August 29, 2022 11:32 AM UTC

All Together Now: GOP's Toxic "Unity Tour" Goes On

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• by: Colorado Pols

Earlier this month, Republican candidates for office at all levels gathered at Mile High Station, an events venue in downtown Denver owned by multimillionaire U.S. Senate candidate Joe “Horse Sushi” O’Dea, to declare their unity heading into the height of election season. Standing together on one stage were candidates like O’Dea and Secretary of State candidate Pam Anderson, who have made much of their supposed rejection of election conspiracy theories, along with Republican National Committeeman Randy Corporon who is the target of a defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems for his baseless promulgation of slanderous conspiracy theories about that company’s products.

Being a “unity rally,” there was no public discussion about the ostensibly major disagreements between Republicans on the stage, but Republicans can’t make those conflicts just go away just by ignoring them. In fact, as Heidi Ganahl discovered when she tried for some months early in her campaign to rebuke the press for asking “divisive questions” instead of simply answering them, when it becomes obvious that you don’t want to talk about a certain thing, that thing instantly becomes the only thing anyone wants to talk about.

But as the Fort Morgan Times’ Brian Porter reported from another “GOP Unity” event in Windsor last week, nobody seems to be getting the message:

A unified message from a unified ballot of candidates will be the formula for success in November’s general election, Colorado Republican Party Chairwoman Kristi Burton Brown told those gathered Wednesday at the party’s Family Barbecue…

Republican candidates for U.S. Senate, U.S. Representative and the top state offices were presented during a meet and greet event at Sundance National Resort & Golf. The issues of importance are similar in many campaigns, the candidates said, and some indicated their campaign volunteers are broadening scopes to support and elect several candidates…

Danny Moore, who is running as lieutenant governor on the ticket with governor candidate Heidi Ganahl, was among those seeking state offices to speak, taking issue with the state’s crime and education standing measured against other states.

“Our kids can’t read [at grade level]. Our kids can’t do math,” he said. “When I moved here, Colorado was the safest place in the country to live. It is not anymore.”

Now first of all, we’ve already discussed at length this absurd sweeping statement from Ganahl’s campaign that kids “can’t read” and “can’t do math”–and we’re curious if the added “at grade level” in brackets above was the reporter, you know, helping out so that Moore’s statement wasn’t quite as laughable on its face.

But more importantly, Lt. Gov. candidate Danny Moore’s embrace of election conspiracies led to his removal from the chairmanship of the state’s congressional redistricting commission–and rather than walking his prior statements back after being selected by Ganahl as her running mate, Moore doubled down on his conspiracy theories in a Colorado Springs Gazette op-ed. In response, Secretary of State candidate Pam Anderson put out a statement condemning Ganahl’s campaign for “allow[ing] this false rhetoric to continue.”

With all of this in mind, last Wednesday would have been the perfect moment for Anderson to call out Danny Moore. After all, he was right there on stage with her!

But of course that’s not what happened:

Pam Anderson complained her opponent, Democrat Secretary of State Jena Griswold, spent half of COVID funds on “herself with commercials.” She called for Griswold to pay back the funds being spent on commercials with former Secretary of State Wayne Williams.

We wrote last week about Anderson’s petulant complaining over Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s public service announcement with her GOP predecessor Wayne Williams, even though Anderson admits there’s nothing wrong with the ad’s content opposing election misinformation. And at the same time Anderson is complaining about election misinformation PSAs, she’s standing on stage with some of Colorado’s most infamous and unrepentant election deniers in a show of “unity.” We thought this glaring contradiction was a reason why Moore wasn’t on stage for the first “unity rally” at Mile High Station, but now that they’ve taken the stage together it’s not a question she can hide from any longer.

This is equally true for Joe O’Dea, whose headlong flight to the middle since winning the Republican primary took its own header after O’Dea sabotaged himself on abortion by claiming ownership of 2020’s soundly defeated abortion restriction ballot measure Proposition 115. O’Dea has been running on a message pretty much directly cribbed from ex-Sen. Cory Gardner’s narrowly successful 2014 campaign, as a “different kind of Republican” who puts “country before party.” That makes O’Dea’s headlining the GOP’s “unity tour” alongside decidedly immoderate Republicans like Danny Moore, Randy Corporon, and former FEC United employee-turned GOP state House candidate Stephanie Wheeler (standing next to O’Dea in the photo above) highly inadvisable to say the least.

For candidates fighting an uphill battle to win in spite of their party’s deep unpopularity, the absolute last thing they should be doing is “unifying” the unpopular party’s brand with their own. This is such a basic rule for this kind of campaign that it’s honestly bewildering to see it so cavalierly disregarded. Either there’s a dynamic they’re counting on that isn’t evident in any poll we see today, or the Colorado Republican ticket is chaining itself together and heedlessly running for the cliff.

Show us evidence of the former if you have it.