Recently I've focused on the Wisconsin and how the Koch brothers and M&I Bank have taken over Wisconsin politics. Today I've decided to turn my analysis on my home state of Colorado. As many know I was formerly involved with Republican politics here in Colorado. The 2010 race was confusing because the Colorado GOP appeared extremely disorganized. For example, during the 2010 caucuses it was literally impossible to get ANY information on the district 4 Congressional candidates. This is what I said at the time:

The caucus I attended was literally the most boring I have ever attended (and I have attended almost every caucus since 1992). We had eleven attendees which was the same number for the one my daughter attended. Multiples caucuses were held in the church and it was very lightly attended. A KUNC reporter wandered about the very sparsely attended proceedings. One of the attendees openly wondered why nobody was there given "what was going on this week". The same individual ran for the state assembly with the rationale for his running being his personal edification! He had no idea who to support. None of us knew squat about any of the candidates. There was only one speech where one woman endorsed some personal friends. Two of the candidates she supported were running for the Congressional seat but she gave nothing substantive on why we should support either or why one was preferable over the other. The only candidate that stopped by was running for Sheriff. Another of the participants asked to delay the straw poll until some of the candidates stopped by (which never happened). The winners of our straw poll were Diggs Brown, Scott McInnis, and Jane Norton. At the county level Gardner, Maes, and Buck won handily. So, the effect of the Tea Partiers at the local level was to purge the moderates and even mainstream conservatives out of the GOP. I saw no evidence of inside-the-party enthusiasm I have seen in local OFA meetings. Most of my friends in county leadership are long gone.

Note the last paragraph as I will comment on that shortly. More recently there came the resignation of Dick Wadhams as chair of the Colorado GOP.

Since that time, State Senator Ted Harvey announced that he would challenge Wadhams's bid, saying that "a lot of the grass-roots activists and county officers believe we need to go a different direction." Harvey was referring to the grass-roots Tea Party groups that became influential within the GOP in 2010. Many of these activists were harshly critical of Wadhams' performance during the 2010 election cycle. Wadhams told KDVR's Eli Stokols on Monday that he was stepping down because he was "tired of the people who see a conspiracy behind everything we do, people who don't have any clue what the role of the state party really is." “I have loved being chairman, but I’m tired of the nuts who have no grasp of what the state party’s role is,” he told the Denver Post.

The county officers are completely disorganized and as we know here the grass-roots activists are astroturf. (Much more on this later.) The Larimer County GOP got fined big time apparently because their chair didn't pick up their mail.

"Because the election was just hectic and busy and we had stuff going on, we're trying to recruit volunteers, we're trying to get people in for making phone calls, we're just trying to do all the election stuff," [former Larimer County GOP chair, Larry Carillo] said. In most county parties, the treasurer plays a key role in maintaining campaign finance reports. But the Larimer GOP's most recent treasurer Terri Fassi resigned in late July or early August 2010 and hasn't been replaced, interim party Chairwoman Devon Lentz said.

A political party does three things:

Fundraising

Messaging

Organizing



As we see above the party was failing on all three counts, particularly on point 3. Because of that I wasn't very worried going into the elections because of it. What I failed to appreciate is that the powers that be have made the GOP (and its little-d democratic style organization) irrelevant. Even people as savvy as Rachel Maddow assumed that a disorganized GOP means that hyper-conservative candidates will not be able to win. Note her comments on the Nevada GOTV:

As outside organizations run by people like Karl Rove start supplanting what the traditional party has done in terms of fundraising and messaging and organizing, is there a cost to that? Is there a cost to outside groups like those run by Karl Rove doing that instead of the parties doing it? Here‘s a specific example from this past election in Nevada. It‘s the 2010 Nevada Senate race between Harry Reid and Sharron Angle. All of the polls right before that election, right up until the election said Sharron Angle would be the United States senator from Nevada right now. She is not. Why? Because for all of the anti-Harry Reid sentiment in Nevada, for all of the fundraising prowess of Sharron Angle, for all of the bad indicators for the guy in charge staying in power in Nevada, in November, there was something missing. The Republican Party was notably absent on the ground in Nevada in the days leading up to that election. There was no organizational capacity, it seemed, to turn all of those pro-Republican factors in that election into actual Republican votes. There was no Republican Party get-out-the-vote machine there. It‘s something that we found out when we were in Vegas just a couple of days before the election.

Rachel's error was she focused on a Senate race where there was a substantial union GOTV operation in place and a statewide electorate. I contend there isn't really a cost to the outsourcing of the entire Republican party to corporations. I'll will follow the money with Cory Gardner, where the outsourcing produced a different effect below the fold.

Update: Thanks for the rec list. First time. I'm honored.

Update: There was a good question in the comments about how long has this been going on. Here's an early history of the Koch front group Citizens for a Sound Economy provided by sourcewatch.org. CSE later split/merged to become FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity.