November 02, 2011 11:39 PM UTC

Down Goes Frazier. Again. Probably for Good.

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• by: Colorado Pols

We’ve always been mystified by the interest in Aurora city council member Ryan Frazier, who seems to get a lot more credit than he deserves. But after losing his bid for Aurora Mayor last night to Steve Hogan in a race that wasn’t really close (Hogan won by 10 points), Frazier should be pretty well done in Colorado.

Frazier was touted as a rising star among Colorado Republicans when he tried running for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in 2009. He eventually dropped that race to take on incumbent Democrat Ed Perlmutter in CD-7…and promptly got the crap kicked out of him. Perlmutter beat Frazier by 11 points, yet for some reason Frazier was widely praised by local and national media for having been a strong candidate.

Here’s what we wrote about Frazier following the 2010 mid-term elections, when we named him one of the “Losers” of the cycle:

Sometimes a candidate will lose a big race but do well enough that he or she is considered a rising star. Frazier? Not so much. He got bullied out of the Republican Senate primary to run in CD-7, where he proceeded to get the absolute crap kicked out of him by Rep. Ed Perlmutter. Frazier is a good fundraiser and is decent at delivering a prepared speech, but his campaign was amateurish at best and he otherwise proved to be immature, vacuous and just plain silly in unscripted moments. In one debate, he repeatedly demanded that Perlmutter tell him the page number of something in the health care bill; when your big attack is that your opponent can’t recall page numbers, you’re running a student council campaign.

It’s not losing the race that hurts Frazier, but the fact that he couldn’t even be competitive in a Republican year. Frazier lost by 11 points to Perlmutter and received about 13,000 fewer votes than 2008 GOP candidate John Lerew, a guy whose own yard signs said “John Who?”

Ryan Frazier has now lost high-profile races in consecutive years by double digits, and there’s now no denying the fact that he’s just not a very good politician. Sure, he’s a good speaker (even if he sounds like he’s doing an impression of Barack Obama) and a decent fundraiser, but his campaigns have been downright ridiculous at times. Whether traveling to the Mexico border to stare at the fence, or claiming in a recent robo-call that the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd was out to get him, Frazier was less statesman than used-car salesman. And voters have noticed; it’s worth repeating that Frazier hasn’t just lost — he’s lost in a landslide in consecutive elections.

If the shine wasn’t completely off of Frazier after 2010, surely it is today. Donors aren’t going to back him a third time, not after that performance record, so we’ve probably seen the last of Frazier as a candidate for public office.