August 14, 2018 11:10 AM UTC

Even More Silly California Bashing--Who Is This Aimed At?

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• by: Colorado Pols

9NEWS’ Marshall Zelinger takes a look at another ad running in the Colorado governor’s race, once again demonizing the state of California as a segue into attacking Democratic nominee Jared Polis:

RadiCalifornia is back.

There is another political ad calling out Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jared Polis and suggesting he’s trying to turn Colorado into California: “RadiCalifornia.”

The ad ends with a suggestion to call Polis at his Washington, D.C. Congressional office. So, is this an ad about Polis’ gubernatorial campaign or his job as a Congressman?

The ad is paid for by State Solutions, Inc., which is a non-profit issue-advocacy group connected with the Republican Governors Association. The RGA produced the previous “RadiCalifornia” scrabble ad.

Like we said when the original “RadiCalifornia” ad ran in late July, the whole premise of this attack doesn’t make a lot of sense to us. It’s true that California’s tax and regulatory burden is overall higher than Colorado’s, but the presumed negative consequences of this aren’t explained convincingly. If you have some kind of predisposed hatred of the state of California, we suppose you’ll fill in the blanks.

But seriously, how many Colorado voters hate California enough to do that? This strikes us as an idea that sounded really good in a strategy session of political operatives, but has absolutely no resonance with ordinary people. The fact is that a very large percentage of the population of Colorado was not born here, and plenty of those folks hail from the Golden State themselves. California’s natural beauty is renowned, their unemployment rate is at a record low, and the state’s economy is bigger than most nations of the world.

So what exactly is, you know, the problem?

The only other thing we can add to this curious discussion is a little data. Neither Jared Polis nor his running mate Dianne Primavera were born in California, in fact they were both born here in Colorado: Polis in Boulder, and Primavera in Denver. By contrast, Republican nominee Walker Stapleton and his running mate Lang Sias were born in the state of Connecticut. Obviously a contest between Colorado and Connecticut is no contest–so we’ll ask the question another way.

With all due respect to the Republican Governors Association, this just doesn’t seem like a winning message.