DENVER — Thirty-six hours after Republicans suffered historic election losses in Colorado, and as elected members were regrouping, state Rep. Richard Holtorf, of Akron, framed the party’s position in heroic terms.
“I think of the Spartans and Leonidas, as the Persian army comes down to take over and destroy Greece and Sparta,” Holtorf said, referring to the legend of a vastly outnumbered — and doomed — group of Spartans who fought to hold off their opponents.
It was the first public regrouping of elected Colorado Republicans after an election that one described as a shellacking. The Republican candidates for the state’s top offices had just been swept, some by double digits, by Democratic incumbents. Hopes on election night that the GOP would narrow the Democrats’ majority in the state House of Representatives and maybe even flip the state Senate materialized the next day as losses.
