September 05, 2018 02:11 PM UTC

Today In Bad Walker Stapleton News

• 8 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

With the 2018 campaign season now officially underway, we are noticing quickly that the high volume of bad press for Republican gubernatorial candidate Walker Stapleton we are obliged to cover in this space is taking up a significant amount of time and homepage space. Much in the way that bad news for Donald Trump tends to merge into a stream of noise that winds up desensitizing news consumers, there’s a risk that the multiple and often related bad news narratives for Stapleton could simply get tuned out–or at least tuned down.

In the interest of avoiding this, we’ll try to summarize Stapleton stories on days when the headlines come hard and fast so as little as possible gets lost in the shuffle. Like today! In the wake of Stapleton’s fundraiser last Friday featuring infamous anti-immigrant hardliner Tom Tancredo, 9NEWS spoke with NBC national correspondent Chuck Todd about the wisdom of Stapleton hanging out with Tanc–and got this truly thought-provoking response:

.@chucktodd told #9NEWS: “Maybe @WalkerStapleton is not comfortable saying what needs to be said and he wants an association that will help send that message to the Trump base.” More of Todd’s analysis on #HeyNext. (2/2) #cogov #copolitics #9NEWS

— Kyle Clark (@KyleClark) September 4, 2018

Although the implications of this possibility are deeply troubling, it would explain a lot–including Stapleton’s bizarre inability to put his family’s ties to the Ku Klux Klan to rest. At some level, is it possible that Stapleton doesn’t want to repudiate racism?

Next we have two different Democratic campaigns opening fire on Stapleton, the first from Democratic candidate Jared Polis highlighting Stapleton’s absenteeism from work as Treasurer–Westword reports:

The second from the state Democratic Party, recalling comments from Stapleton during his run for Treasurer that we wrote about when they originally occurred:

“I think that all state programs are going to have to compete for limited funds,” he said. “It’s time education competes for funds.” [Pols emphasis]

He said the last thing anyone wants is to release offenders.

“We have to stop automatic ratcheting,” he said. “I will allow prisons to compete and ultimately be funded by precious tax money.”

We’ve always thought that amazing statement “I will allow prisons to compete” with schools for money would be highly revisitable when Stapleton made a run for higher office–and, well, here we are!

The final piece of news from this roundup, though the business day isn’t over and there could be more, is Corey Hutchins’ much-anticipated story from Friday’s Tancredo fundraiser in Parker. Although Hutchins supplied enough via Twitter to elicit a response from NBC’s national political reporter, another Stapleton quote from this story is the subject of much bemused discussion today:

Stapleton urged those there to talk to their Democratic family members and “to independents, who are kind of out to lunch,” [Pols emphasis] about the stakes of the election.

That’s right. Stapleton said that 37.7% of registered voters in Colorado are “out to lunch.”

It’s possible we are dealing with a campaign for governor so bad, we’re going to have to wait until after the election to fully process just how bad it was. Is there any other candidate in recent memory dumb enough to just straight-up insult the voters who decide elections in this state? Would even Dan Maes have done that?

A long two months await, folks.