January 17, 2018 05:23 PM UTC

Cynthia Coffman Will Go Petition Route, Ride Unicorn

• 5 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

This is…strange, but par for the course for Cynthia “Wait, What?” Coffman:

INBOX: Cynthia Coffman says she will petition onto the GOP primary ballot in the Colorado governor’s race. #copolitics

— Jesse Aaron Paul (@JesseAPaul) January 17, 2018

This is the part where we tell you that Coffman has just $85,000 in her campaign bank account as of the beginning of January. Candidates for Governor need at least 10,500 valid signatures from registered voters of their own party in order to make the primary ballot in June (1,500 from each of Colorado’s seven congressional districts). It is nearly impossible to gather these signatures through volunteers alone — assuming Coffman even has volunteers — so she’ll need a lot of money for signature gathering firms that normally charge anywhere from $2-4 per signature. These firms can jack prices up to as much as $8 per signature depending on demand — and there is a LOT of demand in 2018.

Now, In order to account for potential duplicate signatures, the general rule for campaigns is to submit double the required number of signatures for ballot access. For candidates seeking the top statewide offices in Colorado, that means they need to collect about 21,000  total signatures by March 20.

At an average cost of $2-4 per signature, it would cost a statewide candidate anywhere from $42,000 to $84,000 at minimum in order to qualify for the primary ballot. In 2014, Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez paid about $269,000 to two different signature-gathering outfits (Argos Colorado and Signature Gathering CO of Oregon); it’s impossible to tell from campaign finance reports just what percentage of that $269k paid for signature collection alone, but this is still a pretty good estimate of what it will cost candidates in 2018.

Again, this is the part where we tell you that Coffman has just $85,000 in her campaign bank account as of the beginning of January.

We have a hard time envisioning a scenario whereby this works out well for Coffman, though we’ve been saying that for awhile now.