September 19, 2022 02:19 PM UTC

In Which Joe O'Dea Claims to be Pro-Choice

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• by: Colorado Pols

Colorado Republican Senate candidate Joe O’Dea released a new television ad over the weekend that most politicians would be ashamed to have approved. The ad attempts to paint O’Dea as a “pro-choice” candidate, which is nothing short of a complete lie.

In the ad, which you can see below, O’Dea’s daughter, Tayler O’Dea, says, “My dad supports a woman’s right to choose.” The ad then cuts to Steve Kornacki of NBC News saying, “O’Dea is running as a pro-choice candidate” and Marshall Zelinger of 9News saying, “O’Dea…supports a woman’s right to choose early in pregnancy.”

We could discuss at length how this advertisement is completely false and goes against everything O’Dea has said about abortion rights. We could also point out that O’Dea’s campaign has regularly tried to claim that he is both pro-life AND pro-choice.

But the simplest way to explain why this ad is false is using O’Dea’s own words. You’ll notice that O’Dea himself never appears and says I am pro-choice, because he is not. And how do we know that Joe O’Dea is pro-life, and NOT pro-choice? Because Joe O’Dea said it himself in May:

Republicans know that the issue of abortion rights is a huge problem for them, particularly since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June. Joe O’Dea probably can’t win an election in a heavily pro-choice state like Colorado by being “pro-life,” so O’Dea is now content to just lie about his position in order to curry favor with voters who haven’t been paying close attention to his words on the issue.

This is the worst kind of cynical politics. A candidate who would approve an ad like this has no business representing Coloradans in elected office.