Loveland grandmother Mickie Nuffer grew more concerned by the day as she watched people on television shouting about “defunding the police” and later, in her own county, when businesses required proof of vaccination to enter.
In Highlands Ranch, mom and former teacher’s aide Donna Jo Tompkins was growing increasingly frustrated with mask mandates, last-minute school quarantines and the latest curriculum controversy: critical race theory.
And in Arvada, Angela Marriott was alarmed by the way people on Nextdoor pounced on any conservative sentiment, especially against masks, and was exasperated pretty much every time she watched the news. “I would turn on the news and just be enraged within minutes, watching our police being abused, properties being destroyed and trying to erase our history with tearing down and damaging statues,” she said.
“I just decided one day I had had it. I was going to take this negative energy and put it into something constructive, to fight for freedom and my children’s future.”
None of the three women had ever been political, but said they were compelled by the 2020 COVID shutdown and other government policies of the past two years to get involved. Similar to the way Democratic women mobilized after the election of former President Donald Trump, conservative women who never before attended a caucus or canvassed a neighborhood are organizing in living rooms across Colorado.
Tompkins formed Liberty Girls in Douglas County, which has grown from about 20 women who first gathered in her house for coffee and snacks a year ago to more than 300, all standing, she said, for God, country and family.
Nuffer is creating her own version, called the NoCo Ladies for Liberty, with about 250 members in Larimer, Weld and Boulder counties. Marriott, meanwhile, started Arvada Grassroots Conservatives, which also includes men. And in the Douglas County town of Castle Rock, a group called We the Women formed last year.
The rise of the liberty mom voting bloc is the latest in a line of suburban-women influence on elections, from the middle-class “soccer moms” of the 1990s, to the “security moms” after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, to the “rage moms” exasperated by Trump and racial injustice.
Tompkins formed Liberty Girls in Douglas County, which has grown from about 20 women who first gathered in her house for coffee and snacks a year ago to more than 300, all standing, she said, for God, country and family.
Nuffer is creating her own version, called the NoCo Ladies for Liberty, with about 250 members in Larimer, Weld and Boulder counties. Marriott, meanwhile, started Arvada Grassroots Conservatives, which also includes men. And in the Douglas County town of Castle Rock, a group called We the Women formed last year.
The rise of the liberty mom voting bloc is the latest in a line of suburban-women influence on elections, from the middle-class “soccer moms” of the 1990s, to the “security moms” after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, to the “rage moms” exasperated by Trump and racial injustice.
Liberty Girls worked to flip Douglas County School Board
Tompkins, feeling helpless about the state of the nation, logged onto a Facebook group for conservative women in Colorado and began sending private messages to women in the group who were her Douglas County neighbors. Immediately, she had 30 women who were...