October 06, 2022 10:27 AM UTC

O'Dea Campaign Promotes Saddest Meet and Greet of 2022

• 5 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

As we wrote in this space just a few weeks ago, Republican Joe O’Dea’s campaign for U.S. Senate seems to have been modeled in part on the 2014 strategy that saw Republican Cory Gardner narrowly elected to the U.S. Senate against incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Udall. As we noted in that same post, there’s not much reason to think that this approach might work again in 2022 — particularly after Gardner was drubbed by Democrat John Hickenlooper when the former sought re-election in 2020.

But with time running out on the 2022 election and O’Dea finding himself abandoned by even the fringiest of the far-right Republicans, Team O’Dea is going back to a well that has long since proven to be emptier than Lauren Boebert’s melon:

O’Dea is similar to Gardner in that both candidates tried to convince Colorado voters that they were totally not a threat to any existing rights (such as abortion). O’Dea’s campaign has even tried to tell voters that they shouldn’t worry about electing him because he won’t get anything accomplished anyway. The main difference between O’Dea and Gardner, aside from the facial hair, is that Gardner was a pretty good politician who stammered out calculated nonsense, as opposed to O’Dea’s habit of just barfing out whatever comes to mind even if it contradicts something he already said.

We assume this “Meet & Greet” means that Gardner is endorsing O’Dea for Senate. You might think this would be obvious, but most Colorado Republicans have avoided Gardner in 2022 like he was trying to give them a COVID booster. We were surprised, in fact, when CO-07 Republican candidate Erik Aadland announced last month that he had received Gardner’s endorsement because the former Senator has been largely invisible in Colorado.

Anyway, if you have a hankering to meet Gardner and O’Dea at an undisclosed location that also will include a food truck of some sort, now you know how to RSVP.