October 09, 2013 07:39 AM UTC

So Long, "CAPartyGirl"

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Josh Richman reports for Political Blotter, the MediaNews Bay Area political blog:

Assemblyman Tim Donnelly today announced the addition of a familiar face to his gubernatorial campaign – veteran GOP press secretary Jennifer Kerns.

Kerns, 40, comes to the Donnelly campaign fresh from her role in unseating two Colorado state senators in a recall election prompted by those lawmakers support of stricter gun laws enacted this year…

And Kerns and Donnelly were together at the California Republican Party’s convention this past weekend in Anaheim to roll out Kerns’ new 501(c)(4) group Free California, which “won’t rule out ‘Colorado-style recall elections’ should Gov. Jerry Brown sign the gun-control bills now in his desk.

…Kerns also has been a consultant to the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association for almost five years, and was a spokeswoman for Proposition 8, the gay-marriage ban of 2008.

Named as the California Republican Party’s communications director in January 2012, Kerns took some heat two months later for suggesting that a female pundit who’d criticized Rush Limbaugh for calling a law school student a “slut” was herself one. Kerns and the state GOP parted ways shortly after that, although that might’ve had more to do with the party’s dire financial situation than with Kerns.

Democrats tried hard to make an issue of spokesperson Jennifer Kerns, known via Twitter as "CAPartyGirl"–a longtime California GOP communications hired hand who ended up being the face of the "grassroots" recalls against Senate President John Morse and Senator Angela Giron. Kerns even denied having been brought in from out of state on a national news broadcast, saying only in response to questions that she "lives and works in Colorado." It's possible that was technically true between April of this year and…well, sometime before yesterday. But her new job working for a California gubernatorial candidate, and heading up a pro-gun California group threatening recalls, won't leave much time to visit her adopted home state.

As the old saying goes, "victory erases bad memories." That's certainly the case for Jennifer Kerns, whose most notable contribution to the recall storyline came when she melodramatically warned of "massive amounts of voter fraud, including ballots possibly even being mailed in from Chicago." When asked for proof that something like that was possible, she cited the presence of a car with Illinois tags outside the Pueblo Democratic Party office, and the presence of two Organizing for America staff in said car. To be honest, after this incident was ridiculed by Slate, we might have thought future conservative causes in need of a spokesperson might look elsewhere.

But we guess you can tell that to the board of Jennifer Kerns' new 501(c)(4).