Mark Baisley is a Republican state senator who represents Woodland Park, a position he’s held since 2023. He served as a state representative from 2019 to 2023.
Born in Minnesota, his father was an energy construction engineer, and the family moved often. Baisley spent parts of his childhood in Idaho, Alaska and Puerto Rico. He graduated from Columbia College and built a successful career in aerospace, national security and cybersecurity. A job with what is now Lockheed Martin brought him to Colorado in 1989.
Baisley said a high school teacher in Puerto Rico sparked a passion and reverence for America’s founding documents and system of government.
“I want to do what I can to preserve this incredible gift,” Baisley told CPR News.
William Woody for CPR NewsU.S. Senate Candidate Mark Baisley speaks during Club 20’s debate event at the Asteria Theater in Grand Junction. Sept. 19, 2026.
Colorado voters cite affordability and high costs as a top concern, from gas and food prices to housing and childcare costs. If elected, what would you focus on first, and how would you get past the challenges that have made it difficult to bring costs down?
Baisley said the three affordability efforts he’s promoting involve lowering interest rates for home purchases, decoupling property tax rates from property values and lowering student debt.
He would lower interest rates by offering tax breaks to lenders who offer loans based on the current 10-year Treasury yield rate. That 10-year rate is currently about 4.8% versus the 6.75% average current 30-year mortgage rate. “That would make a really big difference,” he said.
Baisley called the state’s current property tax system “a systemic error” that does not make sense. He said he would pursue a national-level fix.
“When property values go up 45%, does that mean the library district needs 45% more revenue to run on?” he asked. “On the other hand, if our property values were to drop by, say 25%, would that mean that the fire district would need 25% less revenue to live on?”
On student debt, Baisley said he would “lean on the universities.” He blamed the Obama Administration for federalizing the distribution of student loans in the wake of the Great Recession. He argued that resulted in a lack of competition that ballooned university expenses and left students saddled with much larger loans. His fix: require universities to pay 50% of loans through tapping into endowments, then tax foreign student programs to cover another 30% of the cost of American student debt.
The U.S. students “would still be left with 20% responsibility, which I think is appropriate for them to still have some skin in the game.”
In recent years, people have talked about how the other side is ruining or trying to destroy America. If elected, as a member of the federal government, how would you go about restoring trust in government? Do you think bipartisanship can benefit democracy?
“I’m going to object a little bit to the question in that the United States is not a democracy, very deliberately not a democracy,” Baisley said. “We are a republic.”
The government should not be working to “overrule everybody else by numbers,” he said, but to secure the rights of its citizens. Securing rights does not require a majority, he said.
“But, getting back to your bigger point, which is how do we restore confidence in our government? One thing we need to do is science,” Baisley said.
The sciences he’s speaking about are “the social sciences,” and he said schools need to do a better job of teaching civics and how the country’s system of government functions.
Baisley also advocated for Colorado adopting the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines developed by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. He said he unsuccessfully pushed for this adoption in the Colorado Senate.
Many Colorado voters say they want secure borders and support deporting those who have committed serious crimes, but they have also expressed concern over tactics they’ve seen enforcement officers use along with a lack of due process. If elected, what kind of immigration policies, reforms or guardrails would you support/seek?
Baisley called the loss of life during recent ICE raids in Minnesota and Texas preventable tragedies. “We could have done so much better than that, and people should not have lost their lives,” he said. Though he added that victims like Renée Good, Alex Pretti and Ruben Ray Martinez should not have been impeding “active law enforcement activity in the first place.”
He said he does support ICE’s duty to “usher out of the country anyone who is a danger to American citizens.”
For U.S. immigration policy broadly, he noted the country invites more than a million new immigrants to the country each year. That’s a small enough number where “they assimilate into America’s culture,” he said.
Democrats in the Senate voted to eliminate the filibuster. Thus far, Republicans have not. What is your position on getting rid of or keeping the filibuster?
“The short answer is that I would vote to eliminate the filibuster if my fellow Republicans would be willing to immediately pass the common sense bills that have been queuing up for years,” Baisley said.
Baisley said the filibuster rule has evolved over time, and while it has served the purpose of “denying radical changes in law,” it has also prevented worthy bills from passing.
“Bearing in mind that the filibuster is not mentioned in the Constitution,” Baisley said, “I would vote to eliminate the filibuster rule.”
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