For Colorado Republicans, the low point came in 2022.
The party had pushed to retake the state Senate with the help of a new group, Advance Colorado, that assisted with candidate training and donated to Republican efforts. But on election night, the GOP found itself even further adrift, outnumbered by a nearly 2-to-1 ratio in the Senate and losing everywhere else, too.
The then-GOP chair, Kristi Burton Brown, said that night that the party had run a strong slate of candidates, but it hadn’t mattered. Colorado had “fundamentally shifted” away from a Republican Party that once jockeyed for power.
A year later, with a new leader at its helm, Advance ran the campaign to crush , a Gov. Jared Polis-backed proposal to curb property tax increases that also would’ve allowed the state to keep more of its revenue. The measure’s failure forced a special legislative session.
But more importantly for a battered conservative movement, it suggested that conservatives could still win in the state — maybe not as candidates, but a little farther down the ballot.
“After 2023 happened, it was like, ‘Why don’t we try to go on the offensive on this, if (Democrats) aren’t?’ ” said Michael Fields, the group’s president.
As the institutional conservative movement has withered in Colorado, the infrastructure and financial support that once powered the Republican Party and its candidates have found a new home — and new influence — in Advance Colorado, according to interviews with more than a dozen consultants, politicians and activists from across the political spectrum. And while money still backs Republican candidates and committees, Advance has proven itself as the most successful wing of the conservative movement in the state.
Led by Fields, 39, Advance’s small group of consultants and officials has mastered the ballot process with the help of a network of conservative — and largely secret — donors and like-minded groups. The Denver Post’s reporting shows that former Gov. Bill Owens and billionaire Philip Anschutz have played supporting roles as it has successfully advanced conservative policies in a state that has not elected a Republican to statewide office since the Obama administration.
Advance’s victories continued in 2024, when it backed two winning ballot measures, including one that required the cash-strapped legislature to spend $350 million on police funding. It also threatened to run two property tax measures that, had they passed, would have cut taxes and blown gaping holes in government budgets.
That move forced yet another special session. As frustrated Democratic lawmakers returned to the Capitol that August, they gave a promotion to Advance’s leader.
He was, they complained, Gov. Fields.
Despite the GOP’s rapid disintegration in the state, Advance now finds itself at the center of a fourth election cycle, the most expansive and significant ballot contest for the organization and in Colorado’s recent history. Much of that fight will be dominated by the tripartite tax war: Advance is running a measure that would cap the state’s income tax, while opposing two other ballot proposals that would increase taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations and would allow the state to keep more money for schools.
The result of those contests alone will help determine the state’s fiscal situation for the near future. But Advance is backing six ballot measures in all, with major potential implications for energy, criminal justice and immigration policy.
For conservatives, it’s a remarkably prominent position for a movement that has scrambled to find relevancy. Advance has offered not only influence and a counterpunch to Democratic electoral dominance but a ray of hope that, while the GOP brand is in tatters in a state that’s roundly rejected President Donald Trump, the core ideas that animate it — and the money that can put those ideas in front of voters — still have purchase in Colorado.
If they didn’t, voters wouldn’t back Advance’s policies, and it wouldn’t wield the influence it now does.
“What Advance has succeeded in doing — conservatives have long said that our ideas win, even if our candidates don’t win,” said Tyler Sandberg, a Republican consultant. “They put that to the actual test by putting them on the ballot and passing them pretty overwhelmingly.”
For liberals and Democrats, Advance stands as something between a worthy adversary and, in the view of some, a Trojan horse for wealthy people who want to cut taxes and shrink government.
Ian Silverii, a veteran liberal consultant who’s working to oppose Advance’s proposals, blasted the group for packaging complex policy as simple yes-or-no questions to an electorate that may not grasp the full impact of the bargain. Other critics said that Advance could run whatever it wanted at the ballot without the burden of having to figure out how it would work, should voters pass it.
“It truly is remarkable what you can do when you have donors and corporations who are willing to spend tens of millions of dollars in secret money to influence our politics,” said Shad Murib, the chair of the Colorado Democratic Party.
Whatever the depth of their antipathy, Advance’s opponents have been forced to reckon with it as a legitimate political force.
The group has won at the ballot, forced special sessions and now has a serious chance of passing sweeping reforms across a number of policy areas in November. While its prior campaigns faced little opposition, a coalition of liberal groups is banding together this year to fight Advance’s measures and promote its side’s larger tax-reform proposals. Some of the groups have also hinted at pursuing ballot reforms next year.
Advance is “defining the criminal justice conversation; they’re defining the energy conversation and the pollution conversation,” said Chris deGruy Kennedy, a former state representative involved in the property tax negotiations two years ago. He now leads the progressive Bell Policy Center, which will face off against Advance over the income tax measures. “And by virtue of this contest with us, yeah — whichever way this goes will define the state budget conversation.”
Group rises as state party flounders
After the Republican failures of four years ago, Fields was recruited from another conservative group — which had unsuccessfully backed — to come to Advance and shape its policy agenda.
The candidate losses in 2022 were steeper than conservatives had expected. Soon after, the Colorado Republican Party elected far-right firebrand Dave Williams as chairman, kicking off a series of internal disputes and lawsuits that continued for three years. The party is now a shadow of itself: As of July 31, the state GOP owed more than $271,000 in debts and had fewer than $60,000 in its federal bank account, according to campaign records.
Craig Steiner, the current chair of the state GOP, did not return a message seeking comment.
Anschutz, a conservative megadonor, had regularly contributed to the party. But he hasn’t cut a check to the state GOP — at least one that’s publicly reportable — since 2022. He also did not return a message seeking comment.
But as the institutional GOP floundered, Advance was notching headline-grabbing wins at the ballot. Simultaneously, its annual revenue grew from $1 million to $5.7 million between 2021 and 2024, according to federal tax records.
Ralph Nagel, a prominent businessman and an Advance donor, said Owens, the last Republican to serve as the state’s chief executive — from 1999 to 2007 — invited him to join the group’s supporters as conservative donors sought to coordinate support and organization. He said Advance was pulled together by Owens and Anschutz, and supporters include an invite-only group of four or five dozen donors who gather for dinner twice a year.
“It’s a curious thing — if there was a book written on this era of this group, it wouldn’t be that long,” Nagel said. “But it would be so credible. Is it really that simple to do important things? And it turns out: Yes, you can.”
“It’s a terrific success,” he continued, praising the group’s backers as committed businessmen who wanted to steer the state in the right direction. “You have to be proud of it.”
Advance is not the first group to bring significant cash into Colorado politics. The business-friendly group One Main Street has spent millions in largely untraceable dollars to support moderate Democrats in recent years. Outside groups still spend money to elect Republican and Democratic candidates as Democrats reach for supermajority control of both chambers in the Capitol.
Most famously, the mythologized “Gang of Four” — a group of wealthy liberals that included Polis, then a State Board of Education member — brought their fortunes to bear to send Democratic candidates to the Capitol more than two decades ago.
But while the Gang of Four’s spending coincided with the beginning of the state’s leftward tilt, Advance has found success as the name-brand conservative movement has collapsed. That shift also helped shape the group’s focus.
“I think there was a recognition by the supporters of Advance (that) maybe this isn’t the best bang for our buck,” said George Brauchler, the district attorney for the 23rd Judicial District who was the first president of Advance Colorado. Instead, they thought: “Maybe the issue here is the R and D next to the names thatap driving this outcome. Why don’t we instead focus on conservative issues and see if we can get conservative issues on the ballot — because Colorado isn’t nearly as blue or left as elected representatives suggest.”
Advance has largely focused on fiscal policy and public safety issues, which, in cases like the police funding measure, can double as fiscal restraints. Fields said the group typically comes up with its own ideas, polls possible ballot language to gauge public support and files different versions of that language with the state title board, the administrative gatekeeper for ballot access.
“Once it’s actually going to move, there are other groups and other people, and we’re constantly just saying, ‘Hey, we have an idea. Do people want to help us put this on?’ ” Fields said.
Nagel said Fields and his team give presentations to the donor group, and that while donors may have their own ideas, Fields has been broadly respected and trusted to steer Advance.
Like Fields, he said the group’s campaigns were often planned two to three years out.
“We fund a base amount, and then everyone makes more contributions on a project basis — (for) ballot initiatives or whatever’s going on — and then most of us still continue significant support of candidates and old-fashioned politics involvement,” he said.
Fields said his group focuses on the issues facing the state, and it has balanced its priorities between playing offense and defense. The property tax wars forced Democratic concessions, for instance. But when Democrats moved this year to redraw the state’s congressional districts as part of a multistate redistricting war, Advance fought the ballot proposals and put forth its own measure that would block any changes.
“We are doing stuff that I believe can pass because voters understand it,” Fields said, adding that the group’s leaders have shelved ideas that don’t have popular support. “And we are that voice, I believe, of the center of unaffiliated voters right now.”
‘A clearinghouse for dark money’
To Advance’s critics, though, it’s little more than a black box that takes in mostly dark money and churns out ballot measures that serve conservative donors’ economic interests.
Steve Fenberg, a Democrat and former president of the state senate, said Advance is a “clearinghouse for dark money,” referring to donors whose identities are largely undisclosed. He said the group was proficient at boiling complex issues down to overly simplified ballot questions. Policy, he argued, is supposed to be nuanced and complicated.
“They’re a shell of an entity, in my opinion, with a good and charismatic leader,” he said. “But at the end of the day, they’re there to hide major donors who want to have an influence on Colorado’s future.”
Fields declined to identify his financial supporters, other than to say that more than 12,000 people have donated to Advance. (He didn’t know what the average donation was.)
Some of those donors are disclosed in federal tax filings. In 2024, as Advance readied to run five ballot measures, Nagel’s foundation gave the group $475,000. foundation gave $400,000. The Norwood Foundation, run by the leaders of a , gave $250,000. A group run by erstwhile U.S. Senate candidate Joe O’Dea contributed $627,000 that year, while the Wisconsin-based Bradley Impact Fund gave $500,000.
Advance is also connected to a larger, multimillion-dollar conservative donor and spending network that includes spending committees and think tanks like the Greenwood Village-based Common Sense Institute, which has received support from Anschutz’s son and other donors, like the Coors family foundation.
The group and its broader network have included many of Colorado’s most prominent conservative voices. have included Burton Brown, the former state GOP chair who lamented the state’s shift back in 2022, and top Republican lawmakers like state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer and then-House Minority Leader Rose Pugliese.
West Group, a law firm that’s worked with Advance, is staffed by former officials from the Owens administration. Owens himself is also involved in Advance’s work, and the law firm for which he works was paid by Advance in 2023 and 2024, tax filings show.
Dick Wadhams, a former state GOP chair, referred to Owens as the informal chairman of Advance, playing an important role with donors.
“He’s not running it day to day, but he’s certainly played a big role in Advance, and he’s not stayed on the sidelines as a former governor,” Wadhams said. “I think you’ve got to have somebody of Bill Owens’ stature and with a record of achievement … for donors but also just to show that this is a serious organization.”
Fields says he discusses Advance’s ideas with Owens, whom he describes as an “informal advisor” who has “a special relationship with donors.” Nagel, who said he was invited to the group by Owens, said the former governor was the “face” of the group.
In response to an interview request, Owens told The Post in a statement that he was “proud of the work Advance Colorado is doing to promote common sense policies and protect Colorado’s future. It has now become a critical part of the infrastructure pushing back against the Left’s stupid policies.”
Pursuing simple-sounding measures
Fields, Wadhams and others can, and do, point to Advance’s past success as evidence that voters support its criminal justice agenda, as well as its drive to keep the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights intact. That 1992 voter-passed amendment requires voter approval for tax increases and restricts growth in government revenues, and it’s come under repeated attempts by Democratic-aligned groups to pare it back.
Advance’s record is not perfect: A school choice proposal in 2024 failed, for instance. Still, its influence exists because voters have either backed its proposals or Advance can credibly argue that voters will pass them, which prompted the 2024 special session.
“Pound for pound, we’ve out-fought them, right?” Nagel said of Democratic interests in the state. “If you deal with the revenue model with the state and keep it proportional to good policy — their thing was always raise more taxes, make government bigger and more complicated, and less focused.”
But like Fenberg, Democratic and liberal critics argue that Advance essentially distills its proposals into simple, even deceptive, language that masks the true impact.
For instance: Did voters in 2024 know that requiring the state to provide $350 million to police would mean taking that money from the rest of an increasingly beleaguered state budget?
More to the point: Are ballot questions the right way to address complex issues such as — to cite two Advance measures on this year’s ballot — fentanyl-related sentencing or whether Coloradans have ?
“I think one of the major problems is that the opposition can just either burn the house down (through ballot-passed tax cuts) or just be like, you have a right to natural gas,” said Scott Wasserman, who previously ran the Bell Policy Center. “And itap the governing coalition” — meaning Democrats — “that has to figure it out. If we’re just going to govern by brinksmanship, this is not going to work.”
But he said Democratic leaders and liberal groups had been slow to respond to coalesce and respond to Advance. There was little organized opposition to its three ballot measures in 2024.
This year, though, a coalition of liberal groups has joined together in an effort to head off Advance’s half-dozen proposals.
“Advance has gone deeper and broader in what they’re doing,” said Carolyn Siegel, a spokeswoman for the coalition, which is broadly organized under the name Vote Common Sense. “And people recognized they can’t be fighting off these bad policies one by one, but they need to kind of work together to expose whose money is really behind Advance — and what are the real impacts of some of these measures that aren’t about the sound-good things they try to make them about?”
The breadth of that coalition speaks to the extent of the reach of Advance’s proposals this year: It includes the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, which is concerned about a measure that would require law enforcement to work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in certain circumstances; Conservation Colorado, which opposes the natural gas measure; Cobalt, the abortion advocacy group; and the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, which is involved in opposition to the fentanyl measure.
The measures have broader implications outside their specific policy areas, argued Kyle Giddings of the criminal justice group. If the fentanyl measure passes and sends hundreds more people to prison, the state , on top of existing pressures. (Earlier this year, Polis asked lawmakers to devote $200 million to a new prison.)
That would mean less money for the rest of the budget, with far-reaching impacts.
The anti-Advance coalition has raised roughly $1 million across its spending committees already. Advance’s measures will mostly be supported by a group called Brighter Colorado, which had raised $275,000 as of last week. Another group, focused on supporting Advance’s income tax cap and opposing Bell’s progressive income tax, has not reported any money raised yet.
Beyond the results of this election, Giddings and others hinted — without providing specifics — that they may push for ballot reforms in the future.
The rise of opposition groups — and their threat to pursue ballot reforms — is a sign of both Advance’s growing prominence and the seriousness with which liberal groups are now taking it. In the near term, the results of the November contest are likely to be significant in determining funding for schools, the tax burden on corporations and wealthier individuals, how the state regulates natural gas and how law enforcement interacts with ICE.
For his part, Fields chafes at the suggestion that his group simply does the bidding of wealthy donors. He is adamant that Advance proposes measures that will benefit Colorado, and that the group only has as much influence as voters give it.
“Voters decide, right?” he said. “Eventually, you get an answer on it, one way or the other.”
