December 14, 2022 09:46 AM UTC

It's Good To Run Your Own "Stink Tank"

• 9 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Although Colorado Republicans don’t have much to be proud of coming out of yet another disastrous election season in 2022, one piece of their political infrastructure Republicans appear to want to save is the so-called Common Sense Institute, an organization created to push conservative messaging with (hopefully) more credibility than the typecast old-school conservative “stink tank” the Independence Institute. Although CSI churned out reams of repackaged public data to support favored Republican scare tactics like fentanyl and increasing auto theft rates, there’s not a single race in Colorado this year in which CSI’s “analysis” made even a small dent in Democratic dominance.

As post-mortem analysis continues to unpack the profound weakness of the Colorado Republican ticket in 2022, generally agreed to have been led to ruin by the unqualified train wreck that was hard-right gubernatorial candidate Hiedi Heidi Ganahl, the recurring theme has been an inability of Colorado Republicans at the highest levels to realize Ganahl would be a disaster–which was evident long before Ganahl won the Republican nomination. From the beginning of Ganahl’s campaign, it was clear that Ganahl would not be following the Cory Gardner playbook of feinting to the political center to win in a blue-trending state. Unfortunately, there was no one left in the Colorado Republican Party, even at the very top, removed enough from the GOP’s Trump-era ideological brainrot to see what was coming.

That is why we spent most of September and October talking about “furries.”

An excellent example of the hubris at the very top of Colorado’s conservative leadership that blinded them to impending disaster at the polls in November is the founder and chairman of the board of the Common Sense Institute, Earl Wright, who was recently exposed as having been in contact with Trump coup plotter John Eastman in the days after the January 6th, 2021 insurrection and on the coup-curious side of the 2020 presidential election. CSI announced yesterday that Wright is the recipient of something they’re calling the “Free Enterprise Trailblazer Award Winner!”

If we ever have enough money in one place to found our own “stink tank,” we’re going to make it a rule that we get a cool-sounding award every year! We fund the joint, we get the awards. Isn’t that how it works? Here’s precedent that says it is.

Sadly, if Earl Wright is who they’re giving awards to after this terrible year, no lessons have been learned.