Winners and Losers of 2012: Losers
After a few days of reflection, here is our list of losers from the 2012 election cycle in Colorado. Find our list of winners here.
1. Mitt Romney and Colorado Advisors
Mitt Romney’s campaign efforts in Colorado never made much sense to us. Romney spent far too long early in the campaign visiting traditionally beet-red, but more importantly under-populated areas of the state, allowing the battle for suburban votes to shift toward President Barack Obama. Some 85% of Colorado voters live along the Front Range between Ft. Collins and Pueblo, which we would think is fairly common knowledge at this point. At one point at the end of the summer, Romney had gone more than 30 days between visits to our state.
Later, Romney made a disastrous mistake by declaring himself opposed to the wind power production tax credit, which is tied to thousands of manufacturing jobs in Colorado–even though almost all Republicans in the state supported it. By the time Romney began to “Etch-a-Sketch” himself into a moderate candidate for the general election, he had already radicalized himself in the eyes of too many Colorado voters. Once that was done, his attempts to walk back from the hard-right positions he took in the primary looked disingenuous and fed distrust.
But above all, Republican supporters of Romney in Colorado disastrously internalized their own spin, and convinced themselves that polls showing Obama steadily regaining, then holding his lead in Colorado from mid-October onward were “skewed.” This false sense of security, combined with the Obama campaign’s world-beating field campaign, yanked the rug out from under Romney’s feet in a state that consistently ranked as one of the most competitive.
2. Frank McNulty
Outgoing Colorado House Speaker Frank McNulty will go down in history as one of the most divisive, Machiavellian, and ultimately self-destructive leaders in the history of the state. Taking a one-seat majority in 2010 by the barest of electoral margins, McNulty acted as if this was a mandate for the “Tea Party.” Abusing and manipulating legislative rules to an extent nobody we know can remember a match for, McNulty ruthlessly carried out a partisan, obstructionist game plan in the House against the Democratic Senate and Governor’s office.
But McNulty’s arrogance was his own undoing. McNulty lost control of the legislative reapportionment process through his own bad faith, resulting in maps that dramatically reduced the number of “safe” seats for either party. Then McNulty turned the 2012 legislative session into a nationwide controversy when he shut down debate just before civil unions legislation would have passed his chamber with bipartisan support.
As a result, outside money poured into key legislative races, and Democrats used the story of the shutdown of the legislature against Republican House candidates all over the state. Today, not even a candidate for GOP House minority leadership, the implosion of Frank McNulty’s political career is pretty much complete.