Collins emerges as sole Republican for open SD4 seat, calls for state-level DOGE audit

COLORADO SPRINGS — Colorado Senate District 4 is an open seat this cycle, and Teddy Collins, owner of the Colorado Springs firearms retailer Spartan Defense, says he is now the only Republican on the June 30 primary ballot. Collins laid out his pitch on The Kim Monson Show on April 10, a few days after the SD4 Republican assembly.

Collins told Monson he took 77.4% of the delegate vote and said the other two Republicans who sought the nomination did not advance. “I am the only candidate to make the ballot out of three,” he said. “I got 77.4% of the votes, so I will be the only one on the primary ballot come June.” Ballotpedia’s SD4 page, which has not yet been updated with assembly results, still lists Collins alongside Kevin Conrad and Jennifer James in the Republican field, along with Democrat Nicolas Livingston on the other side of the ballot.

The seat is open because Sen. Mark Baisley, whose current term runs through January 2027, is running for U.S. Senate in 2026 rather than seeking another term in the statehouse. SD4 has been Republican territory, but Collins made clear he is not treating the general election as a formality.

“Yes, I do have a pretty serious Democrat challenger,” Collins said of Livingston. “They are trying to flip a seat blue, so we definitely don’t need to take our guard down on Senate District 4.”

A state-level DOGE audit

Collins used most of his airtime to argue Colorado needs its own version of the federal Department of Government Efficiency effort, applied line by line to the state budget. He pointed to the 2026-27 fiscal gap that the Colorado Joint Budget Committee has spent months trying to close. “We have a budget and a deficit that has exploded. We have $1.5 billion in deficits,” he said. “We’ve managed to get that down to $500 million, but we’re still about $500 million short.”

The underlying numbers line up with what the JBC has been working with. Colorado Politics reported in late March that JBC staff had circulated roughly 150 suggestions and identified about $516 million in general fund cuts, with the committee noting the state has no Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) surplus this cycle to cushion the homestead exemption and other costs. A day before the broadcast, the Colorado Springs Gazette reported that the panel faced “a $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion general fund hole to fill for the 2026-27 budget, depending on whose revenue forecast the panel chose to use,” and ultimately built its plan on the governor’s more optimistic $1.2 billion figure, leaning on reserve draws and fund sweeps to balance what the cuts alone could not.

Collins argued those tradeoffs are a symptom of a larger problem. “We need to doge the state, find all the corruption and waste, because there’s got to be a ton of it, and we’ve got to cut pet projects from politicians,” he said. He went further, asserting without evidence that Colorado has “more fraud than Minnesota,” a rhetorical flourish paired with a call to “figure out where our tax dollars are actually going.”

Beyond the audit pitch, Collins framed his campaign around what he called excessive regulation on Colorado small businesses and gun owners, pointing listeners to his campaign site at CollinsForColorado.com. With no contested primary on the Republican side, he said his focus now shifts to the November general election, where the margin in SD4 will decide whether Republicans hold a district the party has treated as part of its southern mountain base.