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Landon Mascareñaz has spent his career working in education and economic development, focused on whether systems are truly open to the communities they serve. Now, as the founder of Courageous Colorado, a Unite America grantee, he’s focused on one goal: opening Colorado’s primary elections so more voters have a voice in who represents them.
For Mascareñaz, the case for open primaries starts with what people can already feel.
“We see gridlock everywhere we turn, and we know that it’s breaking apart families and communities,” he says. “And we hear from experts across the political spectrum that there’s things that we can do. We can open up primaries.”
When primaries are set up in a way that shuts people out or makes it difficult for them to participate, the winners listen to fewer voters—making compromise less attractive, fueling zero-sum politics, and leaving more voters feeling unrepresented and frustrated.
His work is built around a simple question: In Colorado, are elections open to everyday voters—or closed off until it’s too late to matter?
Mascareñaz didn’t come up through politics. He began his career as a teacher in the Navajo Nation in New Mexico and spent years working across education and economic development.
Along the way, he started to notice a pattern.
“I began to see that some of the great challenges facing our country is whether our systems are open to the communities they serve,” he says.
Now he’s asking that same question about Colorado elections: Are they open to all Coloradans?
Colorado primaries aren’t fully open to everyone — they’re semi-open. Unaffiliated voters must register with a political party to participate, and even then, they can only choose to vote in either the Democratic or Republican primary.
For Mascareñaz, primary election reform is where the work to create openness is most needed in Colorado. By openness, he doesn’t just mean access to a ballot—he means real influence over the outcome.
In Colorado, that influence often gets concentrated early: According to the Unite America Institute, in 2024, six of the state’s eight congressional districts were “safe” for one party or the other, meaning many voters went into November with outcomes essentially decided in the primary. And in a state where nearly half of voters are unaffiliated, Colorado’s semi-open primaries still ask those voters to choose a party’s contest just to participate in the election that often matters most. Yet participation remains low: fewer than 23% of eligible Coloradans turned out in party primaries in 2022. The result is a system where just 19% of eligible voters in Colorado cast a meaningful vote to determine the state’s U.S. House members.
By contrast, open, all-candidate primaries would make Colorado’s elections feel open at the moment it matters most—when voters still have real options, not after the decision has effectively been made. Every voter would start on the same ballot, giving unaffiliated voters a straightforward way to participate without being sorted into separate party lanes. And with more competition, Colorado’s highest-turnout election in November becomes meaningful more often. The system would be open not just in theory, but in practice.
Mascareñaz is clear that winning open primaries in Colorado requires more than importing a reform playbook from somewhere else. Reform has to be built with Coloradans so it fits the state and earns trust.
“We can’t say, ‘Hey, just because another state did this means we should do it here,’” he says. “I want Coloradans to be able to actually co-design and co-create that future themselves.”
His goal isn’t to become a national talking head. It’s to build a Colorado model that works in Colorado, shaped by the full complexity of the state.
“My dream would be that we could build a Colorado model that learns from all the different states and all the different things that the democracy and electoral reform movement has done,” he says, “and come up with a version for Colorado that creates the opportunity for the most impact for all Coloradans.”
Open primaries only work if voters across the political spectrum believe the rules will expand participation, not tilt the playing field. That’s why Courageous Colorado has centered its work on cross-partisan coalition-building.
“Our coalition now includes almost 30 organizations, left, right and center,” Mascareñaz says.
The coalition model matters because reform doesn’t just require persuading voters—it requires persuading people and institutions that have learned to navigate the existing system. Mascareñaz says even when people agree the status quo isn’t working, they hesitate if they think change means their community loses power, influence, or a voice.
“People don’t fear change. They actually fear loss.”
That’s why Courageous Colorado is building a coalition broad enough to make open primaries feel legitimate and durable—something Coloradans across the spectrum can see themselves in, rather than a reform owned by one side.
To build durable support for open primaries in Colorado, Courageous Colorado has gone around the state twice: a listening tour in the spring, and an activation tour in the fall.
Mascareñaz says people often arrive tense—expecting politics as usual. But when the conversation is intentionally cross-partisan, something shifts.
“When we create the context, and when I facilitate and say, there’s not going to be partisan shaming in this conversation,” Mascareñaz says, “I kind of watch people’s shoulders… like, ah, like, okay, like, I can just talk about ideas.”
The purpose of the tours wasn’t to deliver a pre-set agenda. It was to help communities name what would make elections feel more open and meaningful where they live.
Looking ahead to the next 12 to 24 months, Mascareñaz says the work is about preparing for real opportunities to win open primaries—by strengthening partnerships, supporting legislative work where it makes sense, and building local capacity statewide.
“We have to start local,” he says. “Locally, we can do so much.”
Open primaries are the throughline: a reform that makes elections feel less closed, increases meaningful participation, and gives more Coloradans a real say in who advances to November.
For Mascareñaz, his support of election reform is the natural culmination of a lifetime of asking who gets left out. Now he’s asking that question of Colorado’s primaries—and building a Colorado-first, cross-partisan coalition to open them for good.
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