Editor’s note: The Denver Post published stories looking at how both major-party candidates for Colorado governor would approach the job. Read the story about Democrat Phil Weiser here.
It’s difficult to visualize what Colorado under a Gov. Victor Marx would look like — and not only because he’s a first-time candidate with no prior political experience.
Since he won the Republican primary in June, he has avoided debates and has not run as a policy-heavy candidate. He built a nonprofit that has grown to $7 million in annual revenues, but that represents a fraction of the $47 billion budget he would oversee as governor.
And there is little stock of cabinet-ready conservative political appointees after years of Democratic control of the state, particularly because many prominent Republicans — who would ordinarily help Marx’s campaign and vie for future cabinet roles — have criticized him or kept him at arm’s length.
To put it mildly, his campaign has been unorthodox, and launching an administration that doesn’t match what has come before it is part of his core promise. Marx, 61, has pitched himself as an outsider — not a “professional politician” but a leader who will bring accountability to what he’s argued is a rudderless state, beset by wasteful spending and staring at what he warns is a coming socialist takeover.
Marx says that background means he’d bring a different approach, including a promise to deploy artificial intelligence across state government to fix the state’s budget problems and improve efficiency.
"Do you want more of the same, and worse, with Phil?" Marx said in an interview, referring to his Democratic opponent, Attorney General Phil Weiser. "Or do you want someone who’s an outsider, who thinks outside the box -- who has a business background and understands the heart of people, love for people?"
"The government is not the answer," he said on his . "Neither is politics. It's a battlefield, but my gosh, it's gotta be the people of Colorado that stand up and say, 'No more. We can do better.' "
In the last 76 years, only one person with no prior political experience, Republican John Love, has been elected governor of Colorado. An outsider -- particularly one as outside as Marx, whose backstory is layered with a series of incredible, at times miraculous and often-unverifiable tales -- is harder to project into the governor's desk.
But it was equally hard, this time last year, to imagine Marx as the GOP nominee.
A former Marine and devout Christian, Marx founded All Things Possible Ministries in 2002. Marx traveled to prisons and churches to share his life story, including abuse by his stepfather, and later worked with displaced people in the Middle East. The group most recently has worked to train law enforcement.
The self-described "high-risk humanitarian" surged from political obscurity to win the Republican primary, surrounded by staffers who'd largely come from his nonprofit Christian ministry or conservative media circles. He has repeatedly pointed to that success -- alongside arguments that voters are tired of Democratic leadership -- as evidence that he can win in November, too.
If he is elected over Weiser, Marx will likely have to share governance with significant Democratic majorities in the legislature, which will undoubtedly oppose his plans to slash taxes, work with federal immigration authorities and institute new Medicaid work requirements.
While he acknowledges there will be disagreements, he brushes off potential clashes with lawmakers by arguing that they would support commonsense solutions.
His has not been a policy-heavy campaign. His website's , which lays out a broad scope of policies, includes a number of borderline nonsensical statutory citations. One law it cites has been repealed, while others have only vague tethers to the policies they're purported to undergird. (In June, Marx denied that AI had been used to write out his priorities. He said they were written by a former attorney for billionaire Elon Musk.)
Legislative leaders and political experts said they had little insight into how exactly Marx would govern. His lack of experienced political staff -- and the aversion with which many other Colorado Republicans have treated his campaign -- leaves equal uncertainty about how he would stock his cabinet and senior leadership positions.
"I simply cannot fathom what Marx’s Colorado looks like," said Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver. "And I don’t even mean that as an insult. I just don’t know."
Plans to launch audits on state spending
Marx's most frequent promise is to bring more transparency -- and, subsequently, accountability -- to state government. He has pledged to launch audits on state spending and to use artificial intelligence systems across agencies to root out waste and improve efficiency.
He has said he was already "DOGE'ing" parts of the state budget, a reference to Musk's "Department of Government Efficiency" at the start of President Trump's second term last year. In the interview earlier this month, however, he said he wouldn't liken his plans to DOGE.
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His campaign has touted an that allows people to track their tax dollars in Colorado, and he has said he wants to expand it further. He said it's a "proof of concept" about his promises to let Coloradans know how their government operates and if it's doing so successfully.
He has described the dashboard, called "Colorado Works Better," as . But his campaign has also said the dashboard is part of a separate company that is not affiliated with his gubernatorial bid in any formal sense.
The company, which Marx said was founded by a University of Colorado Boulder professor, was registered in Delaware in August. It did not return emails seeking comment.
Marx said he wouldn't replace state workers with AI technology and that he didn't have a "list of 1,000 people to fire" should he be elected. He's also said he wanted to use his authority to fill the governor's cabinet and various boards and commissions with "experts," as opposed to the "activists" that he alleges now fill those roles under Gov. Jared Polis. He told The Post that he would make those replacements only when current appointees' terms expire.
for an AI-heavy approach -- albeit with "human judgment" attached. He would look to automation first. He wants AI in every state agency, AI to examine the legitimacy of state spending and AI training for every one of the state's thousands of employees. His campaign has paid thousands of dollars to AI companies, including to one run by his campaign manager, according to campaign finance records.
"Letap get in and use it first, and with a great team to start with, and find (out), where’s our money going?" Marx said, adding that the technology would be used to process and distill "enormous" amounts of data and contracts within state government.
He said he was confident that his technology-assisted reviews of state funding -- especially Medicaid, which accounts for roughly a third of the state's general fund budget -- would turn up enough money to fill the state's projected $1.6 billion shortfall in the next fiscal year. He also said he'd be able to fix Medicaid without cutting services to people who need it. (He has not found any "magical, multimillion-dollar pot of waste" yet, he said.)
The budget is substantially set each year by the Joint Budget Committee, a bipartisan panel of state lawmakers. While there has been some inappropriate or wasteful spending within Medicaid, the committee's members -- as well as economists with the state -- have said the budget shortfall is driven by healthcare costs that are rising faster than the state can accommodate under limits imposed by the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights.
Kyle Saunders, a political science professor at Colorado State University who writes frequently about AI, said the technology was already well in use across state government. He thought Marx's overall pitch of using AI to review contracts and search for cost-cutting options was reasonable.
But he was less convinced by the scale of the purported payoff.
"If most of the hole is Medicaid, you can't audit your way out of caseload growth," he said.
Looking at campaigning for insight
Saunders said examining Marx's election campaign is the best way to project how he would govern.
While Marx would argue the campaign has been a success -- he beat out two elected state lawmakers for the nomination in the June primary -- Saunders noted that it has also had problems. Over its first several months, his campaign took in 200 illegal contributions that exceeded individual donor limits, including after it began receiving complaints about them.
The campaign has also been scrutinized for its opaque online merchandise sales and the shifting answers it has provided about that operation.
A state hearing officer recommended this month that the campaign face a nearly $58,000 fine for the excess contributions; Marx has criticized the finding as political and has said he will appeal it.
As his summer and early fall were plagued with questions about his campaign's finances, Marx was largely unable to unite the party around him. His two rivals for the GOP nomination -- state Rep. Scott Bottoms and Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer -- both refused to endorse him. And an expected endorsement from former Gov. Bill Owens -- one previewed by Marx, at least -- never came.
Former GOP candidate Greg Lopez is mounting an unaffiliated gubernatorial bid, and last week , the secretary for the Colorado Republican Party. U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert was an early supporter of Marx, while U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd repeatedly refused to back Marx during last week.
Still, Marx has raised more than $4 million for his campaign, and he has promised to reward that grassroots support with transparency and direct outreach to constituents if he wins. His policies would also be largely familiar to Republican voters: He has talked about setting up to monitor teachers, expediting permitting to increase homebuilding, instilling a "warrior ethos" in Colorado law enforcement, and freezing new regulations.
He said he would immediately order state agencies to find ways to cut their budgets by 10% and would support expanding the state's match of the Earned Income Tax Credit, a recent priority of Democratic lawmakers.
A Christian ministry leader whose faith is central to his campaign, Marx has said he wants to reconsecrate the state for God. But he said he wouldn't prioritize one faith over another.
"I'm not going to the Capitol to pastor Colorado," he said. "I'm going to be the governor of every Coloradan, including people who don't share my faith."
If he were to pull off an upset and land in the Capitol, Marx would very likely be joined by sizable majorities of Democratic lawmakers who were already too liberal for Polis' liking.
Much of could not be enacted with his signature alone. He would need lawmakers to repeal laws they had passed, accept policies they have rejected or cut taxes during a period of already-painful austerity.
"There’s going to be real disagreements," Marx said. "But as governor, I'm not going to spend the first four years fighting the legislature just because we have different (opinions). I just want to get things done for Colorado. I'll sit down with both sides and start with areas where we can find common ground."
Legislative leaders, in interviews, were often unsure about how a Gov. Marx would operate.
At a minimum, he could act as a check on a Democratic legislature, said Minority Leader Jarvis Caldwell, the top Republican in the House. Rep. Javier Mabrey, a Denver Democrat running for a senior leadership position in the lower chamber, said he had "not put any thought whatsoever into what it would look like to work with a hypothetical Gov. Marx -- because I do not believe he has a chance of winning at all."
Minority Leader Cleave Simpson, Caldwell's counterpart in the Senate, said he knew Marx only from his June debate against his primary rivals and from his media appearances. He had more experience with Weiser, given Weiser's political history and the attorney general's work in Simpson's district in the San Luis Valley.
"He has the same aspirational goals," Simpson said of Marx's pledges to address the state's cost-of-living issues, "but it's not abundantly clear to me how we get there."
Staff writer Nick Coltrain contributed to this story.
