Failed GOP congressional candidate Nicholas Morse announced yesterday what we’ve been expecting for some weeks now, the announcement that former Republican Secretary of State Scott “Honey Badger” Gessler will seek the job of chairman of the Colorado Republican Party to replace Rep. Ken Buck after another disastrous defeat for the party in the 2020 elections:
Please join me in supporting and voting for Scott Gessler to be our next State Party Chair.
I got to know Scott in 2016 when I asked him for lunch and he accepted. We spent the next couple hours discussing CD2 & he gave me insight into the district and a strategy that I can adamantly say helped.
With his guidance we were able to earn the most votes in CD2 history, even with a strong Libertarian vote (Never Trumpers) & we forced Jared Polis to spend more than $1.5M to protect what was considered a safe seat. Without the third party vote, we would have lost CD2, 47% – 53% and it would have turned some heads. That is the punch that Scott brings to our party and one we desperately need…
Subsequently confirmed by the Colorado’s Sun’s Jesse Aaron Paul:
Scott Gessler, Colorado’s former secretary of state, has announced his bid to be the next chair of the state GOP. He faces Kristi Burton Brown, the Colorado Republican Party’s current No. 2. #copolitics
— Jesse Aaron Paul ☀ (@JesseAPaul) January 26, 2021
Scott Gessler, who served as Colorado’s chief elections officer from 2011 until 2015, has a well-earned reputation as one of the state’s most notorious partisan political pugilists. As Secretary of State, a job in retrospect he should never have had, Gessler was the principal source of baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud in Colorado elections–an eerie prelude to the allegations Donald Trump made to justify refusing to accept the results of the 2020 elections nationally. Gessler’s claims of “tens of thousands of illegal voters” evaporated under scrutiny in much the same way Trump’s false claims did last November, and should have been the end of Gessler’s credibility.
Instead, Gessler became an “expert witness” for the Trump legal team in Nevada, arguing based on his “experience” with Colorado elections that Nevada’s books must have been cooked! A textbook case of bad behavior rewarded. The case was dismissed, but Gessler charged $450 an hour for his services. In between, Gessler charged thousands in 2019 to the failed Recall Polis campaign for “legal advice” that was, if anything other than close up shop immediately and go home, bad advice.
It’s necessary to be honest: Gessler, who is more than a match for the completely clueless vice-chair of the Colorado GOP Kristi Burton Brown, would be a major setback for Republicans hoping to turn the page from the disasters of the past few election cycles. Gessler may offer more attentiveness than moonlighting Ken Buck and less amateurishness than Kristi Burton Brown, but he’s a creature, even a progenitor, of Trump’s alt-facts assault on democracy. There are Republicans in Colorado, a state whose GOP assembly rejected Trump in 2016 before paying terribly for Trump that year and in the next two elections, who don’t want to go down that road any longer.
Gessler can’t lead Colorado Republicans back from the brink, but he might send them over the edge with style.
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The CO GOP continues their inexorable slide down the toilet. If their choice really is between these two, they're fucked.
Who's going to get Moddy's
endorsementkiss-of-death?Q-bie’s Kbb . . .
. . . Fluffy may not know much of anything else, but I’ll bet he definitely knows where his butter’s being greased . . .
Back when Moddy was trying to head fake us posting as Podesta Emails he was ragging on Ryan Call. His displeasure with Ryan means he’d probably be a pretty good pick to come back and right the ship.
Trying is the operative word. Not exactly a convincing head fake. When he was Poddy Mouth, we should have asked him what he thought of Steve House.
Moddy hated Steve House. In real life, “Moderatus” was all in with the Marilyn Marks/ Becky Mizel / Cynthia Coffman / Tom Tancredo scheme to blackmail House and force him out of the GOP chairmanship.
He did have some obvious jealousy issues.
Wouldn’t that be the definition of “futility,” asking Fluffy (or any of his tissue puppets) to think? . . .
. . . No equipment, no operator’s manual, and no hope of being able to use or understand either one.
. . . I mean, unless you, like me, just enjoy the comedy?
It would have been purely for comedy. Just because he would have sputtered out some nonsense or tucked tail and run away like a little punk.
Or, like asking Siri to perform a sex act just to see what the programmed response will be . . .
A hobby of yours,perhaps?
Nah, more just doing whatever's necessary to stay technologically current.
You gotta hand it to the little feller, he knows how to pick ‘em. Now that he’s in the inner circle with Qbie he’ll be a kingmaker at the next state convention.
Who would be the Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Brad Raffensperger or Brian Kemp of Colorado?
We need a big line in the banner to keep track of the Republicans vs Trumpists.
Both Raffensperger and Kemp were Trumpists until Trump went after them for not subverting democracy in Georgia.
Now they're RINOs
Seems as if Brown and Gessler can test their bona fides with the Trumpy side of the party and split the vote, and if a John Suthers-ish or Corporate Republican wanted to jump in as a pragmatic “let’s win” candidate, they’d have a chance to win. Of course, they would then have to actually work with Brown & Gessler and their supporters.
Yup, classic Nash Equilibrium. Seems to be the state of American politics these days.
I have not previously been aware of that term….Nash equilibrium.
I looked it up. The definition left me still a bit confused. Is it synonymous with that old expression "Mexican stand-off" where the first to move makes themselves vulnerable?
Here's where it came from, Duke:
Nash equilibrium is named after American mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr. The same idea was used in a particular application in 1838 by Antoine Augustin Cournot in his theory of oligopoly. … They showed that a mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium will exist for any zero-sum game with a finite set of actions.
I looked it up, too.
It’s a concept that seems to apply to many situations beyond games. The clearest example for me is the application to economics. The individual does better when everyone does better: “ Rising tide lifts all boats” is the equilibrium in action, whereas “I gotta get mine, the hell with y’all” is a counter-example.
Mask-wearing in a pandemic – we all protect each other is, I think another example. But Meiner should explain it, since he/she dropped the term into the comment stream.
Such incredible logic ….
If you ignore the fact that many former Republicans are fleeing the now openly fascist Republican Party in droves, then well, we had an incredible result in CD 2 where out candidate would have, if you ignore the traitor Libertarians, have only lost CD 2 as badly as Bush lost CD 3 to Boebert.
Besides, all votes for non-Q’publicans are illegal votes!
This is unintelligible, Lurker. If you are speaking in the voice of a Q-publican, maybe it’s meant to be unintelligible. Either way, it’s baffling. CD2 has been a safely blue district for a long time.
Meanwhile in Arizona… (pop some popcorn)
Republicans demand audit of Kelli Ward’s narrow win for Arizona GOP chair