June 06, 2022 11:56 AM UTC

Joe O'Dea's Handlers Belatedly Realize He Might Actually Lose

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the only 2022 Republican U.S. Senate candidate who survived state Rep. Ron Hanks’ sweep of the GOP state assembly by petitioning on to the June 28th primary ballot, political neophyte Joe O’Dea undeniably enjoyed good fortune watching a number of at least in-paper formidable challengers go down to a hard-right “MAGA” contender with vastly more rhetoric than resources. Since Hanks’ assembly win, the “17th Street Wing” of the Colorado GOP has rushed to throw support behind O’Dea, while Hanks has campaigned aggressively at Republican Party events across the state hoping to overcome his financial disparity with shoe leather.

As the Colorado Sun’s Jesse Paul reports, after going dark for days ahead of ballots going out this week, O’Dea’s campaign is going back on the air with urgency for the Republican primary after another big cash infusion straight from the candidate’s pockets:

Joe O’Dea’s campaign for U.S. Senate is making a major push heading into the June 28 Republican primary, spending more than $300,000 on television and radio ads over the next three weeks as he begins attacking his GOP opponent, U.S. Rep. Ron Hanks, in earnest..

“This nearly $325,000 tv and radio buy is the start of our June blitz,” said Zack Roday, the new campaign manager, whose resume includes a stint with former House Speaker Paul Ryan. “We are ramping up our advertising and adding key staff to close out this primary strong.”

O’Dea’s campaign appears to have had a belated recognition that despite Ron Hanks’ lack of legal tender, Hanks has all the grassroots momentum in this race being the only candidate saying the words that a majority of Republican primary voters want to hear:

Hanks has yet to buy TV ad time (he is planning to run radio ads soon) and he doesn’t have the same kind of paid campaign infrastructure that O’Dea has. Instead, Hanks is relying on a grassroots network of supporters and volunteers to win the primary, [Pols emphasis] many of whom appear energized by his embrace of baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.

“He can spend all the money he wants,” Hanks told The Colorado Sun, “but he can’t move the people to a message they aren’t going to accept. He’s on the wrong side of the issues.”

Hanks is correct that his platform is much more naturally aligned with the majority of Republican voters than O’Dea, and the more voters hear about O’Dea’s weakness on issues from abortion to Joe Biden’s “socialist” infrastructure bill, the less likely they are to support O’Dea in the upcoming primary no matter how many big Republican names line up behind him. The conservative activist grassroots network in Colorado is moreover extremely suspicious of the party apparatus picking favorites–and especially GOP chair Kristi Burton Brown, who prominent conservatives have called upon to resign.

O’Dea is not the only Republican running in 2022 facing ruin at the hands of their rightward underdog challenger, but unlike Heidi Ganahl besieged by the bizarrely competitive perennial candidate Greg Lopez or Pam Anderson crushed under the weight of Tina Peters’ MAGA stardom, Joe O’Dea does have the ability to write a big check to get his name on TV.

The problem is that O’Dea should have been on this weeks ago, and even then we don’t know if it would work. Announcing O’Dea’s big hire of a former Paul Ryan staffer while Ryan is in the middle of a rhetorical pissing match with Donald Trump over the GOP’s future is just another strike against him among conservative voters, and this emergency loan to the campaign to get ads up trashing Ron Hanks which the Hanks campaign should consider “free advertising,” projects the opposite of strength.

Today’s GOP is a party in denial of its nature. When that happens, bet on nature.