December 28, 2010 09:05 PM UTC

Top Stories of 2010 #9: Ritter Bows Out

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• by: Colorado Pols

On the afternoon of Tuesday, January 5th of this year, a story with enormous implications for Colorado politics broke–in Washington, D.C., on the national Political Wire blog. Apparently, word of Gov. Bill Ritter’s decision to not seek re-election leaked out first when D.C.-based fundraising staff were instructed to stop working. The next day, Ritter made it official to local press.

The unexpected withdrawal of Ritter, whose campaign was posting excellent fundraising numbers and seemed to be on track, from the gubernatorial race was initially cheered by Republicans–who pushed the line that mounting problems for Ritter on both sides of the aisle had forced him to conclude re-election was unwinnable. Their cheers quickly morphed into dread, however, as popular Denver mayor John Hickenlooper stepped up a few days later to take Ritter’s place on the ballot. As we said at the time, Hickenlooper was just one of several very strong Democratic contenders who were ready to run for this office; to whatever extent Republicans may have been correct about Ritter’s weaknesses, the Democrats’ deep bench made them totally irrelevant.

Hickenlooper was strong in all of the ways that were needed this year, from good relations with many traditionally GOP-leaning interests (guaranteeing half-hearted opposition from them at best) to popularity with base Democrats that survived a few early triangulation wobbles on the campaign trail. There’s a strong argument that from the moment Hickenlooper replaced Ritter, this race was unwinnable for the GOP.

A question that lingers today, after everything that happened between Ritter’s withdrawal and Hickenlooper’s anticlimactic defeat of two conservative challengers–if Ritter had known that Scott McInnis would implode in a career-ending plagiarism scandal, and that Maes would prove to be a laughable non-threat, leaving conservative hope of winning the gubernatorial race in the hands of walking embarrassment Tom Tancredo…would he still have pulled out of the race?

What we know of the reasons for Ritter’s withdrawal, which range from the considerable stress of high office on himself and his family to the financial pressures of college-age children, suggest that the answer may well have been “yes.” But there’s no way that anyone could have known what was going to happen to McInnis, and without that, the gubernatorial cakewalk Democrats ultimately enjoyed in Colorado could not have been predicted.

Except, perhaps, by Scott McInnis.