About 75 people showed up in Lakewood on a balmy Sunday morning at the end of June to knock on doors for Democratic state Sen. Brittany Pettersen.

It was an unusual sight — even for residents of a swing district. State lawmakers rarely canvass with an army of volunteers in the years they aren’t up for election, but Pettersen walked her community that weekend because Republican Nancy Pallozzi, who previously ran against Pettersen, announced a plan to recall her from office.

“Turnout like that doesn’t exist for legislative races in October of an election year,” said Matt McGovern, the executive director of the Democratic group House Majority Project. “The recalls have given our passionate people an outlet. It’s not being matched by the other side.”

Recalls or the threat of them are growing in popularity among Republican activists who find themselves out of power in Colorado and frustrated by the laws Democrats passed over their objections in 2019. But their efforts are dividing conservatives into those who see them as urgent no matter the outcome and those who see a real possibility for a string of failures that energize Democrats and end up hurting GOP efforts in 2020.

Recalls were once a rarity in Colorado politics, especially at the state level. No state lawmaker had ever been recalled until 2013, when two Democrats lost their seats after voting for three gun control bills. That success fed an appetite for recall petitions among Colorado Republicans that intensified this year after Democrats swept the 2018 elections and took control of the Colorado House, Senate and governor’s office.

Former Rep. Rochelle Galindo, a Greeley Democrat, faced a recall effort before she resigned from office, and conservatives started and then stopped a recall effort for Rep. Tom Sullivan of Centennial. Three groups are fighting among themselves in an effort to launch a recall of Gov. Jared Polis. Groups have started fundraising to recall Senate President Leroy Garcia and Rep. Bri Buentello, both of Pueblo. Another group is pushing the idea of filing recall petitions against every Democrat elected to Colorado’s General Assembly.

“I think there’s a lot of anxiety and there’s a lot of impatience to fight back, and I understand that,” said former Colorado GOP chair Dick Wadhams. “Anyone who watched the last legislative session has got to be concerned about the future of Colorado.”

Colorado GOP vice chair Kristi Burton Brown, who organized the Sullivan recall, said in a statement when she ended the campaign that one of the positives for Republicans was that “the recall effort has provided us with the opportunity to talk with voters.”

But Wadhams and other Republicans have started to worry that all these recall efforts — most of which they believe to be doomed from the start — are actually playing into the hands of Democrats. Potential recall targets are raking in six-figure donations from national groups and mobilizing their bases to knock on thousands of doors.

“I think this approach is terribly misguided and will end up strengthening the vast majority of Democratic legislators, if not all of them,” he said.

The most ambitious target of these efforts is Polis, who had a 10-point victory in November and currently has a favorable rating of 50 percent vs. an unfavorable rating of 35 percent, according to a poll conducted by Keating Research that was released Wednesday. It had a 4.4 percent margin of error.

State law gives recall petitioners just 60 days to collect all the signatures they need to force a recall election. The number of valid signatures needed from registered voters is a percentage of the ballots cast in the most recent election for that office. For the governor’s race, that number is 631,000 — more than 10,000 per day. It’s a heavy lift, and one that political experts say would take millions of dollars and an army of paid signature gatherers to accomplish.

The Official Recall Governor Jared Polis group has raised about $97,000, Resist Polis PAC has raised $34,500 and Dismiss Polis has about $20,000, according to online records from the Secretary of State’s Office.

Tom Good, the registered agent for Resist Polis PAC, said he thinks there are enough volunteers across the state that paying people to collect signatures might not be necessary. His goal is to collect 100,000 in the first week and have at least two-thirds of them by the halfway point.

“We’ve been pretty quiet, but I think we are going to blow some people away once we start collecting,” Good said.

He said they have been getting a lot of behind-the-scenes help from Republican political operatives on how to organize, publicize and verify signatures. Good is confident his group and Dismiss Polis have laid the groundwork to get the recall on the ballot.

Radical, the group that wants to file petitions against every Democrat elected to a state office, says on its website that many of its efforts will be unsuccessful but many will succeed. Co-founder Ric Rooney told The Denver Post he’s not a “political person,” but in the 40 years he’s lived in Colorado he has never seen anger and frustration at the state government the way he has in recent months. He put together his website to see if people “are really serious” and to give them a way to turn their grievances into actions, he said. He personally plans to file a recall petition against his state lawmaker, Rep. Marc Synder, D-Colorado Springs.

“I guess we’ll see shortly whether the frustration I sense is real or just another Facebook exercise for keyboard warriors,” Rooney said.

Failed recall attempts like the one against Sullivan, however, sent Democratic canvassers to more than 15,000 homes in his swing district and brought in more than $100,000 in donations from national gun control groups — money that remains in the coffers of Democratic groups fighting the recalls. Emily’s List president Stephanie Schriock said this week that her organization, which works to elect progressive women nationwide, is “actively looking” at the Pettersen recall and “what we need to do to make sure she stays in that seat.”

Wadhams wants Republicans to focus their “energy and passion and money” on defeating Proposition CC, the ballot question that will ask voters to give up TABOR tax refunds this fall as well as stopping the national popular vote law and re-electing U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner in 2020.

“Those would be serious wounds inflicted upon Democrats. It would be a rejection of their agenda,” Wadhams said. “And then on top of it re-electing Cory Gardner would be a huge victory and a comeback of the Colorado Republican Party.”

Democrats think they have the political winds at their backs this year in a way they didn’t in 2013.

“National politics dominates,” McGovern said. “It’s most important to how people think about politics right now, and it’s our side that has the energy.”

He regularly sees people who are looking to do something — even something local such as door-knock for a statehouse candidate — to push back against Republicans and President Donald Trump.

That wasn’t the case in 2013, when President Barack Obama had just been re-elected and the Affordable Care Act was being implemented. Republicans were the ones itching to do something — anything — to push back.

As for Pettersen, she plans to be back out knocking on doors every day after the holiday weekend whether or not Pallozzi files a recall petition.

“I take nothing for granted,” Pettersen said. “I always spend the interim knocking on doors in my district to make sure I’m representing my constituents well at the Capitol, so this isn’t going to change my plans too much. But I have a whole lot of friends joining me because the GOP decided to try to get a do-over of the last election I won handily.”