Two decades ago, Republicans controlled Colorado’s political landscape, from the governor’s office to the state legislature and congressional delegation.
Wealthy Democratic donors have teamed up to reverse their party’s fortunes, funneling their money through a series of political nonprofits and political committees to organize voters to try to dominate the airwaves. One of those dark money groups was ProgressNow Colorado.
The strategy worked. Democrats took control of the legislature and gained control of two additional congressional seats in 2004. In 2006, they won the governor’s office. With the exception of 2014, the party has only expanded its power since then.
ProgressNow Colorado, a no-nonsense organization that doesn’t disclose its donors, is celebrating its 20th anniversary this month. It has outperformed similar peer groups of the same vintage. Today, with Colorado firmly in Democratic hands, it may not have the same mission as when it started, but the nonprofit remains a player on the state’s political scene.
“For the better part of two decades, ProgressNow has been an aggressive and effective part of Colorado’s progressive infrastructure,” former state Rep. Rob Whitwer, who wrote a book about the Democratic takeover of the state, told the Colorado Sun. “Judging by ProgressNow’s framing success, it’s been a big bang for the buck for its donors.”
Witwer and former 9News political reporter Adam Schrager published “The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado (and Why Republicans Everywhere Should Be Scare)” in 2010. The book told the story of how the Democratic donor network and groups like ProgressNow Colorado changed Colorado politics.
The ProgressNow model has spread to more than half the nation’s states.
Kelly Maher, a Republican activist who used to lead Compass Colorado, essentially the conservative version of ProgressNow Colorado, said ProgressNow’s challenge going forward will be figuring out where to fit in, given the state’s Democratic dominance.
Colorado Democrats these days are less fighting Republicans and more infighting.
“In the current landscape, much of the political tension in Colorado will be intra-party within the Democrats, rather than cross-party with the Republicans,” Maher said. “And ProgressNow is really going to have to wrestle with this existential crisis of what that looks like in their defense.”
Quick response before it becomes the norm
Michael Huttner left his law practice to form ProgressNow Colorado in 2003, serving as the group’s first executive director.
Huttner tried to mobilize Democrats online through blogs and private chat groups based on geography and policy interests. Call it a pre-social media version of “quick response”—the practice of quickly and intelligently attacking opponents on social media.
Huttner had a background in politics: He managed Jared Polis’ successful campaign for a seat on the state board of education in 2000. Huttner was also a political adviser to Governor Roy Roemer.
The work of ProgressNow Colorado and its accompanying groups has been matched by infusions of large sums of money from Polis, philanthropist and Democratic political donor Pat Stryker, and businessmen Rutt Bridges and Tim Gill.
Dick Wadhams, former chairman of the Colorado GOP, said ProgressNow Colorado was born at a time when Democrats were beginning to spend indirectly on campaigns. Instead of giving money to candidate campaigns, they funneled cash through political spending groups like super PACs and nonprofits like ProgressNow to influence voters.
“There is no doubt in my mind that ProgressNow and other left-wing organizations fundamentally changed the rules of political campaign finance 20 years ago,” Wadhams said.
But, he added, “Republicans created the environment for that to happen when some Republican legislative majorities kind of went off the rails on some social issues,” including LGBTQ equality and abortion.
ProgressNow Colorado used catchy tactics to pit Democrats against Republicans.
In 2004, former Colorado State University President Al Yates, who had left CSU the previous year, became chairman of ProgressNow’s board of directors.
“Al Yates demanded that we have one of the top 10 political websites in the country,” Huttner said.
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So Huttner hired Democratic strategist Bobby Clarke, who worked on Democrat Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, to build a digital presence and bring the sting. Maria Handley, fresh off Democrat Ken Salazar’s victorious 2004 U.S. Senate campaign, joined the organization as director of outreach.
In the 2006 Colorado gubernatorial election, the group coined the name “Both Ways Bob” for Bob Beauprez, a Republican who left his seat in Congress to run for governor against Democrat Bill Ritter, the Denver district attorney.
“We made silly videos,” said Handley, who is now executive director of the Wilderness Society Action Fund. She said she and Clark dressed up in cow costumes and visited the golf course near Beauprez’s home, trying to “do things differently to bring light to issues that in most ways were very serious, but trying to bring more primary way of connecting with a wider set of people’.
Ritter finally defeated Beauprez in 2006, succeeding two-term Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican, and starting an unbroken streak of Democratic gubernatorial victories.
The group “became a mouthpiece for grassroots motivation, fundraising and outrage. Over time, ProgressNow would have a significant impact on the political landscape,” Witwer and Schrager wrote in their book.
The two noted that “ProgressNow’s strategy is not so much building up Democrats as destroying Republicans, using opposition research and other hardline tactics.”
Stunts are not always successful
ProgressNow Colorado’s irreverence has sometimes caused controversy.
In 2013, ProgressNow’s Digital ads encourage millennials to sign up for Obamacare youth review. One of the ads featured a young woman holding birth control pills and posing with a man. She captioned the photo, “My health insurance covers the pill, which means all I have to worry about is getting him out between the covers.” The ads also included pictures of him men making barrels and women doing “Sotskyi”.
In 2018, an aide to Colorado House Speaker Crisanda Duran, D-K, helped Alan Franklin, ProgressNow’s political director and a longtime employee of the nonprofit, sneak into the Capitol to install a portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin below a blank spot that was supposed to fill a portrait of President Donald Trump. The assistant, Katie March, she lost her security badge and Democrats were criticized for allowing the farce.
And ProgressNow Colorado’s campaign record hasn’t been flawless.
Progress Now created a website that says “Corey Gardner Fishing Colorado” in 2014 when the GOP congressman faced incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Udall. A banner with the phrase also flew over a Denver Broncos game.
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Udall lost his re-election bid to Gardner that year, and the GOP also won the races for attorney general, secretary of state, and treasurer.
Of the Democratic candidates on the state’s ballot in 2014, only Gov. John Hickenlooper managed to win re-election that year over Beauprez, who was running for a second term to lead the state.
In 2020, Hickenlooper defeated Gardner’s re-election bid in a Senate contest that saw ProgressNow bring out “Cardboard Cory” to highlight the GOP senator’s infrequent public appearances.
After 20 years, looking to the future
ProgressNow Colorado wasn’t the only political nonprofit born out of the state’s Democratic political resurgence in the early 2000s. But it’s still standing where others have closed.
Colorado Media Matters, a nonprofit media watch organization modeled after the national Media Matters, started in 2006. But it closed in 2009. Colorado Ethics Watch started in 2006. It closed in late 2017 due to lack of funding.
Witwer said the Independence Institute, a conservative think tank founded in 1985 and run by Jon Caldara, is probably the only Colorado conservative group “that has been such a consistent presence in this space.”
ProgressNow may still be up and running because of its relatively low operating costs.
The nonprofit spent only $182,000 in 2004. That year Huttner earned $55,000 as executive director. Through 2020, the last election year for which tax forms are publicly available, ProgressNow Colorado spent nearly $3.6 million, a fraction of which went to then-executive director Ian Silverii’s salary.
Silverii, who is married to Democratic U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen, led the organization from 2016 to 2021. He now consults, including with ProgressNow groups in other states. He declined to speak to the Sun about the group’s legacy.
What is a dark money group?
The Colorado Sun refers to political nonprofits that don’t have to disclose their donors, like other political spending committees, as dark money groups.
ProgressNow is what the Sun refers to as a dark money group because it does not disclose its donors. But in the early days of the nonprofit, its supporters were likely Polis, Bridges, Stryker and Gill. (Polis was honored at a Casa Bonita gala Saturday to celebrate ProgressNow Colorado’s anniversary while Bridges was a sponsor.)
A search of the nonprofit’s tax returns reveals that the organization has received grants from other liberal dark-money nonprofits, including Everytown for Gun Safety, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, and Education Reform Now Advocacy.
Sara Loflin, who worked for environmental nonprofits in the past, took over as executive director of ProgressNow Colorado in the fall of 2021. She said that moving forward, the group needs to be “real pioneers in media change and online dynamics’.
Loughlin said she battled breast cancer for most of the two years she led the organization.
“I think my big thing is really taking some time now to assess where we’re going,” Loflin said. “What do we need (to be)?”