A Colorado political activist angered by Republicans abandoning Donald Trump is now being asked to resign her position as a party precinct leader.
The curious situation began after Kanda Calef Republican U.S. Senate candidate Darryl Glenn earlier this month and endorsed his rival, Libertarian Lily Tang Williams.
Calef made the switch after Glenn in the wake of a 2005 video in which the presidential nominee bragged about groping women. Glenn called Trump “disqualified” and asked him to drop out of the race. (Since then, he and is now .)
Calef is an adamant Trump supporter. “When the Republican Party elites were backing Trump, Glenn was more than willing to associate with him at events,” she said at the time in . “Now that McCain and his ilk are against the nominee, Glenn jumps on board the hypocrisy wagon.”
Calef’s position on the El Paso County Republican Party executive committee made her defection all the more stinging. But itap her low-level position as a precinct leader — the person who organizes party supporters in a neighborhood — that put her in the county party’s cross-hairs.
The party’s bylaws “expressly forbid” precinct leaders from endorsing “non-Republican candidates in an election where there is a Republican candidate running,” El Paso County GOP Chairman Jeff Hays told Calef in a recent e-mail.
Hays asked Calef to “publicly reconsider” her position or resign. If not, Hays said he would start the process of removing her from the precinct leader post.
Calef refused to recant. And she won’t resign.
“If you have fight or flight type of people I’m a fighter,” she said in an interview Monday. “I don’t go quietly.”
The idea that she needs to resign for calling out a U.S. Senate candidate for not supporting Trump strikes Calef as ironic. “I find this to be extremely amusing because Darryl Glenn is the one who said he wouldn’t support the party nominee — what a hypocrisy,” she said.
Asked whether Glenn’s return to supporting Trump will change her mind, she said no. “It’s like a game of semantics,” she said.
In an interview Tuesday, Hays said he is merely following party protocols and a committee will decide whether to remove Calef from her position.
“This is not a witch hunt,” he said.
The most recent time this occurred in El Paso County, according to party officials, was when a precinct leader refused to support Trump earlier this year and resigned his post.