November 15, 2022 10:34 AM UTC

At Least She's Not Your Losing Candidate For Governor

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• by: Colorado Pols

At the desperate end of Colorado GOP gubernatorial candidate Hiedi Heidi Ganahl’s campaign, she returned once again to election conspiracy theorist and 2020 coup plotter Steve Bannon for a last-minute infusion of goodwill ahead of losing the race by somewhere close to 20 points one week ago. Bannon claimed based on what we now know were fictional polls that Ganahl was “surging” in her race against incumbent Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, and that the U.S. Senate race in Colorado was similarly “neck and neck.”

As readers know, it didn’t quite work out that way for Ganahl, who conceded within two hours of the polls closing and left (one would think) Bannon looking like a latter-day Dick Morris. But in the governor’s race in our caddy-corner neighbor Arizona, called last night for Democrat Katie Hobbs over Ultra-MAGA Republican Kari Lake, Bannon is as of this morning certain that the fix is in:

Steve Bannon claims “there’s zero probability” that Kari Lake lost her election. pic.twitter.com/YBx93j8eKw

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) November 15, 2022

Nonetheless, as the Washington Post reports:

Kari Lake, projected Monday night to have been defeated in the Arizona governor’s race, was being advised by GOP operatives and some of her closest aides to take a measured approach and not “storm the castle,” as one person present for the discussions described the sentiments. [Pols emphasis]

The Republican nominee, who rose to national prominence as a chief exponent of former president Donald Trump’s false claims of 2020 election fraud, fell to Democrat Katie Hobbs, who oversaw that election and defended the process from baseless claims of wrongdoing.

Voters rejected election-denying candidates in key battleground states nationwide this year, and many of those candidates have responded by doing what Trump wouldn’t: concede defeat.

There’s no sign of a concession from Kari Lake so far, rather the opposite in fact:

On the campaign trail one year ago, Ganahl appeased election conspiracy theorists by telling them in what she believed was a private setting that Donald Trump “won by such a big margin” that there was no way Democrats “could fix it,” and therefore the solution was “to do that again in Colorado. We’ve got to have such a red tsunami, that there’s no question, there’s no fixing it.”

Ganahl didn’t realize it, but she was describing her own defeat with the parties flipped.

And with the cautionary tale of Kari Lake in Arizona playing out before our eyes, Ganahl was more right than she can ever admit again–probably even to herself.