, it

(11:35):
was it was you have two progressivesand then but one was, you know,
way harder to the left, soyou still have a progressive, you
know, representative or whatever. Andif you depending on where you live,
that's going to be your lot inlife. Just like if there's a progressive
living in Douglas County, sorry aboutyour luck, right, you know you.
But across the board people did seemto go. You know what,

(11:56):
I want someone who seems not reasonablereasonable like they're gonna go and they're gonna
worry about solving problems instead of droppingfire bombs or building a brand or any
of those things that are unseerious andand sort of the way our primary system
incentivizes that kind of behavior is oneof the reasons that I am looking at

(12:18):
ranked choice voding and going kind ofinteresting. This primary more than any that
would have been a really interesting situationbecause we had so many uncontested primaries.
Yeah, what do you think aboutthat? That we just we have so
many districts where either only one personsteps up to run or the other party
just decides not to run anyone.I just feel like that is a huge

(12:43):
problem that we're not talking about.Well, and you know, fundamentally there
is and this is this is thething that we all keep talking about,
right is there's these organizations several inColorado that are looking at the rules of
the game, right, and whetherthey're talking about how we do the business
of the nomination of candidates, howwe do the business of voting, how

(13:03):
we do all of these different thingsand that and what I saw ultimately was
like a real big vacuum where wehave to look at the rules of the
game, but we also have tolook at the players, right. We
have to start to put standards aroundwhat is good faith, what is bad
faith, What is a good person, what is a bad person? And

(13:24):
so I would argue that for instance, Jeff Crank and Dave Williams, that
was just clear and obvious, right, right, Like that was an obvious
Here's a dude of bad faith inDave Williams. He is a self dealer,
he is taking the resources of theparty. And here is Jeff Crank,

(13:46):
happy warrior, wants to build understandswhy he's a conservative and is just
he's just a great guy. Andthe juxtaposition couldn't have been clearer. But
for all of Colorado's regardless of yourparty, but especially unaffiliated voters, we

(14:07):
should now be in a situation wherewe are demanding both parties get better,
right, and so that's one ofthe criticisms. I'm a Republican, and
so when I talk to people aboutkind of what the vision is of restoring
standards, what I want to dowith it, they say, oh,
well, won't that make Democrats better? Yes, it will. It will
make Democrats better. It will alsomake Republicans better. And my case to

(14:31):
Democrats right now, especially just likesemi normy Democrats who are super concerned about
what's happening on their side of theaisle, like they are better served to
have a Republican party that is aviable, that is good, that understands
the underpinnings of our philosophy. Yep, and that is gravitational towards people,

(14:56):
because what we have right now isjust like widespread and deep disgusted with the
entire political spectrum and everyone associated withit. And that is and that's why
you know, both political parties they'renot exactly blazon a trail bringing new people
to the party, so they're bothlosing party membership to the independent or unaffiliated

(15:20):
part of the thing. It hasto be concerning. Yes, it's deeply
concerning. And that is why,by the way, I think that that
a vibrant and a viable Republican partyis critical. And that's that's why I'm
looking at that I want. Iwant a Republican party that is successful.
I also want a Democrat party thatis successful, because if we continue to

(15:43):
do this thing where we are winningto the detriment of others, right like
like we are, we are winningand by depressing the other side rather than
we're looking for a total annihilation victoryinstead of a victory where we get some
of what we want, they getsome of what we want, and it's
good for the state. Yes,And you know, it's funny because I

(16:04):
now look back at the last twentyyears I've had in politics and then and
then why I got so disgusted withit, tried to walk away and go
hide with my goats, and nowwhy I'm bad? Right, It's it's
such an interesting place to be becauseI loved politics for so long, and
I got to the point that Igot ashamed of telling people what I did,
Like I got embarrassed. I wouldtake my children to school and the

(16:26):
other moms would ask me what Idid, and I was like, oh,
you know, may coats, maybeI actually talking about goats at dinner
parties is so much more fun thantalking about politics. But I will say
so, I'm taking a fundraising masterclass. I'm a terrible fundraiser. I get
like, I get creeped out askingpeople for money, which is why I'm

(16:48):
trying. I'm in this like rightseason of trying new things and trying to
fill in the gaps and things thatI have shortcomings. And so I'm taking
this fundraising master class form my friendAngela. She's an amazing fundraiser. She
fundraises for the National Western Right.Like she's unbelievable. And somehow I snuck
my way into this class of likereally good, top level Denver fundraisers and

(17:11):
I watched it and I'm like,Hi, my name is Kelly. I
am learning how to fundraise because Istarted an organization to get crazy people out
of politics. And I watched allof these faces and they were like,
well you know what, and theywe're going to do of the day.
You're staying for of the day,right, Okay, sure, yeah,
yeah, She's like she'll be fine. Yeah. The point of it is

(17:33):
is nobody wants to be associated withthe worst elements. Nobody wants to say
I'm a Democrat, and people thinkof AOC, and nobody wants to say
I'm a Republican and people think ofMTG right right, So getting the crazy
out of politics is a great idea. And I put a link to Kelly's
super pac and her five oh onefour if you want to just check them
out, figure out a way tosupport them, or at least sign up

(17:55):
for Do you have a newsletter?You have anything, I'll make one okay
down new letter right now,