Greg Lopez Is Not Splitting Douglas County's Republican Vote. He Is Giving It Somewhere to Go

This is an opinion piece. The facts in it are sourced; the conclusion is ours, and we say at the end what would prove us wrong.

Republicans have a word for Greg Lopez this fall, and the word is spoiler: the man splitting the ticket, handing the governor's office to a Democrat who was going to win anyway. Statewide, the first half of that is beside the point; Phil Weiser is going to be governor with or without a third name on the ballot. The second half is what we want to argue with, because it gets Douglas County backwards. A spoiler takes votes that belong to someone else. The voters Lopez is talking to here are the ones who already declined Victor Marx once, in June, and who have nowhere on this ballot they can stomach without him. Lopez is not splitting that vote. He is the reason it will be cast at all. What that does to the county's result is the rest of this piece.

Start with what Lopez is, not what he wants to be

Lopez is a former Air Force airman, the son and grandson of migrant field workers, Parker's mayor at 27, a regional Small Business Administration director, and a two-time loser of Republican primaries for governor before he won the 2024 special election for Congress as the party's placeholder. His record has rough patches he does not hide: a 1990s harassment plea with his wife that both call a mistake, a 2003 DUI, a $15,000 settlement of a federal conflict-of-interest case over his SBA years. He left the Republican Party on December 30, 2025, and told CPR why: "They're worried about the brand. They're worried about their team winning. They're not worried about the lives of people."

He is not a fresh face. That is the point. To a Douglas County voter he is the most familiar name on the governor's line, the only one who has ever run anything in this county, and a conservative who is not the Republican nominee. For the voter who watched Marx win the nomination with 39.9 percent, who backed Kirkmeyer or Bottoms, who will not vote for a Democrat under any circumstances and was planning to leave the governor's line blank, that last part is not a liability. It is the whole offer.

Three scenarios

Take the 2022 result as the baseline: a 1,290-vote Republican win, 0.68 points, on roughly 190,000 votes cast. Assume, for the moment, that Weiser matches Polis and Marx matches Ganahl before Lopez is accounted for. Then ask where Lopez's votes come from.

Scenario one, Lopez at 3 percent. The floor for a candidate this well known here. If two-thirds of that comes from voters who would otherwise back the Republican, Marx loses two points and Weiser loses one, and the net swing of a point is enough: the county goes to Weiser by a few tenths. Douglas County votes for a Democrat for governor.

Scenario two, Lopez at 8 percent. A strong but plausible showing for a former Parker mayor on his home turf, still far below his 2024 number. If the split stays two-thirds from the Republican side, Weiser carries the county by about two points, a result no Democrat has achieved here for governor in the modern record.

Scenario three, Lopez at 15 percent or more. The 2010 pattern. It requires Marx's campaign to collapse the way Dan Maes's did, and we do not predict it. But it is the scenario the county's Republican establishment should lose sleep over, because it has happened once already, and that year Tancredo carried Douglas County outright with 48 percent while the nominee got 11.

The only scenario in which Marx holds the county is Lopez under about two percent, or a Lopez vote that splits evenly between the parties instead of leaning Republican. Unaffiliated candidates do fade in the last weeks, so it is possible. It is not the way to bet.

Where his votes come from, and why "splitting" is the wrong word

Three reasons the Lopez vote here comes disproportionately from people who would otherwise be counted as Republicans, and one reason that is not the same as taking them from Marx. First, Lopez's own coalition: the 2024 special-election voters who gave him 12 points were Republican-primary-type voters in a low-turnout June, and they are exactly the people a 39.9 percent nominee has not consolidated. Second, Kirkmeyer and Bottoms voters, 62 percent of the county's Republican primary electorate in a county Kirkmeyer carried outright, have in our reading been given little reason by the Marx campaign to come home, and have a familiar conservative to park a protest vote with. Third, Weiser's ceiling is his own: he ran to Michael Bennet's left in the primary, and the Douglas County swing voter who split a ticket against Boebert in 2024 is not a progressive. Lopez does not need to take votes from Weiser to change the result; he mostly cannot.

Here is the fourth point, the one the spoiler argument skips. A vote is only "split" if it was going to be cast for the nominee. A meaningful share of the county's Kirkmeyer and Bottoms voters were not going to vote for Marx, and were not going to vote for Weiser either; they were going to skip the line or hold their nose. A Lopez vote from that person costs Marx nothing he had. What it does is put a number on the discontent, in public, on election night, instead of hiding it in the undervote. The Republican Party's remedy for that is not to shame those voters back into line. It is to nominate someone they will vote for. Douglas County is where that lesson will be delivered, because Douglas County is where those voters live in the greatest numbers.

The case against us

Here is what would make this piece wrong. Lopez could finish under two percent if the ballot-line effect is all he has; his September report shows $11,286 on hand, so the final weeks will be name recognition, not advertising. Marx could consolidate late; a Trump endorsement or a Kirkmeyer rapprochement in October would move Republican voters home. Weiser could underperform Polis here by more than Marx underperforms Ganahl, in which case Lopez's share is split against a lower Democratic floor and the county stays red. And 2022 was itself a midterm with an older, more Republican electorate than a presidential year, so this year's electorate is not obviously friendlier to Weiser than Polis's was.

Each of those is possible. None of them is the base case. The base case is a Republican nominee with a 1,290-vote cushion, two-fifths of his party's primary electorate, and a familiar local conservative on the ballot beside him, in a county where half the voters belong to no party at all.

What it would mean

If Douglas County votes for Weiser, the story on November 4 will not be that the county turned blue, and it will not be that Greg Lopez stole it. It will be that the Republican Party nominated a candidate six in ten of its own primary voters rejected, in a county where half the electorate belongs to no party, and that a familiar local conservative gave those voters an honest way to say so. That is a different thing from a realignment, and it is reversible the moment the party nominates someone this county's independents will vote for. It would be the first time since the 2010 collapse that a Republican nominee for governor finished behind the Democrat here, and unlike 2010, it would happen without the nominee's campaign imploding. Just a nominee the county did not want, and an alternative it recognized.

Watch the returns from Parker. Lopez's name has been on ballots there since the 1990s. If his share in Parker precincts is in double digits at 8 p.m. on November 3, this piece was right. If it is under three, we will say so.

More: our governor's race page, the Lopez profile, and every race and measure on your ballot.