October 24, 2022 04:15 PM UTC

Mistake Reveals Ganahl Campaign's Disgusting Twitter Account

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE #2: Not long after Ganahl’s campaign claimed to Ernest Luning that it had nothing to do with the “9mm News” account, the account in question Tweeted this:

Which is interesting only because we remember Ganahl’s campaign account Tweeting out basically the same thing back in August:

It’s almost like they’re TRYING to screw up.

Oh, and VICE News noticed Ganahl’s mistake, too.

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UPDATE: “We believe you,” said nobody:

Spokeswoman for @heidiganahl says her #COGov campaign “does not run that parody account, nor do we have access to it. Heidi shared that screenshot with supporters and evidently it found it’s way online,” says @News9mm used screenshot Ganahl shared. #copolitics https://t.co/Mk8RBefsHm pic.twitter.com/e31i8h26XK

— Ernest Lee Luning (@eluning) October 24, 2022

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If you follow Colorado politics on social media, there’s a decent chance that you may have run across a “parody” Twitter account in the last year called “9mm News.” The account has authored about 3,400 different Tweets just since February 2022, the majority of which fall into a few basic categories (and often a combination) of the following: 1) Direct attacks targeting Colorado media outlets and reporters; 2) Attacks on Democratic candidates and political operatives; and 3) Outright racist, homophobic, or transphobic diatribes.

The “9mm News” account also criticizes anyone who might disagree with Republican gubernatorial candidate Hiedi Heidi Ganahl, which we now know is because it is directly associated with Ganahl’s campaign. As Kyle Clark of 9News — a frequent target of the account — noticed on Monday morning:

That Tweet — and the evidence of its connection to the Ganahl campaign — did not disappear forever, of course. Here’s a screenshot (the yellow arrow is ours):

We put together a collage of Tweets sent out by “9mm News” in the last several months; you can see that after the jump below. The account is toxic even by the lowest of standards online. It attacks and retweets disgusting criticism of virtually every political reporter in Colorado and most Colorado Democratic politicians. The account also veers off in all sorts of weird directions (including a regular defense of ivermectin, the horse de-worming medication that MAGA Republicans promoted heavily during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic).

It’s not clear if Ganahl herself regularly used this account to anonymously criticize her many detractors, but quite honestly…would anybody be at all surprised if she was directly involved? AT THE VERY LEAST, Ganahl’s campaign should immediately disavow this account and blame it on the always-convenient “rogue staffer,” but we doubt that will happen, either. A majority of the messages that come from “9mm News” are just less-cautious versions of the messages that Ganahl has been repeating herself since she launched her campaign for Governor last September.

We’re still two weeks away from Election Day, but Ganahl has already established herself as both the worst statewide candidate in modern Colorado history and the architect of the most incompetent campaign in memory. She may also be the most generally toxic person in Colorado politics today (though Rep. Lauren Boebert has a pretty firm grip on that title).

For all of us, no matter your political affiliation, Heidi Ganahl just needs to go away.