February 03, 2015 11:38 AM UTC

David Sabados's Deleted Posts: Too Much Baggage For the Party

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• by: badidea

While I’ve posted on here a fair bit, my normal account is known as me to enough folks that I felt I needed to create another one to share this info. Because of my position, it’s best not for me to get involved in these sorts of things. But in this case, it’s important enough that I felt I had to at least do something to share this issue publicly.

As Wade Norris noted in a post last week, and as most folks probably know by now, political consultant David Sabados is challenging the Democratic Party Chair Rick Palacio for the job. The case for his candidacy seems to be largely that Dems lost some races this year, and that’s Palacio’s fault, and he’d do better. Sabados has carved out a bit of a career managing some lower-tier races (a few state house races, some school board races, etc), and of course there’s a certain irony to the critique given that David has been on the losing side more often than not.

But there’s a basic problem with David that ought to be more concerning to those of us invested in the success of Democrats in the state, and that’s that he’s – rhetorically – been a serious loose cannon over the past few years. And in the course of his campaigns that I’ve watched, he’s personally made some pretty extreme attacks on a lot of elected Democrats in the state. That kind of track record of rhetoric is just going to be a field day for Republicans and their opposition researchers.

I was thinking in particular that a few years back, a friend had sent me a thing he’d posted, saying something to the effect of, ‘geez, how crazy is this’. I went back through my email and found it, and I’ll share it below. In it, he’s attacking Democratic Denver mayor Michael Hancock and comparing him with Tom Tancredo. It is, based on my experience, pretty par for the course with David.

Of course, when I went back to his Facebook page (we’re friends on there) to see the post and link to it, it’s no longer there. In fact, as I scrolled through the page, it looks like he’s scrubbed it pretty thoroughly, deleting lots of the much more aggressive stuff I remember him having written (compared to stuff I’ve seen pop up on my feed from him, this is probably pretty tame). The fact is, he’s said a lot of reckless stuff attacking fellow Democrats. And ultimately, some of it’s going to be out there on the internet, Republicans will find it, and they’ll have a field day with him as chair. I don’t know how to track down that stuff, and only have the post a friend sent me, but I’m sure it’s not the only one that someone grabbed over the years, and I'm sure there are people much more sophisticated than I am. 

Moreover, it seems to me that the fact that he went through and deleted these posts from his Facebook feed in itself seems like a problem, since he felt like he had to try to cover his tracks to hide what he's said in the past. 

It also looks like he did the same thing on twitter, since his twitter account shows 32 posts, but a cache of the page from earlier in January shows 39. Not sure what the posts he deleted were, but again, it seems like a problem that we have a guy running for chair who had stuff that he felt he had to go back and delete. Having those kind of distractions (and just that kind of shady behavior generally) probably isn’t going to help Dems win in Colorado in 2016 – leaving aside any questions of whether he actually has the skills to do the job (which, given his local track record, I for one am not at all convinced of). Who knows what else he felt he needed to delete. 

Current
https://twitter.com/davidsabados

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January 10^th, 2015

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