July 02, 2014 11:01 AM UTC

BREAKING: Jill Repella(?) Picked as Beauprez Running Mate

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• by: Colorado Pols

THURSDAY UPDATE: Round and round we go. We can confirm that Deidre Garcia​ was indeed offered the job of Beauprez's running mate, but declined.

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UPDATE #2: Beauprez's campaign says it never offered Lt. Governor to Garcia, and that Repella was their first choice.

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UPDATE: Looks like Beauprez's campaign did have a bit of trouble finding a running mate. Check out this Tweet from Lynn Bartels of the Denver Post:

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Just reported by CBS4's Shaun Boyd., Douglas County Commissioner Jill Repella has been picked as Bob Beauprez's running mate.

While we don't know a ton about Repella, she does satisfy a couple of important demographic concerns for the Beauprez ticket. First off, Repella is a woman — which Beauprez clearly needed to balance the ticket and combat the narrative of Republican struggles with women's issues. Repella is from the Metro Denver area, which is vitally important to winning a statewide race in Colorado; as we pointed out in April, it has been 18 years since a non-incumbent politician from outside Metro Denver was elected to statewide office, so Beauprez needed a running mate with some kind of base of support in Metro Denver. We wouldn't have gone with a Douglas County elected official, since that's a county that Republicans should win anyway, but at least Repella isn't from a small rural county that would do nothing to help Beauprez's odds in November.

It wasn't going to be difficult for Beauprez to choose a better running mate than he did in 2006, when his disastrous choice of Mesa County Commissioner Janet "Bestiality" Rowland was among the final nails in the coffin of his campaign. But why on earth would Beauprez's campaign decide to make this announcement on the same afternoon as the U.S. World Cup game? The campaign clearly knew that the game was a problem in terms of generating interest and media coverage for their announcement, which is why they waited until the final whistle to make the news official. The news tonight and tomorrow will be dominated by coverage and reaction to the World Cup game, making what should otherwise be an easy earned media hit a wasted opportunity.

Beauprez already botched his campaign announcement this spring when he was stuck in Washington D.C. on the day he intended to file, and this was another avoidable mistake…unless Beauprez's campaign was having trouble finding a suitable running mate who would agree to join him in 2014. Either Beauprez's campaign needed until the last minute (today) to announce a Lt. Governor running mate because they couldn't find who they wanted…or nobody paid any attention to what was scheduled to happen elsewhere today (like, oh, the biggest soccer game in recent U.S. history).

Either way, Beauprez's handling of choosing a running mate ended up being much more complicated than it needed to be. This matters, like it or not, because one of Beauprez's biggest challenges will be proving to supporters and potential supporters that his campaign will be appreciably better than his historically-awful 2006 bid for Governor. So far, not so good.