The secretary of the La Plata County Republican Party was elected to serve as the vice chair of the Colorado Republican Committee Saturday.
Hope Scheppelman, a Bayfield resident, will serve a two-year term.
Scheppelman won the race after two rounds of voting, where she secured 231.6 out of 355 votes. She will replace Priscilla Rahn, who stepped down from the role in June to run for Douglas County commissioner.
As vice chair, Scheppelman will serve as a voting member of the central committee and work alongside party Chair Dave Williams to raise funds and promote the party’s platform and candidates.
Scheppelman is a nurse practitioner and served as a Navy Corpsman from 2000 to 2004. She will continue to work in her role as the secretary of the county party while serving as vice chair.
“We need to engage all voters (conservatives, moderates, unaffiliated, the older and younger generation),” she said in an email to The Herald. “As a party we need to meet the voters where they are at. Ask the votes what issues matter to them most. Have meaningful conversations. Get to know our neighbors.”
Scheppelman joins an ailing state party. Republicans don’t hold a single statewide office and fill fewer seats in the statehouse than ever before, according to a recent Colorado Public Radio story.
Williams, who was elected chair in March, has criticized more moderate Republican lawmakers in fundraising emails. The party is now seeking to keep unaffiliated voters from participating in primary elections.
Scheppelman pledged to represent the Western Slope at a state level and made unity a critical piece of her platform.
In her nominating speech, Scheppelman said that she agrees with closing the primaries to unaffiliated voters, calling those elections the “bedrock of our Republican Party.”
The number of unaffiliated voters has grown both statewide and in La Plata County in recent years, and some observers are warning that denying unaffiliated voters from participating in primaries could harm the party’s appeal to the critical voting bloc.
Scheppelman initially declined to comment about how the party can work to appeal to historically conservative voters who do not subscribe to the more extreme ideology of the party, which continues to deny the validity of the 2020 presidential election results.
She later clarified that her statement on the need to engage all voters was also in response to the question regarding the appeal to more moderate voters.
In her speech, Scheppelman said that the party should seek to increase representation on school boards, improve rural health care, and defend property rights as well as the Taxpayer Bill of Rights. She also committed to traveling to all 64 counties in Colorado.
“As a party we are focused on representing grassroots activists across the state, not just the big counties, and standing strong for our conservative family values,” Scheppelman’s speech read.
rschafir@durangoherald.com
This story has been updated to include a clarification from Scheppelman regarding which questions she did and did not answer.
