This piece originally appeared in the Colorado Times Recorder.
In 2022, Rep. Stephanie Vigil (D-Colorado Springs) beat Republican Dave Donelson, a Colorado Springs City Councilor, by 710 votes in the Colorado State House District 16 race. The narrow victory was a sign of the slow electoral shift in Colorado Springs, a city long considered a conservative stronghold. Since then, Vigil has focused on increasing protections for gig workers, renters, and LGBTQ people in Colorado, and that has made her public enemy number one for El Paso County Republicans.
“My opponent is Stephanie Vigil, and as Darcy [Schoening] mentioned, she’s very, very left,” said Rebecca Keltie during the Aug. 28 Capitol Club luncheon where radio host Kim Monson railed against mail-in ballots and asked for donations to help a convicted felon file lawsuits against the Colorado Secretary of State. “She’ll tell you she’s moderate. However, that is untrue. She is as left as you can get. She’s against parents’ rights. She had the bill for the trans – the pronoun bill – and the bill for kids [to] change their name on their school records, all that kind of stuff. That was her bill. She’s pioneering her way through pretty much everything that we as conservatives don’t want.”
This year’s House Bill 1039, Non-Legal Name Changes, has drawn the ire of conservatives since it was introduced, with contentious floor debates after a week of social media bickering over a failed Republican bill related to child prostitution. In May, Vigil was targeted by Schoening, the Colorado GOP’s director of special initiatives, in a party-wide email urging parents to remove their kids from public schools and claiming Democrats want to “turn more kids trans.” Vigil says the conservative attacks on the Name Changes bill are disingenuous.
“That bill affirms parental rights,” says Vigil during an interview with Colorado Times Recorder. “It was specifically drafted to protect the parental rights of families who have transgender youth in the home, who don’t wish to have their kids go to a public school and be deadnamed intentionally and have their parenting choices overruled by someone else. Overwhelmingly, that’s what this is for. What we were concerned with and why we have the bill is that most transgender youth are affirmed and accepted and out at home. Their parents know who they are. They support them. They’ve got their back, but then they go to school, and they don’t necessarily have the right to go by a name that is their chosen name, that hasn’t legally been changed, when they’re at school. I think they should have that right, and I think that families who have transgender youth in the home have the right to have their parenting choices honored at the school.”
Vigil pushed back on claims that the bill infringed on parental rights. “They’ve lied about this nonstop to anybody who will listen to them,” she says. ”They’ve repeated it in the press over and over again, unfortunately. There’s absolutely nothing in the bill that says that a school may not contact the parent to let them know that this is going on. … These people love to attack the parental rights of queer families. It is actually just astonishing to me that they have no respect whatsoever for any families that don’t look and act exactly like theirs. To me, that is not valuing families, that’s weaponizing our family values that we all have.”
During the Capitol Club Luncheon, Keltie also expressed concern over the economy. “Some of the bills that I would like to see happen would be to lessen the burden on our young people in Colorado as far as getting out of their parents’ basements,” she said. “Their kids can’t afford to move out. Old people, seniors, can’t afford to even move, to sell that big house, move to something smaller.”
Vigil notes that economic woes are multi-faceted and go beyond the state legislature. “A lot of these economic issues are so far beyond Colorado’s borders and they’re so far deeper into the past than just the current leadership,” says Vigil. “There are some things we can do to intervene, but we also have to recognize that the inflation issue is global, right? Corporate consolidation of our resources in this country, of wealth and resources, is [a national issue], and then some. We are up against an economy where we’ve let a vanishingly smaller number of people hoard wealth and resources, try to get more out of you for your labor without paying you more, and charging you more when it comes to food and rent and transportation.”
Vigil points to the contested merger between Kroger and Albertson’s supermarket chains as an example. “We’ve got even two of the biggest players wanting to consolidate even further, to the point that you’ll have the [single] food store where you can shop, when there should be many if we want competition and lower prices. The corporate consolidation piece is a huge one, and it’s important that we continue to have an attorney general who is willing to go to bat for us in that regard and a legislature that’s always looking to empower workers to get more money in our pockets in the first place, from our labor so that we have some buying power out there in the world.”
Keltie also spoke out against Colorado’s abortion legislation. “We need to do much better with our unborn,” she said. “The fact that we passed a bill that says you can abort a baby up to the time of birth — I have a huge problem with that. I certainly do. Today is 2024. The medical technology makes that completely unnecessary. A baby can be born at six months and still survive today.”
Vigil has been endorsed by pro-abortion organizations such as New Era Colorado, COLOR, and Cobalt. “I make a concerted effort to be available to the community,” says Vigil. “We’ve resolved dozens of constituent concerns and administrative burdens and things through my office. I am more than happy to be here for any and everyone who needs me. I’m very eager to get back to work for the people for two more years.”
Keltie previously ran for U.S. House District 5, first as a Unity Party candidate in 2020 and then attempting to primary Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) in 2022. Keltie has also been active in the election conspiracy sphere. In 2022, Keltie canvassed with the U.S. Election Integrity Plan (USEIP), the QAnon-linked election fraud conspiracy group. When asked by NPR about threats to election workers and elected officials, Keltie replied, “I think if there is pressure and if there are threats then that right there shows you they are trying to get away with something.”
In January, Keltie attended the “Never Surrender Rally” at DCF Guns in Colorado Springs. The event, hosted by Douglas County podcaster and defamation suit defendant Joe Oltmann, featured Mike Lindell and disgraced former Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters, who was sentenced today to 9 years in prison and jail for her role in election equipment tampering and official misconduct, actions motivated at least in part by the election conspiracy claims of Lindell and Oltmann. Colorado Times Recorder asked Keltie about her thoughts on the 2020 election.
“I believe that there was some collusion that went on within the [2020] election,” she said. “I only say that because I went door-to-door, and I talked to people, and I met people who got double ballots, triple ballots, four or five ballots. I asked them, ‘What did you do with those ballots?’ I was just an observer, but they all had different answers. Do I think things happened? I do. Do I think was it completely stolen? And, you know, I don’t know, but I think it’ll come out in the pudding.”
