Kent Thiry won’t give up on reforming Colorado’s elections. But is Proposition 131 the right formula for change?

Kent Thiry first came to Colorado in 1973 for a high school student government conference. After the four-day event ended, the teen called his parents back in Wisconsin to ask for some money. He didn’t want to leave just yet.

“I drove down I-70, and I was blown away as I drove around the state — how beautiful it was,” he recounts now from the back patio of his mansion in Cherry Hills Village. “And right then I said, ‘I think someday I will live here.’ ”

It would be years before Thiry made it back permanently — and years before the longtime CEO of DaVita, the kidney dialysis services company, had the financial wherewithal to wield “more power in an informal way than virtually all the elected officials” in the state, as a Republican strategist once said about him. But that 1973 visit served as something of an inflection point for Thiry: It was a trip driven by his early interest in American democracy, introducing him to a state whose electoral landscape he would go on to reshape through a succession of reform-minded ballot initiatives.

Half a century later, Thiry — now 68 and a millionaire many times over — is backing his third and most sweeping potential change to how democracy works in Colorado.

Together with a national organization he co-chairs and a small group of wealthy donors, Thiry is the driving force behind Proposition 131. It would replace the state’s current partisan primary system with an open first-round election. For the general election, it would install a ranked-choice voting system.

If voters pass it, the measure would bring unprecedented changes to how Colorado voters select their representatives at the state and federal levels — harnessing a type of system that’s emerging nationally but has drawn a rare unity of opposition from the state Democratic and Republican parties. It’s not unheard of at the municipal level, with Boulder conducting its first ranked-choice election for mayor last year and Fort Collins poised to follow.

Prop 131 would apply the changed election process to races for state legislative seats, U.S. Senate and congressional races, and state elected offices — governor, treasurer, attorney general and secretary of state. It also would apply to seats on the State Board of Education and the University of Colorado’s Board of Regents.

Thiry previously backed successful ballot measures that allowed unaffiliated voters to participate in major-party primaries and that changed how Colorado draws its legislative and congressional maps. He said he embraced this latest reform out of concern for democracy and in response to voter dissatisfaction with the status quo.

He also said the proposal would address what he described as the disproportionate representation of the “far left and far right” in the state legislature, while perhaps giving “governance-oriented” candidates a better shot.

It would work like this: If six candidates run for governor, all of their names appear on the same ballot in the June primary, regardless of whether they are affiliated with any party. Up to four candidates then advance to the general election.

On the November ballot, voters rank those candidates in order of preference. If nobody receives a majority, the candidate with the fewest top-choice votes is eliminated, with those votes reallocated to the voters’ next choice. The process continues (automatically, without additional voting) until a candidate secures a majority of votes.

Thiry and his supporters argue the overhaul would lessen the power of low-turnout primaries to decide elections, improve candidate diversity and bring back civility — while taking power away from entrenched political parties.

Despite opposition from political parties both large and small, the ballot measure’s polling is strong: In results released recently from a poll funded by the campaign and taken about a month ago, 64% of likely voters supported the measure, against 25% opposed, with leaners added to voters who’ve made up their minds.

Gov. Jared Polis endorsed the proposal on his Facebook page, writing that Prop 131 offered an alternative that would be “better than our current system because it gives voters more choices.”

“By doing this — open primaries and final-four, ranked-choice voting — what we’re actually doing is saying that all of us, now, have access to democracy,” said Terrance Carroll, a former Democratic speaker of the Colorado House. “You don’t have to register a certain way. The opposition to this — they have a vested interest in a system where they can be assured that they control the outcome of the election, as opposed to voters controlling the outcome of the election.”

Scrutiny of Prop 131’s aims

But “controlling the outcome of the election” is precisely what critics accuse Thiry and company of pursuing.

Opponents argue Proposition 131 is a sweeping, confusing overhaul that would introduce more money into campaigns and take power away from the political parties that, they argue, are key to organizing and defining America’s political system.

County clerks have called for a slower implementation timeline to ensure systems can be updated and voters are properly educated. The measure would take effect in 2026, though lawmakers have preemptively thrown up hurdles.

More fundamentally, critics argue that the measure is a Trojan Horse effort by wealthy donors like Thiry — who spent more than $1 million before the June primaries on a slew of more-moderate, business-friendly legislative candidates — to bolster candidates they like.

Under the new system, opponents argue, the candidates with the most money behind them would rise above a crowded initial field and sustain momentum through November. And parties would have less control over who participates in — and potentially advances beyond — primaries.

“This is a group of very wealthy people, a lot of them billionaires, who are promoting these reforms as a way to, quote-unquote, ‘fix what’s broken in politics,’ ” said Wendy Howell, the state director of the left-wing Working Families Party. “I would point out that these are the same people who are breaking our system by putting money into politics.”

Because the measure is advancing largely under the tutelage of Thiry, he’s a prime target of opponents’ criticism and suspicion.

The attention ranges from his time at DaVita — which was profitable for the company but was plagued by gargantuan settlements and federal investigations into the legality of its practices — to allegations that his election reforms are meant to grease the wheels for a future run for governor.

Thiry, who stepped down as DaVita’s CEO in 2019 and as executive chairman in 2020, is adamant — to the point of visible frustration — that he will not run for governor.

He said his “highest and best use is to do what I’m doing now.”

He also doesn’t care what kind of candidates win under the system he envisions, he said. Nick Troiano, the executive director of the Denver-based pro-reform group Unite America, which Thiry co-chairs, said the new system wouldn’t necessarily break the red-blue paradigm. But it might allow different “shades” of Democrats and Republicans to win, since voters of all loyalties would gain a larger role in selecting both primary and general election winners.

Republicans in deep-blue districts have little general election influence now, and the same is true for Democrats in ruby-red areas. But their votes could be more decisive in a ranked-choice system, where giving a higher ranking to a preferred candidate from the opposing party could help swing the election.

“We are not looking for candidates who live in the middle of all policies; we are looking for candidates who will meet in the middle when common sense dictates,” Thiry said. He described his own politics essentially as fiscally conservative and socially liberal.

He’s given $1.4 million to the Prop 131 campaign and is one of only six donors; Unite America is another. Collectively, those donors have given more than $8.3 million.

For critics on both the left and the right, Thiry and Troiano’s reasoning rings alarm bells and raises suspicions. So do the backgrounds of some of Thiry’s paid consultants, who include old-guard Republicans who have been critical of the GOP’s rightward lurch and leery of the growing dominance of Democrats here.

The Colorado Chamber of Commerce, which has long preferred moderate candidates in the Capitol, also supports Prop 131.

“The proponents have been very clear that they want to change who’s winning elections in Colorado. They want to moderate (the) winners,” said Matt Crane, the executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, which has expressed implementation concerns about the measure.

“And look — as a regular voter, I’m not insensitive to that,” he added. “But when you have to go change the system like this to get different outcomes, it needs a lot of examination to make sure it doesn’t hurt the process and hurt voters. And right now, we’re not convinced.”

Thiry sees self as “a student of democracy”

Kent Thiry’s trip to Colorado as a teenager was part of his early interest in American politics and democracy. The second oldest of six children in a Wisconsin family raised just outside of Milwaukee, he “read all the books I could find on Abraham Lincoln and George Washington,” he says of the early American presidents.

He cites Washington’s warnings about political parties, and he can still recite Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address from memory; he teared up while doing so to a Colorado Public Radio reporter earlier this summer.

In high school, Thiry was student body president and, according to a 2012 profile in 5280 Magazine, he tried to strike down a ban on male athletes having long hair. His attempt failed after he used his time on morning-announcements duty to whip up excess enthusiasm.

It was during his freshman year at Stanford University that Thiry learned democracy could be gamed. After he first heard the word “gerrymandering” in a political science class — referring to the selective drawing of a district’s boundaries to favor one side — he called his parents, horrified.

“I said, ‘These California professors, they’re criticizing our country. They’re saying that people do these bad things.’ And I was just sure that couldn’t be true,” he said. “And within a couple more weeks of school, I found out that, in fact, the professor was right.

“So I’ve been a student of democracy and its fragile place in the world since I was very young.”

From that age, Thiry had wanted to become either the mayor of a midsized city or the CEO of a midsized company — settings, he said, where he could make a real impact. In a roundabout way, he achieved both at DaVita, where he was CEO but adopted the title of mayor.

He landed there in 1999, after having worked adjacent to now-U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney at Bain & Company and then doing a stint at another health care company. In 2009, his early dream of living in Colorado became reality when he moved DaVita from California to Denver.

The relocation was motivated in part, he says, by the state’s relative affordability and closer proximity to employees on the East Coast; several million dollars in tax credits doubtless helped, too.

Whatever else can be said of Thiry, he is earnest, from tearing up while quoting a former president to dressing up as one of the Three Musketeers at DaVita events. 5280 once described DaVita employees radiating “an almost evangelical loyalty to the company.”

That earnestness and loyalty benefitted DaVita, one of the largest dialysis providers in the United States. During Thiry’s two decades there, the company earned billions of dollars — Thiry’s website says revenues grew “11-fold” — and DaVita entered the Fortune 500.

But DaVita’s growth and Thiry’s time as its CEO also saw the company accused of breaking federal law in alleged kickback schemes and health care fraud. The company has paid more than $1 billion in settlements for practices it engaged in while Thiry was at its helm, including a settlement this summer. Thiry himself was acquitted in 2022 in a landmark antitrust case.

Thiry’s outside activism grew during his tenure.

Before he left California, he helped write a legislative redistricting measure — and rumors swirled, he said, about a gubernatorial run there, too.

In 2016 in Colorado, he pushed a ballot measure that has allowed unaffiliated voters to participate in Republican or Democratic primaries. Two years later, he backed another successful — and even more seismic — effort that established independent commissions to draw Colorado’s legislative and congressional maps.

Thiry settled on this latest reform, he said, because he’s concerned about the deterioration of democracy, evidenced by how many state legislative races are decided in low-turnout primary campaigns instead of the fall election.

“It’s happened for structural reasons,” he said. “We can remedy those reasons, just as we’ve had to adjust democracy at other points in the last 250 years in order to modernize it and keep it healthy.”

He’s spent significantly to support his efforts: His total spending on Colorado elections and campaigns is approaching $10 million, much of it in the past decade. He’s also donated more than $2.26 million to various federal races and committees in both major parties; nearly $1 million of that has gone to Unite America or its PAC, and the group this year is supporting election reform ballot measures in Nevada, Idaho, South Dakota, Arizona and Montana.

Animated by concerns about polarization

In Thiry and Troiano’s telling, the surge of interest in election reforms is a result of broad dissatisfaction with the current political system and frustration with the seeming intractability of policy concerns.

Thiry says he’s worried about American polarization and about “overrepresentation” of the parties’ extremes in Colorado.

His theory of American polarization doesn’t start with former President Donald Trump or another specific person or policy. Indeed, in interviews, he pointed to no examples of recent Colorado legislation that he considered extreme or driven from the fringes.

Instead, he lays what he estimates as 90% of the blame on “party insiders” who “control the on- and off-ramps to elections.”

“And the toll,” he argued, “is that you got to cater to the far left and far right.”

He and others argue that Prop 131’s reforms would allow lawmakers to draw support from voters of all stripes, opening doors to bipartisanship and giving voters more final options in November.

The legislature’s two chambers are now controlled, at supermajority or near-supermajority levels, by Democrats. The party’s left wing has grown, and at times that’s resulted in intraparty disputes over progressive versus mainstream agendas — with progressive lawmakers’ bills frequently killed or watered down. (Far-right legislation is usually dead on arrival.)

The top Democrats in the state are not leftists, though Thiry isn’t entirely convinced. And this year’s June primaries saw several progressive and left-wing candidates lose to more-moderate Democrats.

In a follow-up email, Thiry identified housing and affordability as two problems lawmakers are “unwilling or unable to solve.” Both remain high on voters’ list of concerns.

But the legislature this year passed a suite of land-use reform and housing bills pushed by both progressive lawmakers and Polis. That work catapulted Colorado to the forefront of an emerging national land-use reform movement; two of those bills were co-sponsored by Republicans.

“It’s not clear to me what the problem is in Colorado” that Prop 131 seeks to solve, said Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver.

He was concerned about Prop 131’s impact on political parties, which would have less influence over who ends up on the ballot. The parties aren’t perfect, he said, but they serve a useful role in vetting candidates and defining elections for voters.

“(Colorado) has a very polarized legislature, but also a very productive one,” Masket said. “It’s managing to get a lot done.”

Would measure sideline smaller parties?

Ranked-choice voting — the other half of Thiry’s ballot measure, for November elections — would allow for more diverse and nontraditional candidates, potentially boosting women and people of color. Because voters would rank multiple candidates, supporters argue that the system would minimize the risk of a long-shot candidate acting as a “spoiler” by siphoning votes from a potential front-runner.

Civility also appears to improve in a system in which candidates seek to appeal to supporters of other candidates for second, third and fourth rankings, according to a ranked-choice voting advocacy group.

Smaller parties argue, though, that open primaries would harm political diversity on the front end. As it stands, minor parties like the Libertarians and the Greens that meet certain thresholds can nominate candidates directly to the general election ballot.

But under the new primary system, a non-Democrat or -Republican would have to jockey alongside larger, better-funded candidates in the open primary for a spot on the November ballot. Leaders of those smaller parties argue the change would further diminish their influence in policy discussions.