CO-04 (Special Election)
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(R) Greg Lopez
(R) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Joe Biden*
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%↓
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
90%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
90%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
(R) Ron Hanks
40%
30%
20%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(R) Deborah Flora
(R) J. Sonnenberg
30%↑
15%↑
10%↓
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Dave Williams
(R) Jeff Crank
50%↓
50%↑
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
90%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) Brittany Pettersen
85%↑
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
(R) Janak Joshi
60%↑
35%↓
30%↑
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
May 11, 2015 03:02 PM UTC
29 Comments
Now we know why she went anti-vaxxer/anti-abortion loonie tunes during the session…
Let me be perfectly clean. She has not one chance in hell of getting any of these nominations for higher office. She is pro-choice. But, she has now lost any pro-choice support she has by her shenanigans with Personhood this year. Interesting, in my view in the last four months she has gone from someone I would have considered voting for to someone that has no shot. Sorry Senator, you blew it. There's no one left to support and Morley Ballentine is dead.
She was pro-choice until she was pro-personhood. She was pro-public health before she was anti-vax. My God, Either Way Ellen ("EWE") looks like Bob Beauprez with a vagina.
Cheers, Frank. There's no unimagining that!
I know…I've tried.
Eye bleach, please!
But about this:
"Roberts would be forced to move so far to the right that she’d never be able to get back to the middle before a General Election"
Two words: Cory Gardner
Michael Bennet didn't even have name recognition in Denver. Ken Buck was a no name DA from Weld County who latched on to the Tea Party bandwagon. Both ended up their party's nominees.
This isn't the 1930s where you had to make whistle-stop appearances in every town. TV and the Internet are king, and if you can speak the money's language, they'll slap your face on every television and website.
Both Buck and Bennet had solid fundraising bases.
after Bennet loses D's will have a fresh start in building a true, state-wide, populist majority that represents the people and ideals of Colorado. Or, they'll keep doing what they're doing.
If Bennet loses, the Colorado ads will have a chance to look in the mirror and acknowledge they are a sorry, confused lot who prefer losing in place of some bizarre mispercoevec ideological purity.
at the same time they can wonder if Ds lose the Senate in 18, what it will feel like to have an R lock on SCOTUS nominees. Please, I encourage you to vote for Ralph Nader.
As I’ve already acknowledged- Bennet cannot win because he isn’t left enough.
"confused lot who prefer losing in place of some bizarre mispercoevec ideological purity"
Sounds like our fanatical friends on the left have become just as demented as those on the right.
I'm old enough to remember Presidents George McGovern, Morris Udall, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry. They too believed that all we had to do was deliver the voters a populist progressive who believed in world peace and economic justice, and all would be well.
It took center-left candidates like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to actually win elections.
It also helped that both of those candidates were charismatic, sexy men, which can't be said about the rest of the guys on that list. Sorry, but that matters. What got Bill Clinton in trouble was also part of what got him elected….go figure. Trouble is, we haven't figured out how that dynamic works, if it works, for female candidates. The double standard applies.
BHO also had pop culture and social media on his side….the will.i.am song went viral, and helped pull out the millenials, as did many of the other social media memes and songs. He did that better than anyone else running.
And, yes, we projected our own hopes onto this centrist candidate, and he didn't meet most of them so far, but it started a new model of grassroots organizing, pulled the country out of the great recession, and pulled us just a little bit farther back from the cliff we were headed over.
That's a heckuvan act to follow, for any candidate.
Back to this thread's subject, Ellen Roberts has to realize that women en masse look at a candidate's policy positions, more than gender. We haven't voted for a woman because she is female since…..oh, never. So she better have something more on the ball than a bunch of contradictory or wishy washy positions on personhood. It makes her look weak, because maybe she is….I don't really know much about her, but am not impressed so far.
touchee….nobody ever accused Walter Mondale or Mike Dukakis of being charismatic or too sexy. And you're right about WJC: what got him in trouble was also what voters found attractive in a sense.
While I agree completely that in order for a Dem to win statewide in Colorado the Dem has to be more centrist than lefty, there’s centrist and there’s centrist. First, there’s a range of center and not all centrist candidates are created equal. Second, you have to find a place in that range that gives voters a better reason to vote for the Dem than … I’m almost as good on economic issues as a real Republican or I’m just like a Republican but I support abortion rights and gay marriage. That type of Dem candidate hasn’t been doing well here or in other competitive states recently. The real Republican has been winning.
I'm a realist who votes for the best option and I'm going to vote for Bennet instead of any Republican because there is certainly no such thing as a contemporary Republican who wouldn't cause more harm and we need the head count to take back the majority. But I'm not at all confident Bennet won't go the way of Udall.
I don't have a solution. I'm not saying toppling him in a primary for somebody better is a realistic, viable solution. If we get an Ellen Roberts as an opponent Dems will most likely get to keep the seat in a presidential year. If they run Coffman, I'm far from sure. I don't know about Coffman but I don't see Roberts as very likely.
And if he loses it won't be because too many lefty purists refused to vote for him. When push comes to shove most of those will bite the bullet and vote to block the R. It will be for the same reason Gardner won. More typical garden variety low info voters finding him less appealing than the other candidate.
He got in by appointment and won his first election largely courtesy of his opponent's gaffes. Since then he's done nothing to raise his name rec or create an identity here in Colorado. He's still a "who?". There's a lot more to worry about here than purists, even if Roberts isn't much of a concern.
Dems need to quickly figure out how and why Coloradans really vote, or smoldering dreams of a blue state might be followed by smoldering remnants of a purple state. I believe Dems and Repubs vote for candidates for different reasons – for Dems it's appeal followed by positions; for Repubs it's R, R, R (loyalty, safety, security, freedom, liberty, rights, etc, etc). It's those unaffiliated voters in the middle who seem less predictable these days. For them it's probably appeal, then emotional messaging. It's not policy and positions.
How about the smoldering end of a joint? Appeal to them on a level they understand about the issues they care about. Hickenlooper drove a ton of them towards the exits. His victory shouldn't have been that close.
Just FWIW, nobody knew who the fuck Allard was either.
Allard is a Colorado native who served in the state legislature, in Congress and the US Senate after being elected to it in 1996, a time when Colorado was more red, less purple than it is now, before being reelected in 2002. All of that made him considerably more widely known by the time of his reelection than Bennet, an outsider who probably never would have been elected to anything in the first place without a leg up via appointment, going into his own reelection. I don't see much equivalence there.
His opponent in '96 and in '02 was also extremely vulnerable as he was labelled "millionaire-lawyer-lobbyist" (which Dick Wadhams was able to pronounce as one syllable) in a flood of radio and TV commercials.
Allard was the amiable neighborhood vet who might give your dog a rabies shot or neuter your cat.
Me, too. B.C. I'll swallow hard and vote for him if he's the Dem nominee. My reason is different and there's only one: Justice Ginsberg. She's not going to be able to stay on the Court much longer and those 5-4 decisions are just scaring the heck out of me. One more Cory Gardner and we'll wind up with another Alito. Snubbing the guy who is insufficiently liberal just isn't worth another Hobby Lobby, or Citizens United to me.
Your reason is the one we all need to bear in mind every election. We desperately need a Dem in the WH and a Dem majority in the Senate to make sure the Supreme Court doesn't get a lot worse. If Gore had won by even a slightly bigger majority instead of one small enough to allow the bloodless coup/steal, we could have avoided a lot of bad Court decisions, especially Citizens United and rolling back on voters rights issues. Instead, we have money as speech, corporations as people and the return of de facto poll taxes in the form of the expense and difficult transportation issues low income voters are faced with to exercise their right to vote. No one need ever apologize for putting that consideration first.
Just because you repeat it doesn't make you less wrong. 🙂 Ah, arm-chair analysts.
Texas Dems floated that same theory about moderate Ds losing. How'd that work out?
that's Texas……American's Somalia.
Yeah, that whole Ralph Nader thing did AWESOME things for the country the first time, including Citizens United and the Iraq War. How'd that work out?
But Bennet has been an absolute dickish dud.
Telling people to hold your nose and vote for him anyway is pretty faint praise.
I've called and complained about his Keystone vote and was told that someone would call me back to discuss my concerns. Never happened. Ugh. He might get lucky and ride Hillary's coattails to reelection but he isn't inspiring Democratic activists to get out there and work for him. He offers them nothing to look forward except more Wall Street influence and back stabbing at critical times.
It'd be nice to have a Dem who didn't feel they had to support cuts to Social Security when it could become solvent by raising the payroll tax slightly.
It'd be nice to not have a president who's in the ideological boundary of Ike called a Socialist by R's at almost every level of government and media.
How about eliminating the cap so the highest earners pay the same percentage of their income as low to middle? The whole social security can't survive hysteria is a rightie myth bought into by Dems who want to look almost as responsible as those fiscally responsible Rs, never mind GOP fiscal responsibility is another myth and their trickle down/austerity economic policies are long documented disasters enabled by cowardly Dems who know the truth but don't think voters will get it and don't even try to advocate for sensible economic policy, the polar opposite of what conservatives keep pushing while the middle class fades, because they're too afraid of sounding liberal. And apparently anything other than traditional conservative (not right enough for today's conservatives) is in danger of being described as wildly liberal these days.
When I read and hear about the divide between moderate and liberal Dems in the Senate I wonder what liberals they're talking about. Liberal Dem pols are only slightly less mythical than unicorns. What's called moderate are the center right Dems and it doesn't go much past center in the other direction not counting social issues. Even there it's hardly radically liberal since it tracks pretty nicely with public opinion polls.
There is simply no significant number of truly liberal Dems left in elected politics as a whole and even fewer in the Senate. And the idea that our President is a radical or even garden variety liberal is the biggest myth of all. There's no way to see his policies as anything but centrist but I guess calling him the most radical, the worst, the least American, the most divisive (who made him divisive in the first place?) etc. is the substitute the right came up with for what they'd really like to call him. It starts with "uppity " doesn't end well.