Marla Reichert, the chair of the Pueblo County GOP, wishes the anti-Leroy Garcia organizers had just stayed home on Oct. 18.

“They would’ve been better off to just leave it alone, to say, ‘We missed it by a little bit, but we’re still here and we’re still watching,’” Reichert said.

She said that she knows for a fact that the organizers collected a significant number of signatures, but she lamented that their paltry final offering — they turned in four signatures, which was 13,502 shy of the threshold they needed to meet — subjected the Garcia recall movement to mockery.

“It’s not fair,” she said, “that it’s being laughed off.”

That four-signature spectacle brought to a close a season of failed recall efforts targeting Democratic lawmakers and the governor. Many in both parties believe that organizers played the recall card at the wrong time, damaging future recall prospects and the credibility of the conservative resistance in the increasingly Democrat-controlled state.

State GOP leaders, in fact, are disowning the efforts, which mostly didn’t involve party insiders. The exception is Vice Chair Kristie Brown, who was involved with the Tom Sullivan recall.

U.S. Rep. Ken Buck, the Colorado GOP chair, told The Denver Post on Friday that the recall failures don’t fall on him in any way.

“I didn’t cast any net,” he said. “There’s a lot of people in the grassroots … who went after legislators. I didn’t direct any recall effort.”

When he was elected to lead the state party on the fourth ballot in March, Buck promised to teach Democrats “how to spell R-E-C-A-L-L.” Now, though, he claims he did not endorse the concept of mass recalls in Colorado.

“What I meant to make very clear was that I heard the frustration from people and that I am absolutely willing to focus party resources on the best way of changing the current situation,” he said, “which, it turns out, is not two or three recalls that were not successful. It’s going to be at the ballot box in 2020.”

It’s exceptionally difficult to recall a state legislator. Since two Colorado lawmakers were recalled in 2013, there has been exactly one successful recall of a state official in the entire United States. Nevertheless, conservatives threatened a barrage of recalls here and actually attempted six of them.

One of their targets, the Greeley Democrat Rochelle Galindo, resigned her seat after being accused of sexual assault. The other five — state Senate President Garcia, Gov. Jared Polis, Rep. Sullivan and Sens. Pete Lee and Brittany Pettersen — were never made to sweat. Organizers didn’t even hand in signatures in any case except Garcia’s.

Fringe characters

The public faces of these campaigns were, for the most part, grassroots organizers and, in some cases people that GOP leaders discuss as fringe characters.

Many no doubt will remember for years the image of Dave DeCenzo and his partner, Joseph Santaro, rolling into Denver on with two mostly empty Budweiser boxes, delivering almost zero signatures. DeCenzo, an engineer, filmmaker and well-known gadfly in Pueblo politics, arrived in Denver dressed in overalls, socks and sandals, and made unsupported claims about voter intimidation and threats of “doxxing” against his supporters.

The Polis recall was messy, with three different groups initially competing among themselves to lead it. One of them didn’t collect a single signature but raised more than $100,000, some of which was spent on gifts to staffers.

The Colorado Republicans willing to talk about the recalls on the record have mixed reactions.

“I’ve kind of been scratching my head through the whole process,” said state Sen. Kevin Priola, a Henderson Republican. “My main concern is that it becomes a boy-who-cried-wolf thing. That when there’s someone who actually needs to be recalled, the public’s like, ‘Oh, here we go again.’”

Neither of the women who ran against Buck for party chair earlier this year wanted to talk about recalls or the party’s role in them. State Rep. Susan Beckman didn’t respond to an interview request, and Sherrie Gibson of El Paso County texted, “No comment. Not my monkey, not my circus.”

Michael Fortney, a Republican strategist who ran Walker Stapleton’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign, criticized a Colorado Public Radio reporter for connecting the Garcia recall failure to the state GOP.

“Love how the press can turn two guys with Budweiser boxes who were obviously not serious about their project, to all the sudden be the ‘Colorado Republican Party,’” he tweeted last week.

State party leaders did not, for the most part, lend time or resources to the recalls. But the projects weren’t supported by fringe individuals alone.

“As a party, we are going to support recalls,” Brown said in May, before she helped launch the Sullivan recall.

In addition to Buck’s now-famous “R-E-C-A-L-L” promise, Minority Leader Chris Holbert, the most powerful Republican in the Senate, nodded in January, during his first speech of the legislative session, to the threat of recalls Democrats could face due to overreach.

Minority Leader Patrick Neville, the most powerful Republican in the House, issued recall threats himself last session — then was involved in anti-Polis recall efforts. Through a spokesman, Neville declined to comment for this story.

“They stirred the pot”

Cole Wist, a Republican who lost his house seat to Sullivan in 2018 — and who publicly bashed the Sullivan recall effort — said there is an important distinction to be made between staying out of recalls and actively condemning them.

“I didn’t see one elected Republican speak out against it,” he said. “The state party needs to own this failure. They stirred the pot, and when they could see that the strategy wasn’t going to work, they didn’t speak up. They retreated and disappeared while rank-and-file members of the party floundered and were exploited by political consultants.”

Indeed, the recall season was lucrative for some — consultants, lawyers and landlords, namely. One company, Taylor Petition Management of Colorado Springs, made $60,000 for circulating Sullivan petitions, according to data from the Secretary of State’s Office.

Contributions to the various statewide recall efforts this year combined to top $300,000. Put another way: At least $75,000 was collected for every recall signature that was actually turned in.

It speaks to the Democratic morale boost the failed recall season provided that Garcia, who’s typically as press-shy as almost anyone in the Capitol, held a victory-lap press conference Thursday to slam Republicans for “endless electioneering” and a “new low” in partisan politics.

Democratic recall targets are boasting that failed efforts to take them down in fact made them stronger. Sullivan, who said he had “carloads of supporters” helping him beat back opposition, agreed with Wist that Republican leaders in Colorado have to own this failed recall season.

“They were standing up there behind Ken Buck, applauding. It was Cory Gardner, it was Kristi Brown, it was George Brauchler,” he said. “They were revving up the crowd. This was their threat.”