December 19, 2022 11:04 AM UTC

Heidi Ganahl Can't Stop Not Stopping

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• by: Colorado Pols

Four years ago, Republican Walker Stapleton lost an open race for Governor to Democrat Jared Polis by 11 points. A few weeks later, a photo emerged of a newly-bearded Stapleton smiling into a camera during a family vacation to Hawaii.

Stapleton had been preparing to run for Governor for roughly a decade, so you could have forgiven him for being a tad bitter about the results of the 2018 election. But Stapleton dealt with his defeat in what appeared to be a healthy manner. He didn’t spend the next six weeks complaining to anyone who would listen about how he was wronged by mean journalists. He didn’t promote bonkers conspiracy theories about how everyone was out to get him, and he didn’t try to prove that it was someone else’s fault that he did or said something dumb during his campaign for Governor.

Stapleton didn’t do any of the things that Hiedi Heidi Ganahl has done since losing by 20 points to Polis in the 2022 election.

You’ve no doubt heard the proverb that “Success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan.” It’s a well-worn saying because it’s true, but not everyone accepts that reality. Sometimes those who fail are so determined not to be alone that they continue to do everything in their power to relitigate past mistakes in a desperate search to avoid acknowledging their own blunders. Sometimes, there is Heidi Ganahl.

It’s important to start out here by repeating the fact that Ganahl didn’t just lose the race for Governor — she set a new standard for incompetence. We’ve said in this space that Ganahl is both the worst major candidate and the driving force behind the worst top-level campaign in Colorado history. Ganahl was so bad that she doomed several downballot Republican candidates across the state to narrow defeats

In the weeks following her election defeat, Ganahl spent a lot of time blocking critics on Twitter and conducting interviews with conservative talk radio outlets in which she complained that the “mainstream media” refused to convey her message — nevermind that Ganahl spent most of her campaign literally refusing to agree to interviews with these outlets.

Her argument, in essence, is this: Colorado media outlets wouldn’t talk about the things that I refused to talk to them about.

Ganahl is still fighting that bizarre battle today, nearly six weeks after her election loss. Naturally, Ganahl is also coming back to the story that put the final nail in her campaign coffin: Her inexplicable insistence that kids in “furry” costumes have overrun Colorado schools. [For more on Ganahl’s furry obsession, click Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, and Here]

Ganahl has latched on to the idea that Colorado Times Recorder reporter Heidi Beedle is a secret member of Antifa, or something, which somehow means that Ganahl’s own obsession with furries in schools is…um…well, that’s about where she lost us entirely. But she wants to make sure that the #1 news station in Colorado is aware of her grievances!

We’re not going to bother addressing right-wing chucklehead Andy Ngo, who is the journalistic equivalent of a three-year old trying to color inside the lines. As Wikipedia explains, Ngo is often accused by other journalists of throwing around the word “Antifa” with little rationale.

There are plenty of reasons why Ganahl shouldn’t be paying attention to Ngo, either, but her argument about Beedle’s reporting on Furry-Lago would be ridiculous anyway. When Beedle initially reported about Ganahl’s obsession with furries in late September, SHE WAS QUOTING GANAHL’S OWN COMMENTS ON RIGHT-WING RADIO. Ganahl has been whining incessantly that journalists wouldn’t pay attention to what she said…now she’s mad that she was quoted word-for-word?

Just so there is no confusion, this is what Ganahl said on Jimmy Sengenberger’s KNUS radio show on Sept. 24, 2022:

Ganahl just can’t quit “furries,” and it’s a real problem for Colorado Republicans who absolutely need to find a way to move forward by moving on from the 2022 Bluenami. Take a look at some of the other exchanges Ganahl is having on Twitter today:

Here Ganahl references the one agreeable story she managed to corral from CBS4 Denver political “reporter” Shaun Boyd, who is so universally discredited at this point that she might as well just become a meteorologist. Boyd’s ridiculous story posited that every school district in Colorado was covering up the furry epidemic in order to discredit a handful of parents who claimed otherwise. Or something like that. It was basically the exact opposite story that EVERY OTHER NEWS OUTLET in the country was reporting on the nonsense story about furries in schools. Lindsay Datko, a Ganahl adviser and the nutball leader of “Jeffco Kids First” (one of the groups that threw down hard on Furry-Lago), even claimed recently that a story from Colorado Community Media debunking the furry claims was being retracted. It was not.

Colorado Republicans spent millions of dollars in 2022 only to get pummeled in the polls — Ganahl herself lit $2 million of her own money on fire — which indicates that they have significant systemic and narrative problems in Colorado. The GOP can’t move forward until it stops talking about the silly crap that helped cement its defeat in 2022, but it can’t do that until its top-ticket candidate from the last election cycle moves on herself.

If any influential Colorado Republicans have a line into Elon Musk, the self-described “Chief Twit” at Twitter, it might be time to make a personal request to get Colorado’s own chief twit removed from the platform.