By C.J. Garbo | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice
Over the last three years prior to my leaving Colorado, a number of elected officials and party activists asked me to run for office. The list is not short. Castle Rock Town Council. Douglas County Commissioner. State House. State Senate. More than once, State Party Chair. A few of those conversations were casual. Several were serious, with people offering to open doors, raise money, and put their own names behind mine.
Every time, my answer was the same. I was flattered, and the answer was no.
Here is my confession: I very much wanted to say yes. Not politely, and not in the abstract. I wanted it badly. I believed then and believe now that I could have served well in any of those seats, and that I could have advanced the conservative cause in Colorado in a way that would have been worth the trouble.
So why did I keep saying no?
Not because I doubted myself. Because I understood the actual job.
What the job actually is
I have a clear and specific picture of what it would take to restore this party to relevance in Colorado. Not a slogan, not a mood, an actual plan. And the honest description of that plan is that nearly everything would have to change for the better.
Communications and messaging would have to be rebuilt from the ground up, because we currently talk almost entirely to people who already agree with us, in a vocabulary that persuades nobody else. Technology would have to be learned, embraced, and adopted, and I do not mean a better website. I mean data, testing, measurement, and the discipline to let results tell us we were wrong.
The party would have to be refocused and restored to its true and original role, which is to find, equip, and elect candidates and to build the machinery that makes that possible, rather than to serve as a permanent tribunal on who is sufficiently pure. Voices across the entire conservative spectrum would have to be unified, which requires treating people we disagree with as assets rather than as threats.
And then comes the hardest part, the part most people underestimate. None of it works unless it is explained. That means hours upon hours of open, transparent, intelligent dialogue about the specific details of the strategy and exactly why it would work, until people own it instead of merely tolerating it.
I have done this kind of estimate professionally many times. Three hundred to four hundred hours of real work before a single vote is cast. That is not a guess. That is what a comprehensive strategy of that scope actually costs.
The math I could not make work
The hours were never the problem. In the private sector, this is precisely what I do. People like me are aggressively sought after and paid handsomely for the exact skills this party says it needs. I have never once been punished by a client for building something that worked.
The problem is what happens to the hours.
I know, with a confidence I wish I did not have, how that investment would be received. Not debated. Not tested. Received. The strategy would not fail on its merits because it would never be allowed to reach a point where merit could be measured. It would be met with hostility, with gaslighting, with slander of my character, and with outright lying. And here is the part that decides the whole calculation: too many people would believe it.
That is the real cost. Not the critics. Critics are the price of doing anything at all.
The cost is that a rumor takes sixty seconds to manufacture and six weeks to answer, and that we have built a culture in which the manufacturer pays nothing and the builder pays everything. We reward the impulse to attack with the same enthusiasm we should be reserving for the discipline to build. A plan requires patience. An accusation requires none. When those two things compete for the same audience, the plan loses, and it loses fast.
So, I ran the numbers the way I would run them for any client, and the numbers said no. I said no.
This is not about the people who said yes
I want to be exact here, because this argument is easy to misread.
Nothing I have written is a complaint about the people currently holding office or serving in party leadership. They said yes when I said no. They accepted a cost I refused to accept. Many of them are capable, serious, and effective, and they are doing this work while absorbing exactly the treatment I just described. That is not a knock on them. It is a debt we owe them.
My argument is not that the wrong people are in the room. My argument is that the room is far emptier than it should be.
The cost nobody puts on a ledger
Opportunity cost is an old idea and a simple one. The true cost of any choice is the best alternative you gave up in order to make it.
This party’s visible costs are its losses, and everyone can read those in a newspaper. The invisible cost is the roster that never formed. It is the candidate who never filed, the chairman who never ran, the strategist who never volunteered, the donor who never got a plan worth funding.
I am not unusual. I can name a dozen people off the top of my head who are exceptional at precisely the things this party lacks. Every one of them was approached. Every one of them thought seriously about it. Every one of them ran the same arithmetic I ran and arrived at the same answer, and their reasoning was nearly identical to mine. When that many independent, competent people reach the same conclusion without comparing notes, it stops being a coincidence and starts being a finding.
I want to be clear about where I fall on that list. I am not the most capable person on it. I am not close. I am simply the one willing to write this down, because I no longer have much to lose by saying it out loud. Whatever you believe was lost when I said no, multiply it, and then understand that the better ones said no more quietly than I did.
I also have to own my share of it. Nobody prevented me from running. I chose the comfortable math. The people who stepped forward anyway were not braver by accident; they simply valued the work more than they feared the cost.
That is a judgment on me, not on them.
What would actually change the answer
Recruitment dinners will not fix this, and neither will another round of pleading for good people to step up. Good people are already listening. They are just doing the math out loud in their kitchens instead of in front of you.
Three things would change the answer.
First, a culture in which losing an argument inside the party does not cost you your reputation outside of it. Disagreement is a normal operating expense. Character assassination is not.
Second, leaders who defend absent people. A rumor dies the moment someone with standing says plainly, in public, that it is not true and that they checked. That costs almost nothing, and almost nobody does it.
Third, the patience to let a plan produce a result. Any serious strategy needs two cycles before anyone can honestly judge it. If we cannot promise a builder that much runway, we should stop asking builders to come.
The next time you hear that our bench is thin, I would ask you to consider a different explanation. The bench is not thin. The bench is full of people who ran the numbers. Right now they are doing this exact work for companies that will not attack them for doing it well.
This party can still have them. It simply cannot have them for free, and the price is not money. The price is a credible promise that good work will be allowed to live long enough to matter.
And I would ask you to sit with one last thing. Those four hundred hours of mine were never actually lost. They exist. They went to a company that did not need saving, they worked, and I was thanked for them. The work happened. It simply happened somewhere else, for people who were never going to need it the way this party does.
I am writing this as one of the people who said no. Take it as a confession first and an argument second.
C. J. Garbo is a cybersecurity executive, political strategist, public-policy advisor, and organizational leader with more than two decades of experience across technology, government, law enforcement, and civic leadership. He currently serves in a global technology solutions company where he advises senior leaders, manages enterprise risk, and builds governance programs that protect critical operations, data, and institutional trust.
Garbo is also an experienced political strategist and campaign leader with a strong record of advising candidates, shaping public messaging, analyzing elections, and translating complex policy issues into clear, persuasive arguments. His political work spans campaign management, legislative analysis, public communications, election administration, local government, and conservative coalition building. He is known for combining political judgment with disciplined research, strategic communication, and a practical understanding of how policy decisions affect institutions, communities, and individual liberty.
A CISSP-certified executive, Garbo has led large cybersecurity organizations, established security operations capabilities, directed enterprise technology programs, and guided organizations through major regulatory, operational, and strategic challenges. His expertise includes executive risk management, cybersecurity governance, organizational transformation, crisis leadership, regulatory compliance, and the development of accountable, high-performing teams.
Garbo holds a master’s degree in human resource management and a bachelor’s degree in political science. His multidisciplinary background also includes 15 years of law enforcement service and extensive leadership in civic, nonprofit, political, and community organizations. He writes on government, elections, cybersecurity, leadership, public policy, institutional accountability, and the preservation of public trust.
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.