Two weeks ago, the leadership of the Libertarian Party of Colorado sued 15 people to block them from attending the party’s convention.
By the convention’s end, seven of those defendants had been elected to the party’s board, including as its chair and vice chair, with promises to “clean up” the party’s image, stop “repelling people” and — perhaps most consequentially for the state and country — to go back to running Libertarian candidates across the state.
“We won,” longtime party member Caryn Ann Harlos summarized in an email shortly after the convention ended last weekend.
The overhaul was the result of more than 12 months of growing conflict within Colorado’s largest minor political party, which has about 37,000 registered voters and has long focused on personal and economic liberties over government regulation.
The civil war included lawsuits, competing factions claiming control and prior leadership attempting to place independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the ballot and snub their own candidate. The party also moved closer to the Colorado GOP, including trying to clear the field to ease U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans’ path in one of the closest congressional races in the country.
The acrimony grew so pronounced that a judge had to oversee a binding agreement between the party’s warring factions just to ensure that the Oct. 18 convention followed its own rules and didn’t devolve into a “(expletive)-show,” as Denver District Judge Sarah B. Wallace put it.
“The last couple of years, the party took a different direction, and Saturday, the delegates voted me in as chair,” Keith Laube, who comfortably beat one of the party’s prior leaders to become chair, said in an interview last week.
He said party membership, which now numbers just over 37,000 registered voters, has dropped, “And I’m proposing a new direction for the party, which consists of more getting back to our Libertarian principles and growing the party.”
The new direction is, in a sense, the old direction. Laube, who previously ran the Libertarian Party of Iowa, and his allies promised to run Libertarian candidates, reverse the decline in their voting base and repudiate the caustic public image embraced by the party’s now-former leaders. He said the party should support LGBTQ Americans, an apparent nod to the prior chair’s use of anti-gay slurs against a sarcastic Facebook critic. At the convention, supporters of the Laube faction held signs that said “make LPCO Libertarian again.”
In America’s political duopoly, smaller parties often represent distinct voices and ideologies that neverthless have little chance in most contests above the local level. In a bid to exercise direct political power, the Colorado Libertarian Party’s prior leadership had sought to ally with outsiders — like RFK Jr. — at the cost of closer adherence to their own party’s candidates and principles.
The cost of that shift — and the party’s aggressive public posture — was too high for some, who challenged the RFK Jr. deal in court. This year, Laube and allied Libertarians held their own meeting in August, elected a new board and told state election officials that they were now in charge, according to communications from the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office.
The actual leadership then sued in an attempt to keep the dissidents from attending the convention, arguing they would create confusion. That prompted Block Wallace’s apt description and her direction that the two sides come up with an agreement to ensure the convention went smoothly — or else.
The convention did go smoothly, and Laube’s faction nearly swept the contests.
Their victory may have echoes outside of the party: It likely means an end to negotiations with the GOP, for instance, which could influence a major congressional race and control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Under the party’s previous leadership, Libertarian candidates agreed not to run in close races, so long as the GOP candidate signed a “liberty pledge” backing Libertarian principles. The agreement was seemingly borne out of the 8th Congressional District, a seat with razor-thin margins that’s become a chronic national battleground.
In 2022, a Democrat beat her Republican opponent by 1,600 votes, while the Libertarian in the race earned nearly 9,300 votes. In 2024, Republican challenger Evans signed the liberty pledge, and his Libertarian opponent dropped out. Evans then beat Democratic incumbent Yadira Caraveo by roughly 2,500 votes. Evans’ victory represented a rare marquee Republican win in Colorado, and it helped his party secure a narrow majority in the U.S. House.
It’s impossible to say definitively if the Libertarian-GOP deal spurred Evans’ win. Laube argued that candidate-less Libertarians wouldn’t immediately flock to a Republican, and some may support a Democrat instead. But Evans took the possibility seriously enough to sign the pledge and hold a press conference with his one-time Libertarian opponent to announce their armistice.
Looking to 2026, Laube said he didn’t support extending the agreement with the GOP and that Libertarian candidates should run wherever they can. At the convention, the party’s newly elected campaign director, Joe Johnson, touted his previous efforts to run Libertarians up and down the ballot.
“To me, it defeats the purpose of the party if we’re going to tell our candidates to back down to another party,” Laube said. “That doesn’t make much sense. Then we’re not a political party.”
Brita Horn, who was elected to lead the state GOP in the spring after a period of internal upheaval that bore striking similarities to the Libertarians’ struggle, said in a statement that she hasn’t had a chance to meet with Laube and discuss the two parties’ prior agreements.
It’s unclear whether the shift will have an impact: Laube’s election is still just days old, and no Libertarian has filed to compete in CD-8. But if one does, the change could affect one of the closest races in the United States and, as a consequence, could influence who controls Congress in 2027, said Kyle Saunders, a political science professor at Colorado State University.
Republicans have a bare majority in the 435-seat House, Saunders said, and the 8th Congressional District is one of the most competitive contests in the country.
“If Libertarian candidates start running in competitive districts, of which there’s one in Colorado, and if it’s a scenario like what happened in 2022 — yes, the third party could very well be the spoiler,” he said.
For the party’s now-former leadership, partnering with the GOP meant a degree of tangible — and elusive — relevance. James Wiley, a member of the party’s prior leadership who unsuccessfully challenged Laube for chair, said the division came down to a “difference of philosophy.”
On the other end of Laube’s faction is Wiley and the now-former party chair, Hannah Goodman, who wanted the party to have and wield some measure of tangible power, even if it meant dropping their own party’s presidential candidate and providing explicit support for Republicans. (Goodman now says she intends to join the Democratic Party.)
“What I’m hoping is that — and what I expect of the future of the Libertarian Party — we recognize that the party, ballot access, ballot line, our spoiler capacity — we use them either consciously or subconsciously, for the good or harm of liberty,” Wiley said. “We can become self-aware as a party.”
For the party’s new leadership, running Libertarian candidates and providing an outlet for their voters’ political perspective isn’t spoiling. It’s what they should do as a party with distinct members and distinct views, they argue.
“We are Libertarians,” Joshua Robertson told fellow party members at the convention. “We are not Democrats. We are definitely not Republicans.”
Stay up-to-date with Colorado Politics by signing up for our weekly newsletter, The Spot.