Category Archives: 2022 U.S. Senate

Republican Senate candidate Joe O’Dea waves goodbye to several million dollars.

The dust is settling after the sweeping Democratic triumph in Colorado in the 2022 elections Tuesday, turning what was once hyped as a coming “red wave” into a cementing of total control over state government by Democrats, expanding their majorities in the Colorado House and Senate and easily re-electing the downballot statewide Democrats who historically were regular victims of ticket-splitting. The results of the 2022 election show much less ticket-splitting in general than prior elections, with voters staying faithful to Democratic candidates all the way down the ballot.

In the closing weeks of the campaign, as readers know, the poll averages maintained 538 and other aggregators were pretty close to the outcome in the two top Colorado races: clearly showing gubernatorial candidate Hiedi Heidi Ganahl losing in excess of 15% and U.S. Senate candidate Joe O’Dea losing around 10%. But in the final days before Tuesday’s election, Colorado’s poll averages in the Senate race were thrown off by what we now know were highly inaccurate partisan polls showing Republicans far more competitive than would turn out to be the case. As the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reports, those bogus last-minute polls were part of a Republican headfake to motivate their own base and fool gullible reporters:

Political journalists were suckered by a wave of Republican junk polls in the closing weeks of the campaign. They were also swayed by some reputable polling organizations that, burned by past failures to capture MAGA voters, overweighted their polls to account for that in ways that simply didn’t make sense. And reporters fell for Republican feints and misdirection, as Republican operatives successfully created an artificial sense of momentum by talking about how they were spending money in reliably blue areas…

It was telling that Republican campaigns didn’t release their own polls to confirm the dubious results Trafalgar and Rasmussen were producing. Still, such polling helped skew handicapping websites. RealClearPolitics, for example, moved Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) into “toss-up” status in the closing days of his reelection bid. Bennet beat his Republican opponent by double digits. [Pols emphasis]

Ex-Sen. Cory Gardner, Joe O’Dea.

Coming into the 2022 elections, Democrats nationwide were battling against an entrenched presumption that the party in power always suffers during the midterms. In Colorado, facing an electorate very much soured on the GOP brand, Republicans tried to position themselves as “a different kind of Republican” in the Cory Gardner mold–but general election voters never believed it according to the polls. Hype and spin from the campaign aside, O’Dea never lived up to the post-partisan image he wanted to project, and the “moderate” veneer O’Dea tried so hard to hold together fell apart under scrutiny. Attempts to show an endearing personality like riding his horse through the suburbs to get strip-mall sushi instead became punchlines for jokes about out-of-touch rich people.

As Election Day approached and the polls continued to show the major Colorado races locked in their respective ranges, the sudden bewildering announcement that Real Clear Politics had moved the Colorado Senate race to a toss-up gave Joe O’Dea’s campaign an infusion of false hope.

Real Clear Politics has shifted its prediction of a hotly contested Senate race in Colorado from leaning toward Democratic victory to a “toss up” as several high profile races across the country continue to tighten with Republicans hoping to take back control of the chamber next week.

On its updated election prediction map, Real Clear Politics now shows the race between Democratic incumbent Sen. Michael Bennet and his challenger, Republican construction magnate Joe O’Dea, is classified as a “toss up” after previously being viewed as “Leans Dem.”

The fake polls showing the race tightening led directly to this:

While Real Clear Politics moved Colorado’s Senate race to a “toss-up” based on polls that turned out to be completely wrong, O’Dea poured another million and a half dollars of his own money into his campaign–a significant percentage of the total of $4.6 million O’Dea ponied up throughout the race. It’s one of the clearest cases we’ve ever seen of a candidate “believing his own bullshit,” throwing good money after bad in a race that ended up close to the worst-case scenario.

That brings us to a central question of Joe O’Dea’s failed Senate campaign.

Did O’Dea’s campaign consultants, led by Josh Penry, take him for a ride?

Joe O’Dea proudly ran as a candidate with no political experience, and despite repeated promises never received significant outside help from national Republicans. This resulted in O’Dea, with a net worth upwards of $77 million, funding this race largely by himself–despite promises from Republican leadership like Mitch McConnell, who declared the party “all in” for O’Dea but never followed those words up with dollars. And when these last-minute fake polls flooded the averages, O’Dea’s consultants, who knew or should have known those polls were not reliable, nonetheless did not prevent O’Dea from dumping another million and a half into what we now know was a futile effort.

Looking at his race with the benefit of hindsight, O’Dea’s duplicitous attempt to triangulate off the Republican brand while bringing a who’s who of Republican big names to the state to campaign for him could be reasonably termed a con job. But it’s also possible that Joe O’Dea was the victim of a larger and longer con job, by consultants who pretended this campaign had a shot in order to extract money from Joe O’Dea.

Joe O’Dea never had a chance. If any one of O’Dea’s “crew” of loyalists had been honest enough to say so, he could have saved a lot of money. Instead, “Joe’s Crew,” with the help of the Republican fake news industrial complex, fleeced their sucker to the very end.

That’s sure what it looks like, anyway.

THURSDAY UPDATE #2: Still digging, folks:

🧵Asked about an ad and fundraiser claiming he's being censored by Big Tech, CO Senate candidate Joe O'Dea (R) says, "I got a crack team there, they found some anomalies. They addressed it with Google and they cleaned it up."
The ad and fundraiser are still live.
First:@KyleClark https://t.co/682cguuwzP pic.twitter.com/KBp11RWHjt

— Spencer Soicher KRDO (@spencersoicher) October 20, 2022

Cool story, Joe.

—–

THURSDAY UPDATE: 9NEWS’ Kyle Clark investigates Joe O’Dea’s claim that Google is “censoring” his campaign, and just like Heidi Ganahl’s own improbable allegation about Facebook, all Google tech support would like to do is help O’Dea’s campaign figure out their problem:

A review of O’Dea’s ad history on Google, which is publicly available, does not indicate a pattern of ads being removed, and the O’Dea campaign declined to provide evidence of its claim.

They pointed to a screenshot of an ad posting reading, “Removed for a policy violation.”

Such notices are common and can be a result of something as simple as a spelling error or formatting issue with the ad. Advertisers, including political campaigns, often resolve these so-called ad disapprovals by correcting the issue or appealing Google’s determination.

According to Google, O’Dea’s advertising accounts have had a small number of violations, mostly due to formatting issues.

But again, why do it right when you can cry conspiracy? Either both O’Dea and Ganahl need to fire their entire tech departments, or they’ve decided a contrived sympathy ploy based on an unhinged conspiracy theory is worth more than, you know, actual ads.

Or it could be both! We can envision the sequence of events in which incompetent tech people claim Google is out to get them, and then equally incompetent campaign consultants decide that’s a campaign message in itself.

None of which makes any participant in this silliness look good.

—–

A new digital ad began running today from Republican U.S. Senate candidate Joe O’Dea’s campaign:

You’re reading that correctly, allegedly serious Republican U.S. Senate candidate Joe O’Dea, not generally lumped in with the ranks of Republican crazies who are expected to say crazy stuff, is accusing multinational tech giant Google of “censoring” his campaign for partisan political purposes by removing one or more of his campaign’s ads from circulation. There are no details backing up this sensationalist claim–what the content of the ad in question was, what terms of service it is alleged to have violated, or when the incident occurred. We’re being asked to take Joe O’Dea’s word that Google is singling out Joe O’Dea for political persecution, even though we’ve never heard O’Dea complain about Google like, say, Rep. Ken Buck does. Doesn’t it seem more likely that Google would retaliate against Ken Buck?

Apparently not:

You know Democrat Michael Bennet is in serious trouble when left-wing Big Tech companies like Google rush to his aid by pulling my ads. [Pols emphasis]

They’re terrified that we can and will FLIP this 1 SEAT needed to reclaim the 50-50 Senate.

With just WEEKS left in this election, I’m counting on the help of grassroots Americans like YOU to help me counter this censorship by increasing the reach of our TV ads.

Please contribute to my Ad Fund to help me FIGHT BACK against this calculated censorship in the final weeks of the election – and I’ll *personally* MATCH your gift at the MAXIMUM 1,500% rate.

Whether or not you believe O’Dea when he claims that Google is out to get him probably depends on your susceptibility to conspiracy theory thinking in general, which we’ll concede includes a lot of Republican voters. Back here in the reality-based community, however, we have trouble with the idea that Google cares enough about Joe O’Dea, who has never once come close to taking the lead in Colorado’s U.S. Senate race, to apply a double standard from their usual terms of service to him. If it were to come out that Google actually did put its thumb on the scale of a U.S. Senate race in this way, it would obviously be a huge story with national, even global implications.

But we just can’t see why Google would put their reputation on the line to come between O’Dea’s “donors” and his laughable 1,500% “match rate.” If O’Dea has proof of something nefarious done to him by world’s second-largest technology company, he should immediately disclose everything, hire a team of lawyers, and let the Panama Papers-level crisis this revelation would call for ensue.

Something tells us that’s not going to happen.