A story out of the Rocky Mountain News this morning has Joan Fitz-Gerald playing the tax return card in the 3-way. The upshot:
Congressional candidate Joan Fitz-Gerald intends to release her income tax returns for the past five years today and call on her opponents to do the same.
By which Ms. Fitz-Gerald intends to somehow make income an issue. It was met by a big yawn from the Shafroth and Polis campaigns.
Rivals Jared Polis and Will Shafroth said that wouldn’t be a problem.
Of course it won’t. This is a continuation of JFG trying to make JP’s millions the issue in this campaign. Let’s hope the JFG campaign is actually planning on, well, you know, campaigning for the seat. Negative campaigning is effective (no matter how often people say the voters hate it), but this just isn’t an issue that’s going to continue to track. Everybody already knows about Polis’ money. If this is the only contrast JFG can continue to raise against JP she’s in trouble.
As a commenter on the RMN story notes, JFG has mining industry and O/G ties. Now that’s an issue that has loads of potential traction. If JP and WS can paint JFG as the anti-environmental candidate, my guess is that it will become a much more effective issue than constantly harping on Polis for self-funding. There is a lot of room to play “Joan as a special interest hack vs. Jared as a special interest of one.” The question is how effectively the campaigns can plays those lines against each other and how effectively WS can stay out of the direct fray while profiting from it.
Leave a Reply