i asked the host to look at it. they cleared caches but no change.
they tried changing the Contrast red to a hex color in the customizer, the site showed the changes.
Since that wasn’t the issue, we then tried to remove that color designation in the color panels and change ‘red’ to a hex color in my function to see if it didn’t like the named color, but now the Contrast color variable doesn’t show up in my palette at all.