Dan Woog makes his HD-19 case on cost of living, schools and police 

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

One part of the job Dan Woog singles out isn’t in his campaign platform. It’s the school groups. He makes a point of talking with the kids who tour the Capitol on field trips, he says, and he’s come to believe the visits fill a gap. “As a dad, I’ve realized how important it is that children learn how state government works because they are not always getting a hands on experience at school,” Woog says.

The same concern turns toward his own two kids. He worries about their future in Colorado, he says, and traces it to a cost of living he blames on overregulation.

The job also competes with them for his time. Woog says the week fills with events he is invited to, and he has had to turn more of them down to be home. “I’ve had to learn to say no much more often in order to spend that short amount of time with my kids,” he says.

That pull between the demands of the job and the family it’s supposed to serve runs underneath most of what Woog says about why he’s seeking another term in House District 19.

The seat straddles Weld and Boulder counties. He won it in 2024 by 110 votes, the second-closest legislative race in the state, and he faces the same opponent again this year, Democrat Jillaire McMillan.

The cost of staying

Affordability is the center of Woog’s pitch, and housing is where he starts. He argues Colorado’s construction-defect liability laws have choked off condo construction by making builders easy targets. The current rules, he says, “are as much about enriching trial lawyers as they are about protecting homeowners.”

Lawmakers did pass a construction-defect reform package in 2025, HB25-1272, which Woog voted for. He wants to go further, and he is candid that more won’t pass without Democrat votes given the majorities in both chambers.

He describes himself as working to build “a common-sense coalition in favor of reform across party lines.”

His affordability argument extends to fees. 

Woog wants to repeal the state’s retail delivery fee and what he calls the gas-tax fee, and he defends the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights against what he describes as fee workarounds that sidestep its limits.

His own delivery-fee repeal stalled in committee, and he concedes the long odds, blaming what he calls “far too many Democratic Socialist-aligned legislators” who are “wedded to creating a bigger government through higher taxes.” The plan now, he says, is to keep building the research case until the political pressure shifts the votes.

Schools and what parents can see

On education, Woog wants two things at once, full funding for public schools and a wider set of choices for families, and he argues the state has spent heavily without the results to match. Success, he says, should be measured “by outputs” rather than “just inputs,” by how well students learn rather than how much is spent.

His proposal rests on a new federal program. 

The Federal Scholarship Tax Credit, created under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, takes effect Jan. 1, 2027, and offers taxpayers a federal income tax credit of up to $1,700 for donations to approved scholarship-granting organizations in participating states. Woog wants Colorado to treat it as a building block for a wider choice program. He credits Gov. Jared Polis with opting the state in and hopes the next governor keeps it there.

The program’s arrival in Colorado prompted a response from Democrat lawmakers. They introduced a bill this session to attach conditions to schools receiving the scholarship money, including nondiscrimination requirements enforceable through court injunctions and suspension of a school’s eligibility by the State Board of Education.

The House Education Committee, where Democrats hold the majority, postponed that measure indefinitely on April 30 on a unanimous 11-0 vote. For now, Colorado is participating without the added state guardrails some in the majority wanted.

On transparency, Woog wants districts to post their curricula online, and he puts the resistance on organized labor, endorsing “full transparency for parents in spite of the vigorous opposition of teachers’ unions.”

He went further, though he prefaced it by saying he prefers “to preserve local control over most of these decisions.” The state, he said, “could consider universal transparency rules whereby parents have the ability to view their child’s classroom on a protected closed circuit.”

He pointed to remote learning during the COVID era, which he called “an eye-opener for many parents,” as a preview. He offered the closed-circuit idea as one possibility rather than a firm proposal, and did not take up the teacher-privacy and classroom questions it would invite.

Policing both ways

Public safety is one of the few areas where Woog’s platform calls for expansion rather than rollback. His campaign site backs putting more officers on the street, though the answer he gave RMV went to accountability instead.

He argues the two goals belong together rather than working against each other. “Promoting public safety is not at odds with holding bad officers accountable,” he says. He supports removing officers found guilty of misconduct and expanding what departments disclose about their conduct.

Body cameras are the reconciling device according to Woog, the tool that lets him back the police and police the police at once. “They protect the public from officer misconduct. They protect officers from fraudulent charges of abuse. Both win,” he says. It is a position that asks something of both sides of the usual argument, more funding for departments and more scrutiny of the officers in them. Woog presents the combination as common sense rather than compromise.

What he learned from his father

Woog lost his father early, and credits him with the lesson that still shapes how he works. His father taught him, he says, “to listen to all people’s points of view and do my best to understand where they are coming from.”

He offers his own time as a volunteer youth coach as a case where that played out. 

Faced with a proposal to add training requirements for coaches, Woog says he was unsure at first that it would do much good. He says that after hearing directly from parents and athletes about severe injuries they had encountered, he feels he made the right decision.

It is a small example, but the shape of it, doubtful first, then settled by the people closest to the problem, is the posture he claims for the job generally.

People, not politics

Woog’s own label for his approach is “People Not Politics.” 

The Legislature has grown more polarized, he argues, and while “Democratic Socialists are a growing power,” he’s quick to add that “not all Democrats are socialists.” The method he describes is to find the ones willing to work across the aisle and build center-right solutions with them.

For a Republican in House District 19, that is not only a philosophy but arithmetic. 

Unaffiliated voters make up about 53% of the district’s active voters as of Oct. 1, outnumbering either party more than two to one in the Secretary of State’s monthly count, so Woog holds the seat only by winning well beyond his own party.

He did it in 2024 by 110 votes, and he faces McMillan again in a district he has called “among the most politically balanced and competitive in the state.” With Democrat majorities in both chambers, the same math governs anything he hopes to pass.

Which brings it back to the field-trip kids filing through the Capitol. 

Woog wants them to understand how the building works. The harder lesson, the one his own position keeps returning him to, is how much of what happens there depends on finding the votes across the aisle to make it work.