Colorado Springs – A crowd of about 200 conservative activists gathered at the ProRodeo Hall of Fame on Tuesday night to hear Republican leaders decry November’s Referendums C and D. They left after two hours of occasionally rousing oratory and free steak sandwiches with Vote No T-shirts, bumper stickers, yard signs and pamphlets under their arms.
Hosted by the Washington-based advocacy group FreedomWorks, the event marked the Vote No coalition’s kickoff of its final push in the campaign over state budget policy in the Republican stronghold of El Paso County. About 1,000 absentee ballots already have been received by county elections officials here.
With absentee ballots being issued across the state and the 36 counties conducting mail-in elections allowed to start mailing those ballots out Friday, both sides of the debate over the proposed five-year suspension of tax refunds under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights are raising their intensity.
“What you have to do is you have to peak at about the time people are getting their ballots, and you have to sustain at that level through Nov. 1,” said Vote Yes campaign spokeswoman Katy Atkinson. “That’s why you’re seeing both sides up with so much television right now. It will probably reach a crescendo next week and stay for a while.”
Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute think tank and a leader of the Vote No effort, agreed.
The various small-government advocacy groups fighting the referendums are “firing on all cylinders,” he said.
For Dick Armey, the former majority leader of the U.S. House who leads FreedomWorks, now is the time for conservative grassroots activists to double their efforts against the proposal, he said in a speech to the standing-room-only crowd.
“Hard work beats Daddy’s money,” said the former lawmaker from Texas, hitting what for the Vote No campaign is an important and recurring theme – that the proponent campaign, supported by business leaders, has the advantage of considerably more funding. “I say, let’s go do it!”
Some in the room chuckled uncomfortably. Republican gubernatorial candidate Marc Holtzman has been appearing in Vote No television ads paid for, in part, by a $100,000 donation from his father, a Pennsylvania businessman.
Proponents all along have said they don’t know how much the opposition has raised because both FreedomWorks and the Independence Institute, which has aired radio spots about the referendums, are not reporting donations and expenses to the state. Attorneys for both groups do not believe they are required to.
Many activists said they already have been active in the opposition campaign, knocking on doors, donating money and telling their friends to vote down the referendums.
Though proponents say the ballot questions offer a taxpayer bail-out for an ailing state budget, doubters like these call it an ill-advised tax hike.
Staff writer Jim Hughes can be reached at 303-820-1244 or jhughes@denverpost.com.
