Archive for category Governor 2010
Maes Endorsers Begin to Stampede?
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, Governor 2010 on September 2nd, 2010
On the heels of Hank Brown’s withdrawal of his endorsement yesterday, John Andrews issued this statement this morning:
This morning I called Dan Maes to withdraw my endorsement and urge him to end his candidacy, for the public good. As a conscientious Republican who earlier voted for Dan, I cannot support a manifestly unfit nominee. He has flunked his job interview with the people of Colorado in the weeks since Scott McInnis faded. The party should cut Maes loose if he does not resign the nomination. I intend to write in a vote for Jane Norton for Governor.
Forcing The Issue
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, Governor 2010 on July 22nd, 2010
This afternoon, Tom Tancredo issued the following statement to the press:
Events of the past two weeks have developed in such a way as to create an unprecedented situation in the race for Governor of Colorado. The two candidates vying for the Republican nomination have, in my opinion, lost any hope of carrying out a successful campaign.
This situation is unacceptable to me, and I am sure, to thousands of other Colorado Republicans, Independents and other Colorado voters whose hopes for a change to a smaller and fiscally responsible government in Colorado in November now seem dashed.
To achieve this goal the winner of the August Republican primary must step down and allow the Party to appoint a viable replacement candidate to face John Hickenlooper and the Obama-Pelosi smear machine. It is up to the Party to pick that replacement except that it is imperative he or she be a solid conservative with a chance to win the general election in November.
Straw Polls
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, Governor 2010, Senate 2010 on March 17th, 2010
As part of the caucus process this year, both Democrats and Republicans in Colorado included a non-binding straw poll, essentially a test of grass roots strength among the candidates. Not surprisingly, the activitst-friendly candidates did well. Andrew Romanoff took about 50% of the vote to Senator Bennet’s 41% on the Democratic side. For the Republicans, Dan Maes got 40% of the vote to Scott McInnis’s 60%, which will probably be interpretes as a win for Maes, and Ken Buck barely edged out Jane Norton by 25 votes, which will certainly be considered a win for him.
How much does it matter? It’s hard to say. On the Democrat side, it may help boost Romanoff’s heretofore anemic fundraising. I have no insight as to whether or not folks were electing delegates based on their Senate preferances, though. For the Republicans, I suspect there’s a strong correlation between not supporting Jane Norton and supporting Dan Maes. This matters, because for the most part, people didn’t have to choose between delegates for Senate and delegates for Governor. It means that if Maes decided to continue on after convention (assuming he can’t make up the difference), he’ll go in as an underdog, but not a massive one. And it says that McInnis still faces significant discontent within his own party.
This suggests that the Colorado governor’s race is beginning to look a little like last year’s Presidential race. Hickenlooper is playing the part of Obama, positioning himself as a reasonable moderate, atlhough he’s actually quite liberal. McInnis is playing the part of McCain, the presumptive nominee that the party really doesn’t quite buy as being conservative enough. For all his harping on “unity,” McInnis is going to find that line increasingly irrelevant. And Dan Maes is playing the role of The Field: in addition to his own support, he’s picking up the protest vote against McInnis.
This doesn’t mean that things will play out the same way at all. Obama was running with a favorable political environment, Hickenlooper has to overcome the current distrust of the Democrats. McInnis is certainly more conservative than McCain. And Maes is a single individual, meaning that someone who votes for him is less likely to switch to McInnis down the line, if there’s a primary.
As for the Senate race, Tom Wiens and Cleve Tidwell were both banking on a strong showing at caucus, and didn’t get it. Fairly or unfairly, the race really narrows down to two candidates, and the question is whether or not, at or after state convention, Wiens’s and Tidwell’s supporters will split up or coalesce behind Buck. And while Norton has worked hard to court the activists and the Tea Partiers, it may not be enough this year.
Of course, there’s no real precedent for correlating straw poll support with election performance. In 2008, the only straw poll was at the presidential level, and Romney, the winner in Colorado, dropped out a few days later. The straw poll results will almost certainly correlate more strongly with County Assembly results – and thus with State Convention results – than with the broader party electorate in a primary. And a lot can happen at County. A disciplined voting bloc can win a disproportionate number of delegates.
Ritter Withdraws
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, Denver, Governor 2010, HD-6 2010, Senate 2010 on January 6th, 2010
Governor Bill Ritter will not seek re-election. The stead drip – drip – drip of bad news seems to have driven him from the race.
It seems as though at least two of these stories are connected, with the possibility that Ritter was using his personal cellphone for state business, and then shielding that usage from public scrutiny in order to hide his affair. Of course, it could also be that he’s not enjoying the job, isn’t very good at it, and has had enough. We’ll know more tomorrow.
From the Republican side, the assumption is that CoDA has already named his successor in the race, and that it will be either for House Speaker Andrew Romanoff or Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, both of whom have fairly high positives and a campaign base to draw from in heavily-Democrat Denver. Ross Kaminsky analyzes the options here. It’s a good piece, but I think he gives Romanoff too little credit, and Hickenlooper too much.
Romanoff is already a statewide figure, with connections on the western slope and down south that Hickenlooper doesn’t really have. He was in the process of running a statewide race, and now won’t have the sitgma of attacking a sitting Democrat. On the other hand, he’s been running to Bennet’s left in this race, and now owns those positions, which might undermine his reputation as a moderate consensus-builder. And he was the father of the failed Amendment 59, which would have gutted the Taxpayer Bill of Rights to fund the Teachers Unions.
Hickenlooper, on the other hand, has a Denver handicap that Romanoff has already overcome. Denver doesn’t scale well to the rest of the state. It bears roughly the same relationship to the eastern plains, the high country, and the western slope that NYC has to upstate and Long Island – people don’t much trust Denver. They may well vote against a Denver mayor more quickly. There’s a reason that Colorado governors come from the legislature, and not from the Denver mayor’s office.
Denver mayors have more power than Colorado governors when it comes to budgeting, which might actually strengthen the argument for a fiscally conservative Republican legislature, in a year when there are any number of already-vulnerable Dems. Denver isn’t a basket-case, to be sure. But it has benefitted greatly from the Democrats’ car tax in order to stay sane. If Hickenlooper is the nominee, Republican City Councilman Jeanne Fatz will probably become veyr popular very quickly as a speaker on hidden lunacy in Denver’s budget. And Denver’s share of the Stimulus Money will also come under closer scrutiny.
There’s an assumption that either Romanoff or Hickenlooper would make things harder on a Denver Republican party struggling to recover from years of decline. But if Hickenlooper is the nominee, the focus on his record from the McInnis campaign may actually end up helping us out.
So my money’s on CoDA nominating their old bag man, Romanoff.
Lt. Governor Penry?
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, Governor 2010 on December 22nd, 2009
Since this possibility has been raised, I think maybe some ideas from outside might be helpful to avoid groupthink.
In my opinion, this move carries significant political risk, and will not likely achieve its intended objective.
Josh Penry as Lt. Gov won’t placate the Tea Party people. It may well infuriate them even more. It won’t raise McInnis’s standing any, and they might well label Penry as a sell-out, based on a fairly pedestrian career move. He’ll be passing up staying in the state Senate where he could have held McInnis to his promises, for an opportunity to run interference for him. And it will totally freeze out Dan Maes, who at this point is their only opportunity cast a vote before everything’s decided.
Ironically, Jane Norton’s candidacy probably hurts this decision’s effectiveness, as one of her main liabilities is her tie to Referendum C & D. If she had no choice but to support them, then Penry will have no choice but to support McInnis, who hasn’t yet proven anything about himself to the Tea Partiers.
From Penry’s point of view (and the party’s, I think) it’s a waste of his talents. Go back and look at a list of lieutenant governors. Yes, Gail Schoettler came within a thousand votes or so of making something from the office. But other than that, you have to go back to McNichols and 1956, 52 years, to find anyone who got elected to high office from being #2. McInnis ought to know that better than anyone, since Mike Callihan failed against him for Congress after being Lt. Governor.
In fact, Lt. Governor has been pretty much an unmitigated stepping-stone to obscurity. Nancy Dick lost to Bill Armstrong for Senate. Mike Callihan lost to McInnis. Schoettler lost to Bill Owens, and Joe Rogers placed out of the money in the Republican primary in the 7th Congressional District’s inaugural run. So if Penry just sacrificed a gubernatorial run in order to preserve that bright career, he may be on the verge of tossing that away, too.
I realize it’s easy to carp from the outside. But it’s also sometimes easier to see that what looks like a really good idea based on traditional politics probably isn’t as hot as it sounds.
Sean Duffy Interview
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, Governor 2010 on December 10th, 2009
Earlier this week, I sat down with the Sean Duffy, the Communications Director for the Scott McInnis for Governor campaign. We discussed a number of issues, from state budget issues and small business, to his sometimes contentious relationship with the Tea Party movement.
I post the interview here, without my own editorial comment, but soliciting your own.
Introduction
Platform for Prosperity
Fox News & the Tea Parties
Outreach to the Tea Parties
Impressions of the Tea Parties
Federal Encroachment
Stimulus Money
State Revenues
The Car Tax
Small Business
Health Insurance
Comprehensive Budget Plan
The Prospects of the Platform for Prosperity
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, Governor 2010 on December 2nd, 2009
Quite good, actually. The platform is a smart one. Sticks to fiscal issues and personal liberty, in an election where those issues will come to the fore. It’s a platform that I can endorse wholeheartedly and without reservation.
Still, there’s the issue of the messenger:
But Nikki Mata, a conservative activist in suburban Denver, said that such a strategy misses the point of the tea-party movement. Endorsements and platforms matter less to her and her fellow activists, she said, than their gut feelings about whether a candidate would shake things up — or would cave in to the establishment.
Ben and Michael have already hit this, but there’s more to be said here.
I like Nikki a lot; she and Lori Horn hatched the R Block Party in the wake of last year’s debacle, and it’s one of the highest-profile, best-attended activist groups in the area.
McInnis needs not to underestimate the amount of work he has to do here. Republicans have not forgotten the damage done to the party’s core values by Bill Owens’s support for Referendum C. McInnis already finds himself defending his “clarifications” on the massively unpopular FASTER car tax. Asking Republicans to push those doubts aside in the name of “unity” is likely to ring hollow. That McInnis currently holds no office works against him with this group in two ways: first, he has no chance to demonstrate his credibility now, and second, he held office during that period when Republicans lost their way. He’ll have to show that he wasn’t part of that herd.
If not persuaded – and it behooves them to be persuadable – , Sondermann is half-right. They have no place to go, but home.
I hope that McInnis realizes that simply putting out a platform – under pressure from wanting Josh Penry’s endorsement and the threat of a Tom Tancredo candidacy – isn’t by itself going to satisfy those who are looking for someone who truly believes. So far, I haven’t seen much evidence of this, but it’s possible that with the nomination apparently in hand, McInnis can now turn his hardball tactics towards Ritter, and genuinely reach out to the activists.
McInnis v. Penry v. Ritter
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Governor 2010 on September 11th, 2009
On the heels of its Colorado Senate poll showing good news for Ryan Frazier, Rasmussen has published a poll on the governor’s race that Scott McInnis supporters are touting, and that can’t make Gov. Ritter very happy. While McInnis leads Ritter 44-39, Penry polls in a dead heat with the next former governor, trailing 41-40. McInnis will spin this as showing he’s stronger against Ritter, although much of the strength vs. Penry is still a result of statewide name recognition. Penry will claim that despite still struggling to make himself known outside the party, almost half the state is ready to vote for him in the general.
Of greater interest, according to Rasmussen, is the very favorable-very unfavorable ratings for the Republican challengers. McInnis leads here with a +10 (18-8), while Penry trails at a -3 (8-11). Some of this may be that McInnis has been out of office for a while, and Penry is having to lead a party in office. I doubt that it’s due to Mike “The Headless Chicken” Huttner’s attempts to portray the financial crisis as the “Bush-Penry recession.”
The election should, of course, be a referendum on Ritter’s performance, and in this regard he’s in some serious trouble. Among those likely voters with strong opinions about his performance, Ritter has an abysmal -14 rating, with 29% strongly disapproving, and 15% strongly approving. He’s not getting points for not deferring to Big Labor on important issues, and one presumes that the Car Tax is beginning to take its toll.
However, the fact that only 20-25% of voters have strong opinions about the Republicans leaves room for the CODA spin machine and the MSM (but I repeat myself) to help define the Republicans, and at this point, McInnis is only slightly less vulnerable to that than Penry is. However, the legislative session is likely to be contentious, with the Democrats threatening to ram through a state-wide health care takeover of their own, and likely to pick fights on issues designed to paint Penry into a corner. How he manages that will go a long way to determining his viability in the primaries.