Category Archives: 2022 U.S. Senate

GOP U.S. Senate candidates Herschel Walker, Joe O’Dea.

As anyone even casually following national politics is aware by now, Republicans once thought to have a lock on winning back the U.S. House and Senate during the 2022 midterms elections are approaching Election Day facing serious deficiencies in their fielded candidates, as well as persistent distrust of the Republican brand after the violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021 seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential elections.

The candidate quality dilemma is particularly problematic for Republicans hoping to reclaim the majority in the U.S. Senate, where the GOP’s path to a majority has been dramatically narrowed by disastrous candidates like Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Blake Masters in Arizona doing their best to blow what could have been winnable races. And in Georgia, Donald Trump’s hand-picked Senate candidate Herschel Walker isn’t just in political freefall, but hitting every rock on the cliffside on the way down as allegations of moral hypocrisy combine with stupendously obvious incompetence to make even some diehard MAGA Republicans think twice.

But as CNN reports, there’s basically no path to a GOP Senate majority without Herschel Walker:

“I think we’re going to stick with Walker….we’re going take it all the way to the end,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in an interview with CNN that aired Tuesday afternoon. “I think they’re going to hang in there and scrap to the finish.”

…The Senate math is simple. Republicans need to net a single seat to win the majority. But, with Dr. Mehmet Oz trailing in Pennsylvania where Republican Sen. Pat Toomey is retiring and Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly running surprisingly strong against Blake Masters, Republicans are looking at a very narrow window of opportunity to make the gains they needs.

A two-seat window, in fact. Nevada, where Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto is in a very tight race with Adam Laxalt and, you guessed it, Georgia where Walker continues to run competitively against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock.

There’s just no other seat that has come on the board for Republicans that could allow them to step away from Walker. [Pols emphasis] New Hampshire was, at the start of the election cycle, widely seen as a potential pickup but popular Gov. Chris Sununu decided not to run and Trump-aligned Don Bolduc emerged as the Republican nominee. While Republican strategists still view Sen. Maggie Hassan as vulnerable, she is clearly in a better spot than many expected her to be even a year ago. In Colorado, Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet’s numbers are somewhat soft but a Marist poll released this week showed him leading Republican nominee Joe O’Dea 48% to 41%.

As the record of spending on the race has made clear down the stretch, Joe O’Dea was never anything close to a top-tier U.S. Senate candidate. Multiple polls show O’Dea locked in an 8-10% deficit behind Michael Bennet, with no time left to alter that dynamic as mail ballots deliver next week. The hope expressed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that O’Dea might seriously threaten Bennet created some circular media buzz, but didn’t change the situation on the ground in Colorado where every investment by Republicans into O’Dea has been more than countered by all-in support for Bennet from national Democrats.

If O’Dea had at any point shown real competitiveness in his run against Bennet, Republicans would have flooded the state with money instead of spending the massive amounts currently being expended to prop up Herschel Walker. It’s not that Republicans are morally repelled by Walker, or if they are they’ve been able to suppress it to the point of culpability (see: McConnell above). The simple fact is that without Herschel Walker, McConnell is very likely to remain Senate Minority Leader.

Joe O’Dea had a chance to ride to McConnell’s rescue, but it was not to be.

Joe O’Dea between two menacingly large wheels.

Even before Republican U.S. Senate candidate Joe O’Dea won the nomination in the June 28th primary, his campaign was under fire from labor groups who criticized the employee safety record of O’Dea’s company Concrete Express, Inc. Since O’Dea has no political experience, his record as the owner of CEI is most of what voters have to go on to evaluate O’Dea besides being all over the map on abortion and riding a horse through the Denver suburbs for strip-mall sushi.

The Denver Business Journal’s Ed Sealover published a feature-length story examining the occupational safety record of CEI along with age and gender discrimination allegations that have dogged the company for years, all denied by O’Dea with the same vigor that Herschel Walker denies paying for that abortion–but aren’t going away, either:

O’Dea has no record of legislative accomplishments or public votes on which he can run but instead is framing his campaign as that of someone who has for years been bettering the lives of working-class Coloradans.

That is why scrutiny is turning now to the Republican’s history as an employer and the differing views that skeptics and supporters hold about his company…

And here’s the bottom line:

Since its 1988 founding, Concrete Express has gotten hit with $135,000 in fines for 28 worker safety violations by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, according to information available on the OSHA website. It also was the target of a since-settled 2019 age and disability lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Colorado to which O’Dea detractors have drawn attention.

…Dennis Dougherty — the executive director of the Colorado AFL-CIO who has tracked the lawsuit and sanctions against O’Dea’s company and has been speaking publicly along with other labor leaders and the liberal activist group ProgressNow about them for months — said there is mounting opposition to the man who says he wants to be a defender of working Coloradans has not been their friend for 30-plus years.

“O’Dea is selling hardworking Coloradans a bill of goods, and he is presenting himself as something he’s not,” said Dougherty, whose organization has endorsed Bennet. “He is a corporate wolf in workers’ clothing.”

On the one hand, O’Dea’s supporters will argue that pouring concrete is an inherently dangerous business resulting in very tight supervision of working conditions by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). But that doesn’t mean safety violations count for less than they would in safer industries, or negligence responsible for violations and injuries isn’t as big of a problem. Contractor associations compensate for this in part by lavishing “workplace safety” awards on their paying members, but it doesn’t change the fact that workers have been hurt working for Joe O’Dea, and some of those injuries were preventable.

One solution for O’Dea if he really has nothing to hide would be to call opponents’ bluffs and agree to their demands that O’Dea release the injured parties in the lawsuits against CEI from the nondisclosure agreements that prevent them from speaking out about their experience. But the likelihood that these cases contain plenty of anecdotal ugliness, if not the systemic safety and discrimination problems O’Dea’s opponents allege, makes that very unlikely.

[Colorado Contractors Association Executive Director Tony] Milo said that OSHA fines are “unfortunately, a cost of doing business for most contractors” and that one would be hard-pressed to find a contractor that hasn’t been hit with penalties. OSHA never suspended operations of Concrete Express, as it has with other firms, he noted. [Pols emphasis]

Under scrutiny, the retreat from “check out all of Joe O’Dea’s safety awards” to “at least OSHA never shut Joe O’Dea down” is so quick it will make your head spin–and it’s a tell that O’Dea’s defenders are nervous about this line of attack. O’Dea regularly accuses his two-term incumbent opponent of having “no record to run on,” but that’s literally the case for O’Dea other than his years of getting rich pouring concrete.

In which some people got hurt.

From there, O’Dea faces questions about the origin of much of his estimated to be up to $77 million fortune–hundreds of millions of dollars in public contracts for roads, bridges, dams, and (Republicans hate this one especially) bike paths paid for with taxpayer dollars. Though not himself a public servant, O’Dea made his fortune in large part as a contractor on public sector construction projects. This is what O’Dea’s vanquished primary opponent Ron Hanks cited when he endorsed the Libertarian running against O’Dea, and the point was well illustrated this summer when O’Dea tried to take credit for the Windy Gap water project that Sen. Michael Bennet had won the appropriation to construct.

The polls say it’s not coming together for O’Dea in this race, who has settled into a ten-point deficit in numerous recent polls. But when the post-mortem begins on O’Dea’s anticipated defeat, inherent contradictions that his campaign chose to either ignore or feigned outrage at the mere suggestion of that will tell the story of why O’Dea lost.

Coloradans don’t need another “Boss.” And that’s not what they want in their U.S. Senator.

Former President George Dubya Bush (R).

NBC News reports on the latest bob and weave in Colorado GOP U.S. Senate candidate Joe O’Dea’s downward-trending campaign–having run as fast as he could away from Donald Trump’s locally toxic brand without completely alienating the Republican base, O’Dea is turning to Trump’s Republican predecessor, former President George W. Bush, for support in the coming weeks:

Former President George W. Bush is making a rare appearance on the campaign trail, participating in a fundraiser with Colorado Republican Senate nominee Joe O’Dea in about two weeks.

The event, shared first with NBC News, is another sign that Bush is aligning himself with candidates who have bucked former President Donald Trump. Earlier in this election cycle, Bush held fundraisers for Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp and Wyoming GOP Gov. Liz Cheney ahead of their primaries against Trump-backed challengers…

The fundraiser will further bolster O’Dea’s campaign coffers after a strong fundraising quarter. O’Dea’s campaign raised $3 million from July through September, which includes a $1 million loan from O’Dea himself.

Halcyon days of yore.

That’s not nearly enough compared to the $5 million incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet is expected to report for the same period–presumably without a million dollars out of pocket. In fact, in that context it’s kind of silly to call O’Dea’s quarter “strong” at all–but that’s not the purpose of our discussion today.

Think for a moment about what it means for a Republican looking to put distance between themselves and Trump’s Republican Party to embrace who was previous to Trump the least popular Republican President since at least Richard Nixon, George W. Bush–the man who ended forever Republicans’ regard for the popular vote, invaded the wrong country after the worst terrorist attack in American history occurred on his watch, and plunged the nation into (at that time) the worst recession since the 1930s.

After O’Dea’s East Coast tour to kiss the ring of Mitch McConnell and National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) chairman Rick Scott, followed by in-state appearances with partisan Republican lightning rods like Sen. Tom Cotton, O’Dea’s “post-partisan” branding took a major hit. The Bushes and the Trumps may not like each other, but the idea that former President Bush would be helpful to Joe O’Dea winning a statewide race in Colorado is only slightly misguided than inviting Trump himself.

Only a small group of Republicans fully immersed in the GOP’s internal struggles can’t see this.

A fool and his money.

If you’re wondering why the fundraising pitches from political candidates have ramped up dramatically in recent days, it’s because of tomorrow’s critical fundraising deadline. Q3 numbers before an election are an important barometer of real-world competitiveness, and have a way of cutting through campaign bluster and revealing where the races that matter are (and aren’t).

As Roll Call’s Kate Ackley reports, it’s also a time when the fundraising gimmicks can get particularly gimmicky:

It must be near the end of a pivotal fundraising quarter, because Ohio Democratic Senate candidate Rep. Tim Ryan is “freaking out.” Colorado’s GOP Senate nominee, Joe O’Dea, is offering to “personally 1,400% MATCH” select campaign donations. [Pols emphasis]

Lawmakers and challengers are planning a fundraising blitz ahead of Friday’s quarterly deadline, the last big one before the November midterms, which are on track to be the priciest nonpresidential cycle yet. The onslaught of appeals includes desperate-sounding emails like the ones from Ryan and O’Dea, as well as more than 100 in-person events planned this week in Washington for members of both parties to raise campaign cash from K Street lobbyists and political action committee donors while Congress is in session.

Colorado GOP Senate candidate Joe O’Dea, as readers know, self-funded his primary campaign. O’Dea’s ability to self-fund in a state that may not in the end be competitive for Republicans was originally seen as an asset, but that presumption has proven crippling to O’Dea by de-prioritizing the race for national GOP funding–and there’s little sign that O’Dea is actually spending to counterbalance the deficiency. With all of that in mind, O’Dea offering a ridiculous “personal match” turning every contributed dollar into 14 could be interpreted as a test by O’Dea to determine how much he should himself keep spending on a race every poll shows him losing.

That would at least be a practical reason to broadcast desperation so loudly.