The most epic night in politics in my generation (I’m mid-30’s ish) deserves some photo documentation. Thoughts from me on this election and Obama’s speech in an upcoming post. In the meantime, one pic of me and what I wore to an election night party in jest. The other of downtown Boulder, Colorado at midnight. This was Broadway and Pearl and the Boulder PD had to close down Broadway (the main street in Boulder).
v* with (Todd!!) Palin for prez sign
Boulder CO downtown midnight Nov 4
I’m just wondering how the Republican party became the party of voter suppression and why anybody who truly loves “freedom” and “liberty” can find it acceptable to make it as hard as possible for people to vote?
I’m not naive, I understand that the Republicans think that making it hard to vote in general makes it harder for the downtrodden (and ostensibly Dem-leaning) to vote. I’m also not opposed to requiring a form of official identification at the polls to try to ensure one-person-one-vote. But seeing as a legitimate path to “victory” the suppression of voter registrations to try to keep legitimate voters from being able to vote is as slimy and dishonest as it gets. At least in this and the past few major elections the Dems have become the party of registering as many as possible to vote while the R’s have become the party of purging roles and throwing up roadblocks to voting. The coverage of this in Montana and Colorado alone is so extensive that I won’t bother posting news links here. Clearly it is also happening across the U.S. as a directed tactic.
The bigger problem though is illustrated by the situation here in Colorado. The person in charge of overseeing voting is a partisan, elected official. This gives one party — whoever wins the Secretary of State election — just about unlimited power to make, interpret, and enforce rules on voting and registering to vote. Fortunately the situation in Colorado has not been nearly as bad as that in Montana (where voters were purged only in Dem “strongholds”), but nevertheless Colorado SoS Mike Coffman has shown Katherine Harris-like tendencies of late. It should be the goal of both parties that everybody votes and votes once. It should not be considered a legitimate political tactic to declare perfectly sound and able voters ineligible to vote on technical whims.
Here’s an idea: how would it change the landscape to implement an Australia or Brazil model where voting is compulsory and results in a fine for not doing it? Freedom isn’t free and voting shouldn’t be optional. Require everybody to vote and we can dispense with this mockery.
Well, a week of elk hunting proved frustrating. Fun as hell, but ultimately unsuccessful. I love being at 11,500 feet on an open pass in a 40mph blizzard at 25F and hiking 10 miles and 5000 vertical feet in a day with a .308 on my back just as much as the next sportsman for Obama, but it would have been nice to be looking toward a long winter with 100 lbs of elk in my freezer. Oh well.
While I was gone the race played out its predictable patterns: Obama opening a bigger lead and the McCain campaign responding by running harder and faster to the substanceless. McCain realizes that despite his well-delivered “I am not George Bush” line at the final debate, he is not offering a clear path to change here, and he will lose because of it. The Robert Draper cover article in the NY Times Sunday Mag did a good job of laying out what has been the McCain campaign’s meanderings of message as they’ve tried tack after tack just groping for something to stick.
The fact that Obama is running on his own ideas while McCain (and more so, Palin) is running on Barack Obama makes it very clear that McCain has little of substance to offer here. So the only thing left is to try to tear down the opponent with repeated salacious gossip or just outright lies (as if Bill Ayers, repeated often enough, is an actual story). No problem, this is just politics in America and if the shoe was on the other foot, the Obama campaign would likely be doing the same thing. But I think that McCain is secretly disgusted by it. We see glimpses of McCain’s dignity when he occasionally corrects people at his rallies or back away from strong statement by others in his team, but unfortunately for McCain he is now tied himself to the worst elements of his party. And the further problem for McCain and the Republican party in general is that while McCain would clearly repudiate the morons in his rally line, Sarah Palin probably wouldn’t. (Well, she clearly wouldn’t, as all she has left is to try things like this.) She very likely agrees with them, even if on a more subtle level.
McCain wants out. He probably genuinely does not like Obama, but he hates being caught up in the nastiness. Both men have oodles of dignity, the dignity that so many smaller party operatives (both sides) will never have. In some way McCain might have run to try to rid his party of the small-minded sleaze that brought him down in 2000. It’s not going away, at least for now, John. But in the last five days you could go a long way to taming the wild dogs on your side of the fence.
Yep, that’s really me. i voted NO on everything. Ok, not really. Out of the 16 different candidates available for POTUS on the CO ballot I steered clear of the USA Socialist Party, the Objectivist Party and the Boston Tea Party (no joke) and instead chose a candidate from a major party. I noticed that McCain/Palin is top line and Obama/Biden second. Not sure what the placement rules are in Colorado, but if McCain is top line on every ballot in CO then, according to some research, he gets an automatic 3-point handicap.
I did vote NO on almost every proposed state constitutional amendment, out of principal more than anything else. I am not opposed to direct citizen democracy in theory, but in practice here (and elsewhere in the west) it is not constrained well enough to be intelligent, efficient and effective. The bar to getting proposed amendments on the ballot is absurdly low, which all but guarantees that each ballot will have some vaguely or poorly-worded amendments, purposefully confusing amendments (like Amendment 46 this year), and even different amendments that directly contradict each other (as in 2006). The constitution of the state should be a clean and minimal guiding document that sets forth the high-level goals and aspirations of the state. It shouldn’t be filled with legal gobbledygook concerning whether state sales taxes are spent on people with developmental disabilities.
The Palin bounce (down the stairs) effect is now confirmed. After seeing acts like this, Dems no long need to point out Palin’s total lack of qualification to be veep, because the R’s are doing it for them. Palin is now an anchor on John McCain’s boat, no longer the helium helping him rise. The McCain/Palin numbers will only drop from here, and the downtrend will be due both to McCain’s economy-managing fiasco as much as from Palin’s stunning unsuitability for the job. The McCain campaign is clearly shielding her from further public interviews and contact with the press as they can’t afford more Couric-type interviews.
As far as the markets, the left/right divide on the $700B Paulson power grab has been fascinating to watch. In Colorado the voting outcome was mixed. Those on the left and right in safe seats voted Y (Degette, Perlmutter and Tancredo) and neither of these players are necessarily considered moderates. The Nay votes were both from contested races (Udall and Musgrave) and from a D (Salazar) and R (Lamborn) in safe seats. In other words, there’s no real pattern here. The media has made much of the fact that rank-and-file R’s voted against the plan across the country (and they did by 2-1) just as 40% of rank-and-file D’s did, showing (supposedly) that conservatives and liberals both are in agreement on hating the compromise Paulson Power Grab, just for different reasons.
Are the reasons really that different? R’s, D’s and moderates all around see the same things here: just two weeks ago Paulson, Bernanke, Bush, McCain, etc. were all spouting that the fundamentals of the economy were strong and that everything was roses. Now they are asking for $700 billion in taxpayer money in a panic rush, telling us that if they don’t get it the economy is gonzo. Voters are very rationally asking the WTF question while their reps are squirming around, ready to push the nuclear button after about two days of debate. Again, it’s times like this I am thankful we have a slow Congress designed to make sure we don’t make panic decisions.
Finally, speaking of the Paulson Power Grab, if you thought the weekend compromise bill ameliorated the No Longer Invisible Hand provisions, think again:
What attracted far less notice in the bill was a set of provisions that would have given Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson virtually unfettered authority to set up and run the new organization designed to stabilize the financial system — bypassing federal acquisition rules and competitive hiring procedures in the process.
The 2008 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act would have allowed Paulson and his eventual successor to waive provisions of the Federal Acquisition Regulation “upon a determination that urgent and compelling circumstances make compliance with such provisions contrary to the public interest.”
“It’s unprecedented in American history and American government,” said Donald F. Kettl, a political analyst and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “The blank check is blanker still given that we don’t know who will be signing dollar bills on Jan. 21.”
The department would have had to notify the House Financial Services and Oversight and Government Reform committees, as well as the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs committees of any waiver within seven days. But the bill would not have granted the panels explicit power to block any such contract.
And it goes on and on….
Anybody who has spent more than 2 minutes in politics in America knows that real political power lies in knowing, understanding and managing the myriad distinct constituencies we have in this land. For instance, Sarah Palin as a proud “Hockey mom?” As easy as it appears to be to draw well-defined distinctions, clearly there is no single constituency that can be labeled “Hockey Moms.” Instead you have 40-something hockey moms who lean left and have right-voting husbands, 30-something hockey moms who just bought the new Metallica album but usually vote Republican, 42-yr old Hispanic hockey moms who have 3 dogs, etc.
And so it is with people who own and use guns. To those who do not, especially those of the metro East Coast political analysis cadre, there probably isn’t much perceived nuance: if you own a gun, especially if you own one for hunting, you’re voting with the NRA and therefore with the Republicans. This, of course, is absurd, but strange as it may seem, the NRA loves this perceived distinction. It gives them a strong wedge issue with which to stoke their funding base, so the NRA does nothing to disabuse the public of the perception.
Fortunately for America, while the NRA does dominate gun politics here, it does not represent all (or probably even a majority) of gun owners. Yes, the NRA has an impressively huge membership and ostensibly represents all American gun owners. But like hockey moms and soccer moms and NASCAR dads and west coast elites and coal miner’s daughters and single black men in their 30’s and elementary school librarians, the “gun owner constituency” is not a single-minded, single-issue, black-and-white politics constituency. Far from it. And while the NRA is proudly and staunchly protecting the interests of gun owners for whom the biggest priority is to be able to own any and every gun ever manufactured, it is not doing nearly as well for the silent majority of gun owners. Amongst others, those are gun owners for whom the biggest priority is to be able to hunt in pristine lands.
I am in the latter category. I am an avid big game hunter, a bird hunter and a fly fisherman. I own — well, let’s say more than a couple — guns, mostly for hunting. But more importantly, I am a gun owner who doesn’t feel threatened by gun control laws. I am a gun owner who doesn’t want any friggin crazy to have the right to own an assault rifle or a semi-automatic pistol. I am an avid gun owner who feels sick when yet another massacre comes down from a kid or kids who should never have had access to a gun. I am a gun owner who becomes incensed when gun rights groups don’t even wait until the smoke clears to declare that the massacre occurred because of gun control laws, not in spite of them. I’m a gun owner that thinks nobody in America needs to own an MP-5 or an HK416. And because of all this and more, I am a firearm owner who feels totally alienated by the National Rifle Association. (more…)
Was covered marginally well by Stuart Rothenberg in RCP today. Rothenberg calls Colorado the single swing state if there is a single swing state. And he might even be right. He boils down his list of the top-5 most important states (Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Virginia) to Colorado, thinking that as Colorado goes so goes the race. It’s a point I made a long time ago on another blog I took down, so I’m not going to call him wrong, but his understanding of Colorado’s electorate is a bit suspect:
Still, the state looks to be made for a tight contest. With upscale white voters who would seem likely to prefer Obama, Hispanics, Boulder liberals and plenty of swing suburbanites, Colorado looks like a one-time Republican state where Obama should have appeal.
As those states will likely go VA, MI and NV to Obama and OH to McCain, Colorado will be pivotal. Expect to see all four candidates here a lot over the next few weeks.
Meanwhile the cracks continue to open up for Ms. Palin. The latest was (Republican) Senator Hagel ripping her for knowing nothing about the world outside of Alaska. The rest of this election season will witness the slow and inexorable decline of Ms. Palin as a force for increased Republican votes, especially as Troopergate and her earmark hypocrisy continue to grab lines and lines of ink.
August 12 has come and gone on the sun-burnt plains of Colorado CD-2. Jared Polis pulled out a good win against Joan Fitz-Gerald and Will Shafroth, keeping Will’s strengths in check while whittling down Joan to the very end.
Much can be said about this race and how it turned out, but the key was this: Jared had the right combination of the resources, the skills and the dedication to pull this off. Much has been made (here as elsewhere) about Jared’s limitless funds but it should be obvious to anybody seriously considering the picture that money won’t buy you anything if you don’t have the awareness and the political skills to match.
Jared’s biggest strategic move was to have the foresight and the cajones to dump an unworkable campaign manager months ago when his campaign was bumbling along without a strong, seasoned leader. Jared picked up Robert Becker and it was off to the races. Becker had the flexibility to run circles around Joan’s campaign and Mary Alice just couldn’t keep pace. Every JFG attack was old and tired, the same old soundbite about Jared’s cash that came across as a whine. The Joan campaign didn’t have fresh material or a fresh attitude and it cost them. When Jared produced solid dirt on Joan the answer was mismanaged.
Jared did well to pick up a campaign manager equal to the task, but clearly the bulk of the credit must go to the candidate himself. He didn’t just rest on the laurels of his money, but wore out the shoe leather as well as Will or Joan (also see his comment here). Only the candidates themselves know how much they are working door-to-door but there’s one bit of evidence I think says pretty clearly that Jared was working as hard as possible for this seat: he had a bigger margin over Joan in Adams and Broomfield Counties than in Boulder County.
Clearly I was supporting Will in this race but as I said previously, if it wasn’t Will it would be Jared for me. I think both were good candidates but Will was stronger on my issues (longer track record and more dedication) and had some intangibles I liked. Even so, I was very impressed with how quickly Jared picked up these issues, how prepared he was for them at the climate/energy debate, and especially by how willing he has been to engage and comment on this blog. Thanks for that, Jared!
So here’s a congratulations to all for a race well played. Jared comes out the big winner in all this, Will comes out as well with a new load of street cred for pulling a lot of weight when every observer thought the two biggies would bury him. As for Joan? I won’t be catty about it, but politically Joan comes out the big loser in this. She started with all the weight and prestige behind her, started as the out-size runaway favorite. And lost. She didn’t lose because she got out-spent, she lost because she got out-campaigned, and that’s that. Despite that, Joan is still to be thanked for putting in the extraordinary effort it takes to run for a seat like this.
Good luck Jared, and serve us well.
We knew that the mining industry was an enthusiastic supporter of Joan Fitz-Gerald before the CD-2 primary race started. And throughout the race she hasn’t even bothered trying to distance herself from those ties. As the race has worn on more of Joan’s mining support has come out, become more clear, stood up, been counted, shown its face, and given her opponents juicy ammo. All this exploded this week as Jared Polis’ campaign released a letter in which Joan tried to back Summit County away from banning cyanide heap leach gold mining (see previous post and ColoradoPols threads about this).
(Note that it didn’t take long for Jared to come out strongly against cyanide mining. Great job, Jared! I can tell you’ve been a passionate and dedicated opponent of this technique for years! Way to stick your neck out and take the opportune obvious expedient right position! Way to be a real leader on this! Oh wait, I guess Jared’s not so clean after all.)
On one of the Pols stories I commented about Joan’s cameo appearances in two different Colorado Mining Association newsletters (one in 2003, the other in 2006), praising her for her support for the mining industry.
Is this a problem? As some commenters in the Pols’ vigorous debate argue, we use the materials derived from mining constantly. We rely on those materials, so what’s the problem? Why is Joan’s defense of the mining industry a problem?
Mining itself is not the problem. We do rely on minerals, and to get those minerals we must mine for them. The problem is that the mining industry is comprised of private and publicly-held mining corporations and the only responsibility these companies have is to their owners or shareholders. They (and rightfully so), strive for maximum profit, and therefore minimal expenses. Mining cleanly? Mining with the utmost care and attention to the environment? An obvious expense.
Society has a different calculation to consider: minerals, yes, but not at the cost of a destroyed environment. The People need to balance minerals extraction with environmental preservation.
So we have a natural and unavoidable tension: mining companies want to make money, society wants the products and a clean environment. We create government regulations to try to ensure we get both, but it is clearly in the companies’ best interest to ensure the minimization of regulations.
So it is industry’s interest to not be regulated, it is in our interest that they are. The relevant question to be asked here is: which side is Joan Fitz-Gerald on? After seeing her praised in print by the CMA twice, after seeing her letter to Summit County, after noting her PAC contributions from mining industry groups, it’s pretty damn clear which side Joan is on. If she is acting in the interest of Mining can she also be acting in the interest of stringent regulations of mining? Not bloody likely. The relevant question for CD-2 voters is: does such a strong supporter of the mining industry warrant our vote?
Joan peppered the CD-2 energy and climate debate with platitudes about the environment, how she drives a Prius, how she’s against all things nuclear, etc. But Joan is walking a razor’s edge espousing a Prius-driving lifestyle while pushing counties away from banning potentially destructive mining practices and taking oodles of mining PAC money. This kind of hypocrisy may be present in most political officials, but it doesn’t mean we have to like it or accept it. In Joan I don’t.
Two days ago the Denver Post announced its endorsement for Will Shafroth for CD-2, a major feather in Will’s cap. This followed by a week the Rocky Mountain News’ own endorsement of Shafroth. The only other newspaper endorsement that means much to this race, that of the Daily Camera, will be announced this week.
Grabbing the two Denver papers is a major coop for Shafroth and a major embarrassment for Joan Fitz-Gerald. While nobody with any ounce of insight into this race would expect Jared Polis to pick up these endorsements, most probably guessed that Joan would have had the inside line. Her years as a state politico and deal maker presumptively marked her as the “inevitable” choice, and she has certainly been positioned as that from the start of this race. Whether coming from her own people or from detail-watchers like ColoradoPols, most have been touting Joan in much the same way that Mark Penn positioned Hillary in the beginning of her race. We all know how that turned out and my guess is Joan goes down the same path.
So why didn’t Joan get the nod over Will? Only the editors of the dailies know, but here’s my guess: personality. Whisper it loudly: once people actually get to meet and talk to these candidates they have opposite reactions to Will and Joan. Will they like more, Joan they like less. Biased by my own experiences perhaps, but I have heard this from CD-2 voters time and again. Joan comes off as something nearing bitter, Will comes off as affable. Quite simply, Joan just turns people off. We can talk about policy differences all day long, but in the end their policies are not far enough apart to matter much. This is about personality. As for Jared? As nice a guy as Jared may be, he comes off as the over-eager new car salesman trying to get you to just jump in and take this thing for a ride. That he is trying to buy this race is obvious, but what is dragging him down like a leaded sea anchor is that he doesn’t have the personality skills to make his purchase irrelevant.
In the end, these endorsements may matter not at all. But they are a major boost of credibility to Shafroth’s candidacy and should give anybody who lays down on conventional wisdom a pause.
In the biggest oops of the CD-2 campaign so far, the Denver Post today ran a placement story by the Fitz-Gerald campaign that has Polis looking like a big, fat environmental hypocrite.
Fitz-Gerald’s environmental liabilities in this race were already known by insiders (not by voters, yet) and Polis has been trying to hammer her from a dual angle: taking special interest money from anti-environmental sources. Polis has also been playing himself as the green candidate, giving his website an eco-feelgood look and putting up significant verbiage on his enviro positions. But today the Fitz-Gerald campaign got the story they wanted in the Post when it ran a Karen Crummy investigative article on Polis’ investment history. Unfortunately for Polis he detailed in a self-disclosure form past holdings in multiple oil/gas and mining companies.
Polis listed income from 20 or more oil and gas companies, such as the China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., ConocoPhillips and LUKOIL, the largest oil company in Russia. He also was invested with pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer Inc., GlaxoSmithCline, Sanofi Aventis and Novartis, and he had stock in mining companies such as Southern Copper Corp., which operates open pit mines in Peru and Mexico.
He also was invested in companies that routinely draw fire from liberal groups, such as Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart of Mexico, Altria Group (previously known as Philip Morris) and Imperial Chemical Industries.
Even so, from January through April, his campaign has continually slammed Fitz-Gerald for taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from political action committees and special interests, specifically the oil, gas, mining and pharmaceutical industries.
The article was clearly researched, promoted and pushed by the JFG campaign:
Jared Polis now has a big perception problem and things have worked out exactly as Joan Fitz-Gerald must have hoped before she started the tax release game in CD-2. A few days ago Polis and Shafroth followed Fitz-G and released their tax returns. The Daily Camera ran a story, because, of course, how much the candidates make is exceedingly important to who should get the job (read: sarcasm….and ok, it’s really because we’re a bunch of peeping toms and any time we can find out how much our neighbor makes or what their medical records say we just have to know).
The story carried a sidebar with six or seven years of income and tax history for the three candidates. The problem for Jared was obvious at first glance: for five of the seven years of his tax history, he didn’t pay any taxes. In two other years he made a combined hundred and twenty mil. In a nutshell, that’s the perception problem: you made millions but didn’t pay taxes. So typical of you filthy millionaires.
While Jared did pay taxes in his two money-making years, he didn’t pay taxes in the others, so looked at a certain way he made somewhere near $110M in seven years but only paid taxes in two of those years.
Now, the reality is that
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.
[Note: the following was an unedited (i.e. sorry for the typos) stream of furious typing from tonight's CD-2 debate on energy and climates issues, held at CU's law school. The most recent update is on top, the first entry just before the debate's start at 6pm is at the bottom of the post. A more considered summation will follow in a separate post.]
7:50 PM: Overall thoughts: hard to say who won. On the issues, Will won, Jared was second and Joan third. It follows the pattern of observation that I made in my original post on this. Will knows the most but Jared is a quick study and sounded very good in certain areas, although he had to fall back on the special interests angle and other tangents (like the copyright/IP angle) too often. Will never had to fall back on stock talking points. Joan brought up Iraq and the Bush Administration and name dropped far too often for me to take her performance seriously here.
However, even though I called her “dour” in an early entry, on crowd appeal Joan held her own and probably came across as the most seasoned of the three. All three candidates drew laughter once or twice, but Joan’s moments seemed the most, well, poignant. She got amped up at the end of her closing statement and I think it played well, but the effect of it was tempered by her going second and being followed by Will, so the last thing the crowd heard was Will’s closing. Even so, Joan got the most applause two or three times by raising Iraq. I really mean no harm or insult by using the term “dour.” Her “dourness” probably played to many as seriousness and I imagine that many in the audience gave her highest aspect marks, coming across as the most serious candidate and probably the most electable because of it. That said, Jared came out as quite personable and articulate, probably the most articulate and even self-confident of the three. When it comes to the psychology of politics and elections, I am a big self-confidence guy. I think it is the single biggest factor that voters respond to. If any of the three won on this, it was Jared.
From the way the crowd reacted to comments, lines, ideas, etc., I get a sense that what I was listening for was something fairly different than what the crowd was listening for. I was listening for wonky substance, maybe many were listening for general personality and/or electability. Perhaps the applause for Joan’s Iraq lines was only felt by a small minority and so wasn’t representative of how the balance of the crowd perceived the debate, but those lines definitely played and Joan was the only of the three raising them. The point is, I don’t have a strong sense of who won the debate in the crowd’s eyes (and there were no applause clues to help me). My guess is that it was very nearly a draw and didn’t leave many with a clear line to pick a certain candidate.
Again, on the issues alone, Will Shafroth won. On everything else considered, I would guess that everybody in the room found something to like in each candidate and who wins in individual eyes comes down to some deeply intuitive reaction to candidate personalities. More follow-up in a subsequent post.
7:37 PM: It’s over now. My wrap up in a few minutes.
7:36 PM: Will goes last: I have 3 kids and I feel a deep sense of responsibility on this and it drives me to run for Congress. Gets laughs. There’s nobody up here that’s bad on these issues. It’s not how we’re going to vote, it’s how we’re going to lead. If there is one thing I’m going to do it’s energy and climate change. My commitment to you is that I will work everyday on climate and energy issues. I too am going to go to Congress unencumbered. I’ve raised a lot of money and it’s 99.7% from individuals.
A lot of the readers here are Colorado CD-2 local and have been hammering me for writing national and ignoring the state and local. I’m nothing if not weak, malleable, easily bought and influenced and otherwise ready to do your every bidding, so let’s get moving on the local and state (CO) coverage.
Here’s the CD-2 lay of the land in brief:
Mark Udall is giving up his safe CD-2 seat to run for Senate. As there is no legitimate R competition for this safe D seat, this race is really over with the August 12 primary. The challengers to the throne are all liberal D’s, befitting Boulder’s political makeup. Joan Fitz-Gerald is the assumed favorite by most observers, currently the State Senate president, holding strong name recognition. Jared Polis is usually considered the biggest challenger and has plenty of name recognition, but is suffering from a perception of buying his name recognition and his way into this race. (In such a politically-aware district, that poses more problems than it would in a sleepy district.) Will Shafroth is the third candidate and might be the strongest of the three if he had any name recognition. Right now best odds are on Fitz-Gerald simply because of the name recognition, but if Shafroth can ramp up his profile significantly, he’ll be tough. He’s been benefiting from sitting back in the shadows while Fitz-Gerald and Polis rip each other apart, but he can’t stay there for long. Polis is an enigma, as he seems to polarize people in a way that Fitz-Gerald doesn’t (polarizing doesn’t mean it diminishes his chances….there are two sides to a pole, it could help him). Shafroth has played it smart by sitting out the complex caucus process. While Fitz-Gerald and Polis threw themselves into the multi-stage caucus system as the path to getting on August’s ballot, Shafroth has gone the petition route. I think that was a smart play, as he can quietly build name recognition by gathering his signatures while Polis and F-G fiddle away.
Now on to energy and climate. It’s hard to say what will separate these three fine, fine candidates on August 12, but it will in part be a combination of grassrootsing and campaigning, debate performance, and frequency of mention in the local papers of record. The problem with campaigning on the issues for these three is that there isn’t a lot of room for separation here. They all have to be predictably anti-war, pro-renewable energy, pro-climate policy, pro-universal health care, etc.
