Following the Money in Local Government

The Quiet Money

By Blask • July 2026 • blaskattacks.com • Burn It All Down Baby

Somebody gave $9.7 million to a political nonprofit in Colorado in 2020. One person. That single donation was more than half the group’s entire budget, the group spent about $4 million of it telling you how to vote on three statewide ballot measures, and on June 29 the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that you never get to learn that person’s name. Not this year. Not ever.

I’ve been pulling records on this for a while now, so grab a fork, because I’m going to help you eat this bowl of shit spaghetti one noodle at a time. Fair warning up front, and I’ll say it again later because it matters: most of what’s in this post is legal. That’s not me clearing anybody. That’s the fucking problem.

The case that just rewrote the rules↑ Top

The group was called Unite for Colorado. Here’s the timeline, straight from the filings and the court record:

So the people of Colorado voted on three ballot measures in 2020 with $4 million of persuasion raining down on them, spent six years asking one question through every level of the court system, and the final answer was: you don’t get to know.

Now think about what that ruling actually is. It’s not just a loss. It’s an instruction manual. Keep your ballot spending under 25% of your total budget and you can pour millions into Colorado elections while disclosing nothing. Every political operative in Denver read that opinion the same way I did. (Two honest footnotes: the court applied the old legal test to 2020 conduct, and a 2022 law wrote a 30% threshold into statute going forward, so how this plays for future cycles is genuinely unsettled. And the reporting says the justices treated it as a close call. Fine. The message received on the ground is not subtle.)

How is this legal? Let me show you the pipes↑ Top

Colorado actually has decent disclosure law on paper. We voted it into the constitution ourselves in 2002. State-level super PACs have to register fast and itemize every donor over $250 in the state’s public TRACER database. You can go search it tonight, and you should, it’s your database.

Here’s the leak. When the “donor” listed in TRACER is itself a nonprofit, the trail stops dead. The nonprofit reports its donors to nobody but the IRS, and the IRS redacts them. So you get a name like “Brighter Future for Colorado” in the public record and a brick wall behind it. Every serious player in this state, left and right, runs on that one design flaw.

The legislature knew. In 2019 they passed the Clean Campaign Act, which says anyone giving $10,000 or more earmarked for political spending has to pass along an affirmation identifying themselves. Sounds airtight. The dodge is one sentence long: the nonprofit just says the donations it received were never “designated” as political. No designation, no affirmation, no trail. Common Cause predicted this exact evasion the year the law passed. A bill to fix it, SB25-148, died in a Senate committee in March 2025 without so much as a floor vote.

And enforcement? A federal judge struck down our old citizen-enforcement system in 2018, and the replacement runs like this: you file a complaint, the Secretary of State’s office decides whether to prosecute it, a hearing officer hears it, and a deputy secretary of state issues the final ruling. Standard penalty for blowing a filing deadline is fifty bucks a day. The Unite case took SIX YEARS to reach a final answer, and the answer was nothing. If you designed a system to look like accountability while guaranteeing it never arrives in time to matter, it would look exactly like this.

Both teams run this play↑ Top

Before anybody puts on a jersey here, let me ruin the party for everyone. The Colorado Sun went through the TRACER filings for the 2022 cycle and found at least $42 million spent influencing Colorado voters came from nonprofits that don’t disclose their donors. That’s about 35% of all the money state super PACs raised and about 31% of the ballot-measure money. Roughly a third of the money in our biggest political fights is anonymous. And it flowed to Democrats and Republicans alike. (That $42 million is the Sun’s own computation from the state’s data, so credit and blame to them, but nobody has ever rebutted it.)

This is what I mean when I call it football politics. People treat their party like their team. They cheer their side’s wins, they boo the other side even when the other side just did something that actually helps them, and everybody’s got endless vitriol for the neighbor in the wrong jersey. Working people happily dividing themselves from working people. Meanwhile, look at the money above — both locker rooms are getting paid out of the same kind of anonymous wallets, and the only people winning every single Sunday are the billionaires and political elite up in the owner’s box. My problem was never with the fans. You’re not on the field, you never were. To the people running this league, you’re the ticket revenue.

The blue side. Colorado is literally where the modern dark money playbook got written. In the mid-2000s four rich progressives, Tim Gill, Pat Stryker, Rutt Bridges, and a pre-Congress Jared Polis, built the coordinated nonprofit network that flipped this state and became a national template. Two Republicans wrote a whole book about it called The Blueprint. Yes, that Polis. The governor who signed the 2019 transparency law was a founding member of the original quiet-money machine. I’m not going to make the joke, the joke makes itself.

Today the out-of-state money comes through the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a D.C. giant that has moved eight figures into Colorado, sometimes wearing local costumes with names like “Health Care FAQs.” But the fresher story is One Main Street Colorado. It reported $2.8 million in 2024 revenue, including $1 million from a pass-through called Coloradans for Progress, which itself took $2.2 million from Chevron and another $1.13 million from an oil and gas trade group. In last month’s Democratic statehouse primaries, about $2 million in untraceable money flowed through three nonprofits into eight brand-new super PACs with names like “Denver Progressives United” and “Blue Collar Progressives.”

“Blue Collar Progressives.” Chevron money, routed through two shells, named like it’s your union buddy. Come the fuck on.

Several of those PACs were registered to the same person at a Durango apartment or a UPS store mailbox in downtown Denver. (Somewhere in this state there is a strip mall mailbox with more political pull than your city council. Anyway, I’m getting off topic.) The one clean note: the money that fought back was union money, about $800,000 disclosed right out in the open, AFL-CIO, teachers, SEIU, names on the record. And the dark slate lost 6 of its 8 races. Remember that for later.

The red side. Remember Advance Colorado Action, the renamed Unite for Colorado? The network around it, run by Michael Fields, is the most effective political operation in Colorado that no voter can audit. The 990s mapped by the Colorado Times Recorder (a progressive outlet, so weigh that, but the underlying documents are tax filings) show $8.85 million arriving in 2022 from a nonprofit called Colorado Stronger Alliance and then bouncing between satellite groups, Colorado Dawn, Ready Colorado, Defend Colorado, until the origin is unrecoverable, before roughly $8 million lands on Republican causes. Money moving in circles until it comes out clean.

Side note, because staring at these circles for weeks did something to my brain: I started building a tool that draws them. It lives at coloradopoliticsmap.com — think LittleSis, but for Colorado — you pull up a company and see the lobbies it hires, the bills those lobbies touched, and the donors behind the whole parade. The circles make a lot more sense when you can actually look at them.

What did it buy? In 2023 the network put well over $2 million into killing Prop HH, and before you cheer or boo, know that the Yes side’s biggest donors were dark too, $650K from a New York education nonprofit and $600K from the Sixteen Thirty Fund. Dark versus dark, with your property taxes as the battlefield. Then in 2024 Advance and the business lobby qualified two ballot measures that would have blown a $2.4 billion hole in school and local budgets, and traded them away in closed-door negotiations that forced the governor to call a special session. A nonprofit with anonymous funders summoned the elected legislature of Colorado to the table and cut a tax deal. One political observer said it straight: “There really is no accountability.” Whatever you think about property taxes, and plenty of regular people wanted the cuts, you cannot vote for or against the people who did this. That’s the problem.

Who funds Advance? The rumor around Denver, stated flat-out by a GOP central committee member in 2023 and conspicuously not disputed by the network’s former president, is Phil Anschutz, the richest man in Colorado. Now I should say this plainly, because this is the difference between this blog and a conspiracy channel: that is an attributed rumor, not a documented fact. I can’t prove it. Nobody with the books has confirmed or denied it on the record. The documented funders are foundations like Bradley and Walton money. The biggest checks are exactly as anonymous as the law allows, which is the entire point of this post.

And your actual elections?↑ Top

Quick tour. The 2024 race for the 8th Congressional District, our great toss-up seat, cost about $40 million, and three-quarters of it was outside money, including a state fund “funded in large part by nonprofits that don’t disclose their donors.” For every dollar the candidates controlled, outsiders spent three. The 2023 Denver mayor’s race was carried by a $4 million super PAC stocked with out-of-state billionaires. And this June, Michael Bennet’s run for governor had $11 million in super PAC air support, $5.1 million of it from Michael Bloomberg and $1.25 million from a donor-secret nonprofit registered to a UPS store in Cherry Creek, created in February 2024 for apparently this exact purpose.

Bennet lost by ten points.

Sit with that, because it’s the one genuinely hopeful thing I found. Weiser won while being outspent nearly eight to one on the outside, and his election night line was “You all sent a very clear message: the future of Colorado will not be decided by out-of-state billionaires.” Same night, the Chevron-funded slate went 2 for 8 in the statehouse primaries. The money doesn’t always win. But here’s the part that should still bother you: in the Hickenlooper Senate primary that same night, the PACs defending him were funded by a donor-secret nonprofit, and because of federal reporting deadlines, voters didn’t learn who paid until after they voted. Disclosure that arrives after the election isn’t disclosure. It’s a receipt for a purchase you already made.

What I can prove, what I can’t, and what you can do↑ Top

The honest ledger. Documented, with filings: everything above with a link on it. Not proven: who gave Unite for Colorado that $9.7 million, who actually bankrolls Advance, whether the Anschutz rumor is true, and any actual lawbreaking by any of these groups, because almost none of this breaks the law. Nobody’s been charged with anything. The system isn’t being cheated. The system is working as built, and after June 29 it’s built a little worse.

You don’t have to take my word for a single sentence of this. TRACER is public, every super PAC donor over $250, searchable right now. ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer has the 990s of every nonprofit I named, and the next batch drops this fall and will show who bankrolled 2025. The complaint form is one PDF, any citizen can file. And the legislature convenes in January knowing exactly what the Supreme Court just blessed. Watch who introduces the fix, and watch who kills it in committee like they did in March 2025.

One more tool, and full disclosure, I built this one. coloradopoliticsmap.com is my map of exactly what this post describes: the connections between the companies, the lobbies, the bills, and the donors, drawn as an actual map instead of a pile of filings. Poke around it, break it, tell me what I got wrong.

The pattern here is not that one party is dirty. The pattern is that both machines figured out the same thing: Coloradans can outvote money, but we can’t outvote money we can’t see, and every year the pipes get quieter while the checks get bigger. You’re allowed to know who’s talking to you before you vote. That used to be the whole deal.

Until next time.

~Blask

Sources↑ Top