August 12, 2010 05:54 PM UTC

The One We Got Wrong

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• by: Colorado Pols

We’re proud to report that our primary oddsmaking, as reflected in The 2010 Big Line to your left, accurately predicted the outcome of every race decided on Tuesday.

Except one, as the Durango Herald’s Joe Hanel reported yesterday:

Cortez Republican Scott Tipton won the right to challenge U.S. Rep. John Salazar for his seat in Congress.

Tipton beat Bob McConnell, a retired Army colonel from Steamboat Springs, in a hard-fought primary…

McConnell courted tea party support and got a major boost with an endorsement by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

“I felt the power of people reaching out and hearing my message that I was not in it for myself, I was in it for them. I don’t regret a minute of it,” McConnell said.

Tipton had hoped to avoid a primary, but McConnell put up a strong showing at the Congressional district convention in May, enabling him to stay in the race through the primary.

It’s true that, largely on the strength of the high-profile endorsement by former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, we had Bob McConnell at slightly better odds than Scott Tipton to win the CD-3 primary. It does appear in retrospect that we gave too much credit to the value of Palin’s endorsement, but we also didn’t think that Tipton had really excited the GOP base. Though it has been and remains our opinion that neither GOP contender has an appreciable chance of unseating locally popular incumbent John Salazar, we did think that Palin’s support of McConnell would be worth more than it ultimately was.

So you can consider us at least partly disabused of the notion that Sarah Palin’s endorsement is worth, well, anything–and it’s possible, depending on how other Palin-endorsed candidates like Nevada’s Sharron Angle do in November, that the rest of the country will not be far behind us.