Colorado’s House Republicans elected a freshman lawmaker from Colorado Springs to become their new minority leader over the weekend, making him the fourth to hold the post in the past three years.
Rep. Jarvis Caldwell was elected on Saturday with 12 votes, beating out two more right-wing members — Reps. Ken DeGraaf and Larry Don Suckla — who received four votes apiece. Caldwell succeeds former Rep. Rose Pugliese, who’d served as minority leader for roughly 18 months before she resigned last week after a public showdown with her Democratic counterpart.
Caldwell had served as the caucus’s communications director before leaving after the 2023 session to work for a charter schools group. He returned to the House to represent District 20 after winning election in November.
“I will fight to restore Colorado to a prosperous state where families are safe, communities are strong, and government is accountable to the people we are elected to represent,” he said in a statement.
Caldwell is House Republicans’ fourth minority leader in the past three years. Pugliese, who was also then a freshman lawmaker, succeeded then-Rep. Mike Lynch in early 2024, after a previous drunken-driving arrest of Lynch came to light. Lynch had became minority leader in late 2022, after his predecessor, Rep. Hugh McKean, died of a heart attack shortly before that year’s election.
As minority leader, Caldwell will steer an at-times fractious caucus whose members are outnumbered nearly 2-to-1 by their Democratic colleagues. Part of that job is working with Democratic leadership, but the relationship between the majority Democrats and minority Republicans has been particularly strained in recent months.
Pugliese resigned weeks after a public argument with Democratic leadership after a photo of a Democratic lawmaker that was taken by a Republican legislator was shared and ridiculed in a GOP group chat.
Caldwell will also be tasked with recruiting candidates to help Republicans chip away at Democrats’ near-supermajority. The caucus made progress last year, when Republicans successfully flipped three swing seats. In a brief speech before the vote Saturday morning, Caldwell said the GOP was at a “turning point” — echoing a conservative rallying cry inspired by political activist Charlie Kirk, who was shot and killed at a Utah college earlier this month.
“In the state of Colorado right now, we know that the Democrats’ approval rating is absolutely underwater,” Caldwell said. “… The state’s in a budget crisis that we’ve seen over the special session, in the session before that and (will see during) the upcoming session.”
The Democratic Party’s brand — as well as the approval rating for some of the state’s top Democratic officials — has indeed sagged, even in solidly blue Colorado, according to a recent poll.
Still, the task facing Caldwell — and Colorado Republicans generally — will not be easy: That same survey showed equal disapproval for the GOP. Solid majorities of respondents also had negative perceptions of President Donald Trump as well as cornerstones of his domestic policy agenda, like tariffs and the massive tax bill that prompted a special legislative session last month.
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