April 29, 2016 10:36 AM UTC

Yes, Republicans Are Definitely Blowing Their Senate Chances in Colorado

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: Per Lynn Bartels of the Secretary of State’s office, Jon Keyser has apparently won his legal challenge and will be allowed on the June 28th Primary ballot.

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Amber Phillips of the Washington Post pens a long story today with the headline: “Are Republicans blowing their chance in the Colorado Senate race?”

Why, yes, as a matter of fact, they are. We’ll get into a bit more of our own analysis in a moment, but first, a few highlights from the Post story:

The past few months have brought on a slew of recruiting and campaign troubles for Republicans. They struggled to find an experienced and reputable candidate to take on Bennet. Now they’re trudging through a crowded nominating process with no obvious standout hopeful. And this week, the establishment’s preferred candidate — to the extent there is one — failed to qualify to be on the GOP primary ballot. So did two other candidates.

Senate Republicans’ campaign arm also hasn’t reserved airtime in Colorado for the fall, which some took as a sign they might just take a pass on the race altogether. (Senate Republicans caution against reading too much into that.) Taken altogether, Republicans’ missteps have given Bennet some much-needed breathing room in a race that his campaign perhaps rightly expected to be much more competitive than it is now…

…Like we said, it’s still too early to tell whether Republicans’ missteps have permanently altered the race. But for now, it seems like the Colorado Senate race is a lot less competitive than we thought it would be.

As of this writing, only two Republican candidates for U.S. Senate have actually made the ballot: El Paso County Commissioner Darryl Glenn and former Colorado State University Athletic Director Jack Graham. Jon Keyser is still waiting to hear from a Denver judge regarding his legal challenge of the Secretary of State’s ruling that he failed to submit enough valid petition signatures. Ryan Frazier is vowing the same legal fight and has hired former Secretary of State Scott Gessler as his legal representative. Robert Blaha has not yet indicated whether he will seek a legal remedy for his own failure to make the ballot, but he has been all over talk radio this morning and we can’t imagine that he would have come this far in the race to give up now.