Dusti Gurule
Posted January 15, 2026
Most of us don’t wake up thinking about caucuses, donor networks, or party labels. We think about whether our families are safe, whether we can access health care, whether our jobs pay enough to live on and don’t put us at risk, and whether the systems around us make life harder or easier. That is especially true in our communities. Latine voters have shown, again and again, that we vote based on values, not party loyalty.
Republican-led agendas have made their priorities clear: roll back rights, criminalize communities, and restrict who belongs. That harm is obvious, and we organize against it every day. And when Democrats hold power, accountability must continue because harm to our communities does not simply disappear.
In Colorado, donor-backed caucuses and political formations often present themselves as pragmatic, bipartisan, or “reasonable.” This dynamic is evident in formations such as the Opportunity Caucus and the donor infrastructure that supports it, including groups like One Main Street. While legally distinct, these entities function within the same ecosystem, where large sums of money shape political priorities and influence behind the scenes, often without meaningful transparency or accountability to the communities most affected.
When wealthy political actors can afford to break the law if the cost is worth the outcome, accountability becomes optional for those with resources and unavoidable for everyone else.
We have witnessed policies passed under Democratic leadership that still leave families without access to care, workers exposed to unsafe conditions, and immigrants navigating systems that were never designed with them in mind. Too often, donor-driven influence asks the same communities to accept less, wait longer, or be grateful for incremental harm reduction.
Colorado has seen multiple dark-money political organizations investigated or found to have violated campaign finance laws in recent election cycles. When wealthy political actors can afford to break the law if the cost is worth the outcome, accountability becomes optional for those with resources and unavoidable for everyone else.
Our scrutiny is necessary because there is no such thing as neutral money in politics. While donors debate strategy behind closed doors, our communities are worried about something far more basic: the money to put food on the table, not the money to buy an election.
Reproductive justice asks us to look at the full context of people’s lives — race, immigration status, gender, class, disability, and geography — and to ask whether policies actually support people’s ability to live with dignity and self-determination. It teaches us that harm doesn’t come only from overt attacks but also from decision-making structures that exclude lived experience while claiming to act “on behalf” of the public.
At COLOR Action Fund, our political work focuses on changing how decisions get made. That means bringing community voices and lived experience into the rooms where policy is shaped, and refusing to accept harm to our families as a political trade-off. We don’t buy access; we build power with people.
As Colorado enters another election cycle, with endorsements and legislative priorities taking shape behind the scenes, these questions matter more than ever. When political influence is shaped in spaces that exclude us, the result is often policy that appears “reasonable” on paper but causes real harm at our dinner tables, especially for communities that are already over-policed, under-protected, and shut out of decision-making.
We must ask our elected officials the questions donor-driven politics often avoids:
Who benefits from your work?
Who was left out?
Who was at the table, and who wasn’t?
Elected officials are accountable to the people they represent. When money and power shape politics without transparency or accountability to our communities, democracy stops working for the people it claims to serve.
We deserve leadership grounded in values, ethics, and lived experience. And any political structure, whether a party, caucus, or donor network, that cannot meet that standard should not be shaping policy on our behalf.
Dusti Gurule has been the President and CEO of the Colorado Organization Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights (COLOR) and the COLOR Action Fund since 2017.
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