May 14, 2016 10:40 AM UTC

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Destroys Jon Keyser

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• by: Colorado Pols

After a wild week in local news, the rapidly escalating scandal over allegedly forged petitions that helped Republican U.S. Senate candidate Jon Keyser qualify for the 2016 primary ballot made its way to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last night.

There’s really nothing quite like an in-depth Rachel Maddow takedown:

Maddow replays lots of details from Denver7 reporter Marshall Zelinger’s reports this week, including Tuesday’s story breaking the existence of many more forged petitions than the first example uncovered over a week before. She goes on to discuss Keyser’s disastrous public appearances Thursday, in which Maddow reports Keyser’s recitation of the words “I’m on the ballot” a total of thirteen times between the debate and Keyser’s calamitous interview with Zelinger afterward.

The point of all this, and this is where Maddow takes the question above the back-and-forth of local news and punditry, is that Colorado’s U.S. Senate race is pretty much the only GOP hope of picking up a Senate seat–in a year that is increasingly looking like a rout for the Republican Party, from Donald Trump all the way down the ticket. Keyser has been successfully sold to the Republican Party elite in Colorado and Washington, D.C. as the only contender who can challenge incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet in November. With the national Republican Party much more straightforward these days about “meddling” in primary races to avert further Todd Akin (or for that matter, Ken Buck) catastrophes, and with no big name like Cory Gardner to turn to, the decision had already been made to fall in behind Keyser.

Today, after almost two weeks of nightmarishly bad press, and having metastasized into a nationwide press spectacle after Keyser boorishly horrified every reporter in America on Thursday, the decision by Republican kingpins to vest their hopes for taking out Bennet in Jon Keyser looks like a very bad decision indeed. Whether Keyser is forced to withdraw from the race or he limps on to defeat in June, this once-promising “wunderkind” is politically done for. At best, maybe he takes a Scott McInnis-style sabbatical and reappears someday to run for Delta County Jefferson County commissioner.

And to Democrats reveling in Keyser’s destruction, we’d say it’s time to shift focus to the candidates left standing.