The Colorado Senate race has become the latest battleground for Democratic efforts to promote “Stop the Steal” Republicans in GOP primaries, a strategy that belies the Democrats’ posture of claiming to think these folks represent a genuine threat to American democracy. Even the New York Times has noticed this strategy, which extends as well to running ads attacking House Republicans who voted for Donald Trump’s impeachment over those votes. The Times gets retiring House Democrat Kathleen Rice of New York to denounce the practice but also receives a variety of weaselly excuses and no-comments from Democrats still in the game.
In the primary between Colorado businessman Joe O’Dea and Republican state legislator Ron Hanks, O’Dea is the far stronger candidate to unseat Democratic senator Michael Bennet. O’Dea has also significantly out-raised Hanks, having poured $630,000 of his own money into the race and raised about the same amount from donors. Hanks remains little-known in the state even compared with O’Dea, who is a political newcomer.
Rather than gear up for a contest with O’Dea, Bennet is relying on his Democratic and progressive allies to pour vast sums of money into Hanks’s otherwise-broke campaign. According to new filings by the O’Dea campaign in federal court and with the FEC, somebody has crossed the line from mischief to lawbreaking by sending out pro-Hanks and anti-O’Dea mailers that fail to disclose who paid for them. Given the Hanks campaign’s paltry resources and the massive flow of dirty-tricks money coming from the left to prop him up, it stands to reason that the obvious suspect in these illegal mailings is someone on Bennet’s side.
There are a lot of silly and unnecessary campaign-finance rules, but one of the truly essential ones is the requirement that campaigns and groups who run ads attach a standard disclaimer giving the name of the organization that paid for it. Situations such as this are precisely why that rule exists: Colorado Republican primary voters deserve to be able to look up who is paying to promote Ron Hanks and discover if it is actually a Democratic group. Yet O’Dea’s FEC filing attaches several examples of mailers — one of them purporting to be a “True Conservative Voter Guide” — touting Hanks over O’Dea as the more conservative option, but with no disclosure of who mailed them.
This is flatly illegal under both federal law and Colorado law. The O’Dea campaign’s lawyers have filed in federal court for an injunction and damages and are demanding enforcement of state law by the Colorado attorney general and multiple Colorado district attorneys. The O’Dea campaign notes that some of the mailers also assert a provably false claim: that Hanks was endorsed by the Colorado Republican Party (Hanks was the leading vote-getter at a convention, tallying 38 percent of the vote, but received no such endorsement).
The O’Dea filings identify an Iowa-based company named Christian Printers, Inc. as the printer and sender of the mailers, and argue that the “eleventh-hour onslaught of misleading propaganda” likely originates with Democrats, who “aim to mislead primary voters and undermine Colorado’s primary system.” The federal-court lawsuit asserts, “Given their wide distribution and professional content, the total cost of the Mailers is estimated at over $1,000,000.”
I spoke with O’Dea earlier this week, and it is no mystery why Bennet prefers to avoid him. He is running a classic kitchen-table campaign focused heavily on inflation, runaway government spending, excessive regulation, restrictions on oil and gas production, spiraling crime, and an irresponsible Federal Reserve. He’s a fourth-generation Coloradan, the son of a Denver cop, who started and built his own construction business that now employs over 300 people and gives him contacts across the state. His wife is Hispanic, and he is optimistic that Republicans will benefit from a big swing with Colorado’s heavily working-class Hispanic population — a shift that would be brutal for Bennet to overcome.
It’s not just Bennet whom Colorado Democrats are desperate to protect; they are also playing in the Republican gubernatorial primary, and a big aim of both ventures is to depress Republican turnout in the fall that could swing one or both houses of the Colorado legislature.
Maybe they should try offering less help to fringe Republicans and more to Colorado voters.
Original source can be found here
