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{"id":25632,"date":"2026-07-10T17:21:07","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T17:21:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/victor-marxs-gop-primary-win-in-colorado-creates-a-new-challenge-for-his-party\/"},"modified":"2026-07-10T17:21:07","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T17:21:07","slug":"victor-marxs-gop-primary-win-in-colorado-creates-a-new-challenge-for-his-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/victor-marxs-gop-primary-win-in-colorado-creates-a-new-challenge-for-his-party\/","title":{"rendered":"Victor Marx\u2019s GOP primary win in Colorado creates a new challenge for his party"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Voters in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ms.now\/rachel-maddow-show\/maddowblog\/colorado-jared-polis-clemency-board-fired-tina-peters-release\">Colorado<\/a> haven&rsquo;t elected a Republican governor in more than two decades, and now that this year&rsquo;s GOP gubernatorial primary has been called, it <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ms.now\/news\/phil-weiser-wins-colorado-democratic-governor-primary\">seems the streak will continue<\/a> for four more years. <a href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/election-colorado-republican-primary-marx-b570a0ebea909683fb7ae9559ea260e7\">The Associated Press reported<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Marine Corps veteran Victor Marx won the Republican primary for Colorado governor on Thursday, inching past a state senator who had the establishment&rsquo;s backing.<\/p>\n<p>Marx, described as a &ldquo;high risk humanitarian&rdquo; and the fastest gun disarmer in the world, defeated Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, his stiffest competition, in the June 30 election.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The results were incredibly close, and as of the latest tallies, Marx&rsquo;s lead over Kirkmeyer was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ms.now\/elections\/2026-primaries\/co\/colorado-gubernatorial-primary-midterm-election-results-2026-r4ji\">only about half a percentage point<\/a>. That said, the advantage was good enough for news organizations to call the contest.<\/p>\n<p>For her party, Kirkmeyer thanked her supporters and volunteers in a statement Thursday evening, signing off by saying, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m still proud of the campaign we ran &hellip; and, for the record, I still haven&rsquo;t killed anyone.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>That might sound like a strange thing to say, but in this case, it was highly relevant: According to Marx, who founded a group called All Things Possible Ministries, he had an abusive stepfather who effectively forced him, at just 7 years old, to kill a man.<\/p>\n<p>Asked in May how many people he has killed since then, the GOP candidate paused before telling Kyle Clark, an anchor at the NBC affiliate in Denver, &ldquo;Does it matter?&rdquo; He went on to call it an &ldquo;odd question.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>(For the record, there are lingering questions about whether Marx actually killed a man as a child, and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cpr.org\/2026\/05\/20\/colorado-gop-governor-primary-candidates\/\">according to local law enforcement<\/a>there are unsolved murders from that time period.)<\/p>\n<p>In case that weren&rsquo;t quite enough, in the same interview, Marx explained that he also performs exorcisms, which he added can be completed over the phone.<\/p>\n<p>He did not appear to be kidding.<\/p>\n<p>A recent <a href=\"https:\/\/slate.com\/news-and-politics\/2026\/06\/colorado-governor-race-victor-marx-maga-charlie-kirk.html\">Slate report<\/a> noted that party insiders not only expect him to lose badly, they&rsquo;re also concerned that having Marx at the top of the GOP ballot &ldquo;could imperil other Republican seats in the statehouse and Congress, plunging the fractured, marginalized party into chaos.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>Marx will face Phil Weiser, the Democratic state attorney general, in November. Watch this space.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p>Steve Benen is a producer for &#8220;The Rachel Maddow Show,&#8221; the editor of&nbsp;MaddowBlog&nbsp;and an MS NOW political contributor. He&#8217;s also the bestselling author of &#8220;Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans&#8217; War on the Recent Past.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ms.now\/rachel-maddow-show\/maddowblog\/victor-marx-colorado-governor-exorcisms-kill-man\" class=\"button purchase\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Voters in Colorado haven&rsquo;t elected a Republican governor in more than two decades, and now that this year&rsquo;s GOP gubernatorial primary has been called, it seems the streak will continue for four more years. The Associated Press reported: Marine Corps veteran Victor Marx won the Republican primary for Colorado governor on Thursday, inching past a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25633,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trump"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}