At last night’s caucuses, local Republicans generally didn’t hold preference polls on the presidential race but there were exceptions, like Adams Country, a swing district that might possibly serve as a barometer of how Colorado would have gone on the red side.

Thanks to The Denver Post for reporting the GOP results from Adams County:

Even though the state Republican Party canceled the straw poll, Adams County officials decided to hold an “unofficial” count.

The precinct didn’t entertain speeches from the candidates’ supporters — “You know who the candidates are,” the organizer said. Instead, the neighbors wrote a last name on a pink slip and submitted it to the secretary.

The final vote count: Trump six, Cruz four, Rubio four and Carson one.

This is obviously only an anecdote, but it’s been hard to gauge Trump’s actual factual support in Colorado, because so few party leaders have endorsed him–or repudiated him.

On the favorable side for the reality-show star, other than caucus-goers in Adams Country, the closest thing we have to official Trump support is State Sen. Laura Woods, who’s said Trump is one of her two favorite candidates but then endorsed Cruz. Plus, vocalists on conservative talk radio, like KNUS 710-AM’s Peter Boyles, have endorsed him.

The GOP Trump haters are also largely in the closet–with exceptions.  In a beautifully written editorial today, titled Donald Trump’s Victories Point to GOP Crisis, The Denver Post reminds us that Sen. Cory Gardner called Trump a “buffoon” last year, and Rep. Ken Buck was more generous, calling him a “fraud.”

“Surely they wouldn’t support a buffoon or fraud if he’s nominated,” The Post opined. “If not, they should say so now.”

Yet, for the most part, Colorado Republicans have been silent on Trump, perhaps agreeing with Rep. Mike Coffman who said Trump “is not going to be the nominee.”

Surely, Coffman doesn’t think that now. But what do he and his fellow Republicans think of Trump and, by extension, the folks in Adams County who are backing him?

I’ve been searching for a Colorado Republican candidate or elected official who’s endorsed billionaire Donald Trump.

I thought I found my guy in Gerald Eller, a Colorado native and disabled Army veteran, who’s one of the dozen or so Republicans seeking to unseat Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet.

I noticed Eller liked a “Donald Trump Supporters” page on Facebook.

But he told me he’s not endorsed Trump.

“I support all of them,” said Eller, when asked about Trump. “I like all the Republican presidential candidates, even the ones who aren’t running anymore.”

So, here in Colorado, the closest we apparently have to an elected Republican who’s endorsed Trump is State Sen. Laura Woods, of Westminster, who told a radio host that her two favorite candidates were Trump and Cruz.

But Woods later she tweeted that she’d decided, for “no specific reason,” that Cruz was her top presidential candidate.

Other Republican candidates in high profile races told the Colorado Statesman last month that they’d back the GOP nominee, including Trump.

Included in the group is Rep. Mike Coffman, who brushed off questions about Trump in December with, ““He’s not going to be the nominee.”

Last year, Colorado Republicans eliminated their nonbinding caucus votes on presidential candidates, but the voting will go on anyway, “for fun,” in Adams County.

That’s what Adams County Republican Chair Anil Mathai announced on KLZ 560-AM’s John Rush yesterday.

“Across the state, there is no straw poll, but in Adams County we have a non-binding unofficial ‘for fun’ straw poll,” said Mathai on air. “I want to hear the voice of the people. So we will have one for U.S.presidential candidates as of Feb. 1 and also one for U.S. Senate candidates out of Colorado.”

I don’t know Mathai, but when it comes to fun, he and I seem to agree. The Republican straw poll in Adams County at the March 1 caucus will be huge fun to see. How could it not be, with Republican activists standing up for Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Carson, Kasich, etc. and Neville, Littleton, etc. etc. I hope someone live streams it.

“In Adams County, we’re just doing it for fun,” Mathai emphasized again at the end of the interview.

But whether Mathai’s notion of fun comports with the Republican rules is another matter. Initially, the statewide GOP straw poll was supposed to be nonbinding as well. But the national Republican Party told Colorado Republicans that if they had a straw poll, it had to be binding. So Colorado Republicans decided against having one.

So we’ll see how much fun national Republicans let Adams Country Republicans have.

Colorado Springs’ Republican Mayor John Suthers told the Colorado Springs Gazette Tuesday that turning the hospital provider fee into a TABOR-defined enterprise would be “by far the easiest, least painful solution for the taxpayers” to address Colorado’s budget woes.

But in his interview with Schrader, Suthers repeats the misinformation that Obamacare’s expansion of Colorado’s Medicaid program, which provides health care to the poor, is eating up state money now.

Suthers: “A lot of the animosity surrounding this goes back to the fact that they are saying look if we didn’t participate in the Medicaid expansion we wouldn’t need all this money, and the provider fee was basically a means to pay for the expansion. I understand all of that, but having the provider fee in the TABOR calculation is going to create immense problems going forward. It’s just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and if you don’t take it out I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

The animosity-filled people who told Suthers that Colorado “wouldn’t need all this money” if it weren’t for Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion are actually factually wrong.

Colorado’s Medicaid expansion has so far cost Colorado nothing (Here at page 26). It’s been 100 percent paid for by the federal government, which will slide down to paying 90 percent of the costs by 2020.

Next year, Colorado will contribute about $41 million toward covering Obamacare’s new Medicaid enrollees. If Colorado were paying the full 1o percent now, the state would contribute $142 million. And Suthers is correct that the Hospital Provider Fee, which is used to cover various health care services for poor people who can’t afford them, is earmarked to pay for this.

But $41 million is a fraction of the $768 million projected to be collected by the Hospital provider fee next year. Next year’s state contribution to covering Obamacare’s Medicaid enrollees, which looks to be on the order of $75 million, is still a fraction of the HPF money collected. So the HPF appears to be a solid source of funds for covering Colorado’s contibution to Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.

The people, mentioned by Suthers, who have all the animosity about the hospital provider fee should explain how they’d fund basic health care programs for elderly, disabled, and other poor people without it. And, for that matter, how they’d pay for state government with it, if it’s not removed from the TABOR framework and $370 million in tax dollars is refunded to you and me.

CLARIFICATION: I updated this post to clarify that the HPF funds health care in Colorado, not other government programs.

In a Feb. 2 radio interview with KNUS 710-AM host Peter Boyles, former Rep. Tom Tancredo said GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz never took him up an his offer to start an organization backing Cruz.

It was last year, after Tancredo had just penned a Breitbart column announcing his departure from the Republican Party. Tancredo was Rep. Steve King’s guest on an Iowa hunting trip, shooting “a lot of pheasants,” with Cruz and others, Tanc told Boyles:

TANCREDO:  So, we’re there at this hunt… And I just wrote the column that week that I had left the Republican Party, but that I was going to start a Colorado Independents for Cruz thing.  And he got [the article] — somebody had sent it to him.  And so, we’re in Iowa and about to go down to dinner, and he says to me, “Hey!  I saw that article! I really appreciate it!  Boy, we’re going to get back to you.  I told my people,” you know, “follow up on that!”  Of course, he never did.

But why, you wonder? Cruz is with Tancredo on immigration, notwithstanding Sen. Marco Rubio’s twisted attempts to make Cruz look immigrant-friendly. Tancredo and Cruz align against choice, against gun safety laws, etc. So I called Tancredo to find out. Why doesn’t Cruz want him?

Tancredo told me he can only speculate, but he assumes the Cruz campaign doesn’t think he’s needed at this point.

“My outreach is to Independents, right, for Cruz,” he said. “Well you can’t vote in the Republican primary here, you can’t go to the caucuses, unless you are a registered Republican. So the only value I would add, if any, is after Cruz is nominated.”

“Who would I talk to, the Jefferson County Republican Party?’ said Tancredo. “I don’t think they will invite me, for some reason.”

That makes sense, I told Tanc.

Still, Tancredo has gone ahead and set up a Facebook page, which he and others update regularly, called CO Independents for Ted Cruz.

“Not Just for Republicans,” is the headline.

In a move that could make the complex life of being a Republican even more complicated, Personhood USA has announced plans to place an abortion-ban measure on the ballot in Colorado Springs, where a domestic terrorist killed three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic at the end of last year.

“The people who reached out to us in Colorado Springs don’t want any violence, including abortion, there,” Personhood USA spokeswoman Jennifer Mason told me, adding, as I wrote in an RH Reality Check post this morning, that the campaign was planned before the shooting occurred.

Planned Parenthood’s announcement that it will re-open the clinic next week “confirmed” the decision to undertake the municipal initiative, which will mirror (at the municipal level) one of Colorado’s three failed state-wide measures that would have banned all abotion, even for rape, Mason said.

Personhood organizers are just beginning the legal process and paperwork required to place the initiative on the ballot, but they expect to have it completed within the next two months, Mason said.

So it’s not clear when the measure will appear on the ballot, if at all, but the signature-gathering effort alone will likely further push choice issues into election campaigns–sparking competition among Republicans who are competing for anti-choice primary voters and helping to define Republican and Democratic candidates up and down the ballot in November.

Could the measure push GOP turnout in Colorado Springs, a hotbed of evangelical churches? I have no idea, to be honest, but you have to think the electoral downsides of the latest personhood campaign, taking place in the wake of a massacre that taints the anti-abortion cause, whether they appoved of it our not, will hurt anti-choice Republicans in the end on Election Day.

Two sort-of prominent Colorado Republicans are apparently refusing to delete offensive comments on their Facebook pages.

Here are the comments, written by commenters on the Facebook pages of Sate Rep. State Rep. Stephen Humphrey (R-Severence) and Denver congressional candidate Casper Stockham.

In response to an article, posted by Humphrey on his Facebook page, in which Democratic House Speaker Dickey Lee Hullinghorst (D-Boulder) criticizes anti-choice “ideologues,” one commenter, Daniel Lanotte, wrote, “Just think where we would be now if Speaker Hullinghorst’s mother had chosen the Speaker’s solution.”

A comment on Stockham’s Facebook page, written in response to an article with the headline,”Breaking: Grand Jury Indicts pro-life investigator behind baby parts video; clears Planned Parenthood,” “Who the hell is this judge that determined this? I’m so angry at Planned Parenthood right now. I wish someone would just blow up their facilities.”

Stockham tells me he doesn’t have time to delete “stupid” stuff from his Facebook page, though he did have time to write comments in the same thread where the blow-up-Planned-Parenthood wish appears.

Humphrey, who introduced a bill last month in the legislature banning all abortion in Colorado, even for rape and incest, hasn’t deleted the Hullinghorst insult, since I told him about it in a voice mail Thursday. (But the commenter himself, David Lanotte, says he was intending only to express his opposition to abortion, not insult Hullinghorst. Lanotte said, “I was not saying that I wish she were aborted.”)

For an RH Reality Check post on the topic today, I asked an expert whether politicians and candidates are responsible for such comments on their Facebook pages. An this has relevance for reporters covering these types of issues.

“When you look at the sheer volume of what people put on Facebook, it’s unrealistic to expect staff or candidates to keep up with it,” said Boise State Associate Professor  Justin Vaughn, author of Controlling the Message: New Media in American Political Campaigns. “They might be getting thousands of comments. Unless we know there’s active support, we should be cautious about inferring that inaction means tacit support.”

But Vaughn said the expectation could be different if a politician knows about the comment or actively promotes it, by retweeting a tweet on Twitter or ‘liking’ a post on Facebook.”

“If the campaign is made aware of an offensive comment and refuses to take action, that’s another story,” said Vaughn.

Vaughn said there could be a political expectation that a candidate will use “certain moments to communicate with the electorate about the limits of political discourse.”

He pointed to a 2008 presidential debate when Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) corrected a questioner’s assertion that then Sen. Barack Obama was a  Sen. Barack Obama was a untrustworthy Arab.

On the radio Tuesday, GOP Chair Steve House amplified Republican lawmakers’ objections to the parental-leave legislation, which advanced in the state House yesterday.

Steve House said the bill, which allows parents to attend a limited number of school functions, is unneeded because employers already treat their employees nicely.

House: The point you just brought up,  one of the biggest problems we have as a Party is, we let the Democrats get away with the wrong premise — the premise in that case being that the average employer is not going to take care of their employees, or be flexible — like you just described– so therefore the government has to do it.   That’s crazy.  I’ve worked for a number of employers in my life.  I’ve watched employers deal with the fact that an employee needed  time to go to a school, or you know, to a meeting in the middle of the day. It doesn’t require government intervention unless your premise is all employers are too mean-spirited to do it, and that’s ridiculous!

KLZ 560-AM’s Steve Curtis didn’t ask Steve House, “What’s the big deal, if employers are so nice anyway. Why not have the law in place for the ones that are mean and greedy?’

We know there’s a few of them out there.

Charles Ehler, who’s one of the dozen or so Republicans vying for Democrat Michael Bennet’s U.S. Senate seat, shared this image on his Facebook page, with no explanation:

I called Ehler,  who is an Air Force Veteran, to find out how close he thinks our government is to rounding us up in boxcars–or if this was a joke. I mean, banning assault rifles leads to this?

Ehler: “It’s funny, and it’s not funny,” he told me, “because we could appear to be a beneveolent society, and as soon as the guns are gone, overnight, we could have a society like that. The force of government can turn on citizens almost at the blink of an eye. It’s called human nature. I have the force and you don’t.

Are we there? I don’t know that we’re there, but boy it could turn quickly. I really don’t think Americans need to find that out. We don’t need to create the conditions for it.”

“I’m collecting a pay check, and the person ordered me to shoot,” he said, pointing to government massacres at Wounded Knee, Ludlow, and Sand Creek.

“I’m also concerned about people getting trigger happy with the guns,” said Ehler, who’s retired from General Dynamics and has run motorcycle-restoration and bicycle-repair businesses. “And we see that happening with the police.

“We saw it with the fellow killed in Oregon the other day. They never saw a gun, but they shot him anyway. The excuse was, he was reaching for a gun.”

Ehler’s comments are in line with his website, which states, “A man with a gun needs little help from government to secure his freedom.”

It what appears to be the first radio interview of his U.S. Senate run, state Rep. Jon Keyser dodged questions on whether he’d like to change TABOR and abolish a state program offering in-state tuition for undocumented college students.

On KNUS 710-AM Saturday morning, Craig Silverman asked Keyser, “Are you a high tax or a low tax kind of guy? And how do you feel about changing TABOR – the Taxpayer Bill of Rights in Colorado?”

Keyser (@8:35 below): Well, certainly, that’s a state issue, and I’m running for United States Senate, but I am a low tax guy.  I think that the free market economy is something that is always going to work best and the more government, the more regulation that you pile on, the less the business owner – the small business owner, the families – have the ability to be free and make the judgment of how to spend their money the way they want to spend it.

Keyser’s refusal to answer questions on state issues came just five days after he resigned from the state house.

Keyser (@7:30 below): You know what?  I don’t think we need to – that’s something that the Colorado voters, I think, have already discussed. But where my focus will be is National security. And Michael Bennet has been terrible on that.  You know, he wants open borders.  I mean, he just recently opposed some very commo- sense legislation to reform our immigration system and that would prevent radical Islamist terrorists from posing and masquerading as refugees coming to our country.

Keyser aligned himself with U.S. Senate Republicans when he told Silverman that Syrians should not be allowed in the U.S. for now because he doesn’t think they can be screened well enough at the present time.

Keyser expressed his opposition to the Iran nuclear agreement negotiated by Obama, which lifted economic sanctions while aiming to stop Iran from developing nuclear bombs.

Keyser said Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet’s vote in favor of the pact shows he “cares more about the Iranian economy than he does about the Colorado economy.” Ouchy.

In response to a question about global warming, Keyser said he thinks “the climate is changin, but the question is, how much, and to what extent human factors are contributing to that.”

Keyser, who also indicated he is for the death penalty but against most abortions, is part of a crowded field of about a dozen Republicans vying to take on Bennet.