April 08, 2022 01:16 PM UTC

Ganahl Flat-Out Refuses To Renounce The "Big Lie"

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• by: Colorado Pols

In today’s Unaffiliated newsletter from the Colorado Sun, an interview Wednesday by former DA-turned AM radio host George Brauchler of Republican candidate for governor Heidi Ganahl represents the latest attempt to get Ganahl definitively on the record answering what should be a simple question: whether she believes the 2020 president election was rightfully decided in favor of Joe Biden. Over six months after the original launch of Ganahl’s campaign in which this question became a damaging stumbling block, we see that Ganahl still hasn’t improved on the answer no one found acceptable last September:

BRAUCHLER: “Was the election stolen?”

GANAHL: “You know, Joe Biden is our president. Unfortunately, right now, he’s the guy in the White House. We’ve got to do everything we can to change that.”

BRAUCHLER: “But do you believe it was stolen? Do you not believe it was stolen? Is that too tough of a question?”

GANAHL: “I think there’s a lot of questions about what happened in the election. And for four years the Democrats yelled ‘Russia! Russia! Russia!’ And, for the last couple years, we had some questions about what happened. I don’t understand why they’re so averse to transparency and people asking questions and gaining confidence again.”

And if that wasn’t bad enough, Brauchler then asked Ganahl how she planned to handle questions about Tina Peters, the Mesa County Clerk facing felony charges for tampering with election equipment in a failed quest to prove the “Big Lie”:

“I’m not going to get caught up in influencing or telling voters what is OK or what is not OK,” Ganahl said. “That’s their choice.”

As you can see, Ganahl won’t even go as far as the Colorado Republican Party’s own chairwoman Kristi Burton Brown has and distance from Tina Peters. It’s one thing to weasel her way around the broader question about the 2020 election, which most Republican candidates petrified of their own base are finding themselves forced to do to varying degrees, but refusing to even agree that a candidate under felony indictment should step aside for the good of everyone on the ticket (including Ganahl) tells us that Ganahl in her heart might really believe the election was stolen from Donald Trump.

We took note back in February when Brauchler’s colleague at 710 KNUS talk radio Peter Boyles ripped into former state House Minority Leader Patrick Neville for continuing to push the “Big Lie” past the tolerance of even some conservative voters, not to mention the state’s unaffiliated plurality, at the risk of undoing any advantage Republicans might have going into the 2022 midterms.

For once, Denver’s right-wing AM radio talking heads are right. But the Republican candidates they need to persuade, whether out of fear of the base or their own conviction, do not appear to be listening.