Centennial State Republicans are hopeful that the party can reverse the anti-Trump backlash in recent years.
With the political environment looking dour for Democrats and President Biden polling in the low 40s, Republicans are looking to expand their Senate battlefield into Democratic territory.
One of their best opportunities could be Colorado. While the Centennial State might have swung the hardest of any state against President Trump in 2020, Republicans see a path to beat Sen. Michael Bennet this November. GOP operatives say Bennet, who’s served in the Senate for more than a decade and had a brief run for president in 2020, still remains undefined to many voters.
They want to follow the same playbook that lifted Cory Gardner over then-Sen. Mark Udall in 2014, when Gardner successfully painted Udall as a Washington insider and rubber stamp for Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Bennet is no stranger to tough races. He was appointed to the Senate in 2009, then won the seat outright in 2010 against Rep. Ken Buck, one of the more conservative members of Congress, in a close race. He beat Daryl Glenn, a retired Air Force colonel, in 2016 by 6 points, running just 1 point ahead of Hillary Clinton.
With two candidates duking it out in the Republican primary, GOP consultants and operatives who spoke to National Journal say their best candidate against
Bennet is Joe O’Dea, a construction-company owner who employs around 300 people. They say the contrast he presents with Bennet, who grew up in Washington D.C., whose father was an aide to Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and whose brother was formerly the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, will be appealing to voters. O’Dea, who is making his first run for office, grew up in Colorado and was adopted at birth by a Denver police officer.
Even as Republicans are optimistic about O’Dea’s candidacy, everything will need to break their way if they have any chance of beating Bennet. According to some GOP insiders, the party’s two biggest liabilities are the candidacies of state Rep. Ron Hanks—the other candidate in the Senate primary—and Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters in the contest for secretary of state; both are avowed election conspiracy theorists.
Peters was indicted in March on 10 counts—seven felonies and three misdemeanors—including attempting to influence a public servant, identity theft, and criminal impersonation. The charges stemmed from a security breach in her election office related to Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the election. Hanks earned the top spot on the ballot at the April 9 nominating convention, earning 39 percent support from party delegates across the state. Candidates needed 30 percent minimum to appear on the ballot; O’Dea submitted the requisite amount of petitions to get on. Hanks accepted the nomination next to Peters, and he maintains that Trump won the election, which he did not.
“The June 28th primary will determine if Colorado Republicans are a relevant political party or not, and consistent with that whether a credible challenge will be made to Senator Bennet,” said Dick Wadhams, a former chair of the state GOP. If either Hanks or Peters wins, Wadhams said, “those two candidates will pull every other Republican down.”
The plain-spoken O’Dea is focusing his campaign on issues like inflation and crime. A political neophyte, he emphasizes his business background and lack of political experience, as opposed to Hanks’s false claims of election fraud.
“I’m not a career politician. I think Mr. Hanks has run a couple of different campaigns,” O'Dea said in an interview with National Journal. “But that’s not me. I’m going to bring a business acumen. I know how to sign the front of a check and know how to balance a budget. Those are the things I’ve learned how to do my whole life.”
The issue page on O'Dea's website makes no mention of “election integrity,” which in competitive Republican primaries is how candidates wink and nod to
Trump’s conspiracy theories. Instead, O’Dea focuses on inflation, protecting working Americans, debt reduction, and crime. He also hit Bennet for, according Biden 100 percent of the time.
“I think that’s part of the problem we have with politics today—it’s, you know, your party versus my party. And we forget what’s good for Colorado,” O’Dea said.
In a statement to National Journal, Bennet spokeswoman Georgina Beven said the senator is running on his record “of fighting for Colorado.”
“From upgrading infrastructure that will create good-paying jobs to giving working families a break by expanding the Child Tax Credit, he continues to fight to build an economy that works for Coloradans, not just the few at the top,” she said.
One area O’Dea wants to zero in on is energy policy, where he believes there is room for bipartisan cooperation. “We’ve got some of the stiffest regulations in the world,” he said. “Here in Colorado, we get the cleanest gas module that can be produced in Colorado, but we need to get out of the way.”
Though O’Dea is focused on the general election and attacking Bennet while largely ignoring Hanks, he still has to clear the hurdle of the June 28 primary.
Remarkably, Hanks raised only $29,000 in the first quarter of 2022 and entered the second quarter with $16,000 on hand. O’Dea, on the other hand, has raised $1.4 million through his entire campaign, including $410,000 in the first quarter.
Democrats are hoping the primary will leave the eventual nominee battered and bruised headed into the general.
“Joe O’Dea will be chasing Ron Hanks in an expensive and nasty Republican Senate primary centered on Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election,”
Colorado Democratic Party spokesman Nico Delgado said. “The primary will be a competition to see who can win the support of Trump and the farthest fringe of the Republican Party instead of addressing the issues that matter to the Coloradans who will decide the general election.”
If O’Dea gets past Hanks and into the general election, he’ll need to boost turnout among base Republicans and win over a majority of the state’s 1.6 million unaffiliated voters.
Kevin Grantham, a county commissioner in Fremont County and a former state Senate president who supported former Olympian Eli Bremer in the primary, said O’Dea’s “outsider status” means he has the ability to appeal to both Trump conservatives and independent voters.
“He actually has the ability to embrace both sides of that—you know, being the
Trump-supporting individual but also being the common-sense, regular-job guy,” Grantham said. “I think he’s in the position where can actually do that, where he can thread the needle and build that coalition around Trump-supporting as well as the common-sense-businessman, regular-guy aspect with unaffiliated voters.”
When asked if he would accept Trump’s endorsement or campaign with Trump in the state, O'Dea took a page from Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s playbook:
He kept the president at arm’s length.
“Trump is gonna do what Trump is gonna do,” O’Dea said. “I’m not focused on endorsements other than voters here in Colorado.”
Republicans say the race will be won or lost in the suburbs outside of Denver—namely Jefferson and Arapahoe counties. Both were once reliably red but have shaded blue in recent years. Any path to victory for a Republican would require cutting into the sizable margins Democrats have built there in the past few election cycles.
Denise Mund, the chair of the Jefferson County GOP, said she attended one of O’Dea's events last week and came away impressed. Like all Republicans who spoke with National Journal, she listed inflation and crime as her two biggest concerns.
“My husband and I are small-business owners, and so is Joe,” Mund said. “And he really seemed to understand the red tape that’s forced on businesses, and how difficult things have become with the supply chain not providing products that are needed.”
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