Democrats just tightened their stranglehold on the University of Colorado Board of Regents, and working Americans who fund the system will get exactly zero say in what happens next.
Former three-term state legislator Edie Hooton crushed Republican Marty Neilson by a nearly three-to-one margin — 196,657 votes to 72,465 — to claim the open Boulder County seat, according to the Boulder Daily Camera. Libertarian Richard Friend pulled just 8,523. Meanwhile, Democrat incumbents Ilana Spiegel and Nolbert Chavez are also leading in their CD6 and CD7 races respectively, meaning the left keeps its governing majority on the nine-member board that controls CU's multibillion-dollar system.
Here is the stake: the Board of Regents sets curriculum priorities, approves hiring, greenlights DEI mandates, and controls tuition at a university system that runs hard on Colorado taxpayer dollars. With this consolidation, there is no institutional check on the ideological direction of the state's flagship universities. The people who pay for it have no representation at the governing table.
Hooton's resume tells you everything about the revolving door between government spending and academy control. She chaired the state's Capital Development Committee — the body that oversees government construction and infrastructure spending — before sliding over to the board that governs a massive public university system. The Guardian and NBC News, covering national races, had nothing to say about this local capture of institutional power. Funny how that works.
The contrast with federal races is sharp. In Texas's 21st Congressional District, former Yankee Mark Teixeira won a House seat after campaigning explicitly to "end radical woke indoctrination, defend parental rights, kill DEI, restore patriotic education rooted in American and Texas values ... and fight against Cultural Marxism," as The Guardian reported. Sports Illustrated, covering the same race, buried all of that — reducing Teixeira to his batting stats and Gold Gloves while omitting any mention of his platform on education and parental rights. The sports outlet laundered a political campaign into a nostalgia piece.
Meanwhile in Minnesota, progressive Democrat Peggy Flanagan defeated Republican Michele Tafoya for an open Senate seat. NBC News noted that Flanagan supports "Medicare for All," national paid family leave, and dismantling ICE — the full progressive wishlist. The Post Millennial simply reported the vote count. Neither outlet connected Flanagan's victory to the broader institutional pattern: leftist consolidation of the educational and governmental apparatus that shapes the next generation.
The CU Regents race received almost no national attention. That is the point. University boards operate below the radar, setting policy on speech codes, bias response teams, and curriculum requirements that radicalize classrooms while parents are told to stay in their lane. When the left captures these boards, they capture the pipeline — and the taxpayer spigot stays open.
The question is whether Teixeira's brand of explicit anti-woke, pro-parental-rights politics can scale, or whether the institutional left has already fortified the positions that matter most.
