December 20, 2011 12:43 AM UTC

About Those "Misogynist Maps..."

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• by: Colorado Pols

As briefly noted by several media outlets, the Colorado Statesman’s Ernest Luning reports:

[O]n Tuesday, state Rep. Marsha Looper, R-Calhan, told The Statesman she intends to run hard for her El Paso County seat despite sharing it under the new maps with House Majority Leader Amy Stephens, R-Monument.

“I look forward to a vigorous reelection campaign in the upcoming months,” Looper said, noting that Stephens has already drawn a primary challenge in retired Air Force Major General Gar Graham…

That’s right, folks, since about the first week of this month–meaning before the finalization of reapportionment maps–there has been another challenger lurking out there against House Majority Leader Amy Stephens. In the Colorado Springs Independent earlier in December, a fascinating report about retired Gen. Gar Graham’s thoughts on the possibility of a three-way fight between himself, Rep. Marsha Looper of Calhan, and Stephens:

“Gar, I’m gonna ask you one final question,” [Host Ken] Clark [of Grassroots Radio] asked, “because this is something that concerns me personally. If you are thrust into District 19, and it looks like we are going to have a three-way race – Gar, Amy, and Marsha Looper – what are you gonna do then?”

“If, in fact, it turns into a 19-20 blend,” Graham began, “and we have three candidates, my first order of business, my first priority is to sit down with Marsha and discuss, ‘How are we going to make sure Amy doesn’t go back to Denver?’ That’s No. 1. No. 2, then I want to pay a little bit of attention to Rep. Looper’s record. I really haven’t studied it; I don’t know much about the lady. And No. 3, I’m gonna make sure we pay attention to what the voters want. Now there’s a fair amount of anti-incumbent feeling right now, and I think that’s because a lot of our problems are from the people who are in there. …”

“I gotta tell you, I was really looking forward to the toe-to-toe battle between Rep. Looper and Rep. Stephens,” Clark responded, “because I do know Rep. Looper very, very well; she is rock solid. … So, Gar, I would ask that you study that very, very hard. The worst thing, I think, that could happen is that we end up with a three-way race and Amy gets put back in there.” [Pols emphasis]

And that’s consistent with what we’re hearing from supporters from Rep. Looper in her primary bid against Majority Leader Stephens. Gen. Graham’s candidacy is being pushed by hard-right elements in El Paso County loyal to former Sen. Dave Schultheis and the Republican Study Committee of Colorado, which you might recall suffered a large reduction in membership following accusations of political meddling in the spring–including the loss of Majority Leader Stephens. What Looper’s intercessors with the Schultheis wing of the party are saying is that she can oust Stephens on the new map, and Gen. Graham’s entry isn’t worth the risk.

But reportedly, the Dave Schultheises of the world are not convinced.

And this brings us to a story from Lynn Bartels of the Denver paper this weekend on the same general subject. Since the finalization of  reapportionment maps earlier this month, one of the principal charges leveled by Republicans is that of “misogyny”–citing the combination of Stephens vs. Looper in HD-19 as their best example to substantiate a rather ugly accusation.

Bartels has repudiated this claim a couple of times; first in a blog post noting such luminary events for women in GOP politics as Jane Norton’s loss to Ken Buck, then this weekend’s more detailed story citing Gen. Graham’s Schultheis-backed run against Stephens and Looper. Bartels is very clear that Graham’s reasons for running predate the controversy over reapportionment, going back to Stephens’ sponsorship of the “AmyCare” health insurance exchange bill. Taking just the 2006 GOP primaries as one example, Bartels recounts three female Republican legislative candidates who were defeated by men. In the last decade as Bartels reports, the percentage of Republican women in the Colorado legislature plunged before recovering somewhat last election cycle–to a level still only half that of Democratic women.

Bartels’ full story is worth the read: it seems that there are plenty of Republican women willing to comment on red-on-red “misogyny,” the kind Republicans don’t put in their press releases.

Bottom line: it was always perilous for the GOP to claim Democrats were “biased against women” in the production of these maps, and now they’re being shown exactly why. To answer the charge that Democrats may have drawn maps problematic for individual Republican women incumbents, tales of Republicans taking a more direct approach amongst themselves.