Meet Some Of The 4,600 Colorado Republicans Who Quit The Party After The US Capitol Riot
Lyle Darrah was on a conference call at work when the riot at the U.S. Capitol started on Jan. 6. When his boss mentioned what was happening, he turned on news coverage — and immediately felt his last allegiance to the Republican Party slipping away.
“I was completely shocked and ashamed. That’s not how I think of the Republicans — who we were, and who we are,” he said. “It’s something I felt I could no longer be in support of.”
That night, he talked with his wife over dinner at their home in the Weld County town of Mead. Darrah had been a lifelong Republican, while his spouse and children are Democrats — the kind of family that joked about canceling out each other’s votes.
Later, Darrah, age 49, sat in his living room and pulled up the state's voter registration website. And then, like thousands of other Coloradans in the wake of the insurrection, he left the Republican Party.
“I think it should be a signal,” said Darrah, a software company director who voted for former-President Donald Trump in 2016 and President Joe Biden in 2020.
His strongest political priorities are fiscal conservatism and national defense, he said.
“I don’t know if there’s anything to be said about being party loyal your entire life, if your party doesn’t go in the direction you want it to,” Darrah added.
But in this moment of upheaval, his story is just one of many reasons that voters have abandoned the GOP.
Nearly 5,000 Arizona voters dropped their GOP voter registration in nine days after the Capitol attack, state figures show. In Pennsylvania, another state Trump lost, nearly 10,000 voters registered as Republicans had dropped their GOP affiliation as of Monday, according to state data.
On Wednesday, the Oregon state house Republican caucus distanced itself from the “false flag” claim in a statement and tried to shift attention to economic issues. “The election is over. It is time to govern,” said the statement, signed by 23 representatives.
