January 26, 2021 12:55 PM UTC

It's Official: The "Honey Badger" Is Back

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• by: Colorado Pols

Failed GOP congressional candidate Nicholas Morse announced yesterday what we’ve been expecting for some weeks now, the announcement that former Republican Secretary of State Scott “Honey Badger” Gessler will seek the job of chairman of the Colorado Republican Party to replace Rep. Ken Buck after another disastrous defeat for the party in the 2020 elections:

Please join me in supporting and voting for Scott Gessler to be our next State Party Chair.

I got to know Scott in 2016 when I asked him for lunch and he accepted. We spent the next couple hours discussing CD2 & he gave me insight into the district and a strategy that I can adamantly say helped.

With his guidance we were able to earn the most votes in CD2 history, even with a strong Libertarian vote (Never Trumpers) & we forced Jared Polis to spend more than $1.5M to protect what was considered a safe seat. Without the third party vote, we would have lost CD2, 47% – 53% and it would have turned some heads. That is the punch that Scott brings to our party and one we desperately need…

Subsequently confirmed by the Colorado’s Sun’s Jesse Aaron Paul:

Scott Gessler, Colorado’s former secretary of state, has announced his bid to be the next chair of the state GOP. He faces Kristi Burton Brown, the Colorado Republican Party’s current No. 2. #copolitics

— Jesse Aaron Paul ☀ (@JesseAPaul) January 26, 2021

Scott Gessler, who served as Colorado’s chief elections officer from 2011 until 2015, has a well-earned reputation as one of the state’s most notorious partisan political pugilists. As Secretary of State, a job in retrospect he should never have had, Gessler was the principal source of baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud in Colorado elections–an eerie prelude to the allegations Donald Trump made to justify refusing to accept the results of the 2020 elections nationally. Gessler’s claims of “tens of thousands of illegal voters” evaporated under scrutiny in much the same way Trump’s false claims did last November, and should have been the end of Gessler’s credibility.

Instead, Gessler became an “expert witness” for the Trump legal team in Nevada, arguing based on his “experience” with Colorado elections that Nevada’s books must have been cooked! A textbook case of bad behavior rewarded. The case was dismissed, but Gessler charged $450 an hour for his services. In between, Gessler charged thousands in 2019 to the failed Recall Polis campaign for “legal advice” that was, if anything other than close up shop immediately and go home, bad advice.

It’s necessary to be honest: Gessler, who is more than a match for the completely clueless vice-chair of the Colorado GOP Kristi Burton Brown, would be a major setback for Republicans hoping to turn the page from the disasters of the past few election cycles. Gessler may offer more attentiveness than moonlighting Ken Buck and less amateurishness than Kristi Burton Brown, but he’s a creature, even a progenitor, of Trump’s alt-facts assault on democracy. There are Republicans in Colorado, a state whose GOP assembly rejected Trump in 2016 before paying terribly for Trump that year and in the next two elections, who don’t want to go down that road any longer.

Gessler can’t lead Colorado Republicans back from the brink, but he might send them over the edge with style.