November 12, 2010 09:13 PM UTC

Even More Ken Buck Post-Mortem

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: Buck told the big Denver newspaper today that Bennet had a big advantage because they could afford to send a video tracker to all of his events. Apparently Buck thinks having someone drive around the state with a video camera costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Buck also says that if they had the same tracker at Bennet events, surely Bennet would have said some equally unfortunate things.

Uh, sure.

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Slate’s David Weigel takes a look at Sen. Michael Bennet’s improbable breaking of the “2010 wave.” Weigel identifies four key elements that won the race for Bennet, including the successful courting of Hispanics, and a spirited primary that toughened Bennet for the general election. And two others we’ve spent time on in this space–the broad sweep of Buck’s “extreme” stated positions, and the breakdown of the GOP gubernatorial campaign. With a margin of victory as narrow as Bennet’s, it’s fair to say that every one of these factors played a role.

The “Crazy” card can work. The number that mattered in the Colorado exit poll was this one: 54 percent of voters called Buck’s views “too extreme.” A whole lot of money and media went into making that word, and that attack, stick to him. Bennet was so shameless and assiduous about loonifying Buck that one of his ads even clipped footage of Buck, frustrated, sarcastically asking “I’m extreme? I’m extreme?” Quoth the narrator: “Ken Buck asked the right question.”

But the crazy card didn’t work for the Democrats in dozens of House races, including two races they lost in Colorado. What was different in this race? The diversity of the “craziness,” for one. Bennet’s rote attacks on Buck for entertaining the ideas of privatizing Social Security and implementing a national consumption tax were added to a powerful attack on his opposition to abortion in all cases and to some forms of birth control. That, according to FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe, “divided and distracted” voters. Nationwide, Republicans erased the Democrats’ advantage with female voters. Buck lost female voters by 17 points…

Pray for a Republican meltdown. Compared with Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, the patron saints of Tea Party election-throwing, Buck didn’t make many mistakes. He mishandled a controversy over a woman who asked him, as Weld County district attorney, to prosecute a rape case he had passed on. “She had buyer’s remorse as a result of the relationship that she had with this young man,” he explained on Meet the Press, in words that may as well have been calculated to alienate female voters.

But it was Buck’s partner at the top of the ticket who messed up the battle plan. The party’s nominee for governor was hobbled by a plagiarism scandal and lost to first-time candidate Dan Maes, whose own mistakes sent the party establishment running to support Constitution Party candidate Tom Tancredo. It seemed like Tancredo was preventing a disaster, but there was no way for him to really save the GOP-the party had to keep wasting time on Maes, and the Republican Governors Association bailed on the state, denying money that could have been used to help get out the whole Republican vote.