Category Archives: Gov. Jared Polis

As promised when the so-called “Dethrone Polis 2020” campaign announced Friday that they would not be turning in the required 630,000+ valid voter signatures to qualify a recall question for a future special election ballot, here’s the “request” by a lawyer purporting to represent the campaign asking for a 90-day extension of the collection period, citing public gathering restrictions imposed to control the spread of COVID-19.

As the Colorado Sun reported Saturday, this is dumb on a couple of key levels:

The 60-day deadline for signature gathering is specified in the state Constitution. Any request for an extension would have to be granted by the courts, Betsy Hart, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Jena Griswold, said in an email.

Although proponents of the failed abortion ban ballot measure Proposition 115 successfully petitioned the courts for a short extension to citing collection difficulties during the pandemic, that campaign had actually submitted signatures by the required deadline, something the Recall Polis campaign never even bothered to do. With no evidence that this campaign came even remotely close to their goal within the 60 days they had, granting them 90 more days would be silly and unfair.

Not to mention they have to ask a judge, not the Secretary of State. We’ll see if a court case is ever even filed–and if one is, we expect it to survive about as long as one of President Donald Trump’s election lawsuits.

With all of this in mind, the realization that the second in as many recall attempts against Colorado’s popular Democratic governor has failed miserably is not sitting well with the Facebook faithful–and they’re growing despondent over leaders’ silence:

And in the absence of hard information, some are getting a bit twitchy, Michigan-style:

Safe to say, these are not productive methods of coping with bad news.

The reality, much like the half-baked dispute over the presidential election, is that this second consecutive recall campaign against Gov. Jared Polis is all over. We are curious to know just how many signatures organizers claim to have obtained, but unless they actually turn them in for validation we have no reason to believe any number they give us. As we’ve said from the beginning, the logistics of an undertaking on the scale needed to gather more signatures than any campaign in the state’s history would have been visible. It never existed, it was never going to exist, and just like the 2019 recall it was the product of unserious actors who were never capable of succeeding.

Since the 2018 elections devastated a Colorado GOP already reeling from their steady erosion of power over the previous 14 years, the party from the highest levels has done nothing to change course–and the 2020 election proved it. Taking bad advice from bad consultants, Republicans instead dived into a series of recall campaigns against Gov. Polis and state lawmakers in 2019 that not only failed, but seriously damaged the credibility of Republicans from state party chairman Ken Buck on down. Buck’s personal embrace of recalls, and his vice-chair’s direct role in the ill-fated recall attempt against Rep. Tom Sullivan of Centennial made it impossible to extricate the party once the campaigns humiliatingly crashed and burned.

Although recalls were always intended for use in exigent cases of misconduct by elected officials, not opportunistic do-overs of fairly decided elections, the abuse of the process for political paybacks by a shrinking minority party in Colorado does appear to have damaged the credibility of Republicans involved. Former House Minority Leader Patrick Neville, who audaciously played in the failed Sullivan recall after leading the House minority to its smallest size in decades, is as close to persona non grata as he’s ever been. The National Popular Vote legislation cited as justification for recalling Polis and state lawmakers was victorious in a statewide vote. The “red flag” law that had the gun lobby dreaming of a 2013 redux is working as intended.

If Republicans in Colorado ever want to win again, it is this endless state of contrived political crises that has to stop. The last decade of Republican politics has been about disregarding all rules, traditions, and even pretense of cross-aisle engagement, and waging endless, ad absurdum partisan warfare down to the very last mountainous molehill.

We can’t speak for everywhere in America, but the voters of Colorado are sick and tired of it.

They’re the ones saying so, we’re just the messenger:

If the graphic you see above is truthful, the Recall Polis 2020 campaign would have now have in its possession somewhere in excess of 200,000 signatures, on their way to the minimum necessary 631,266 minimum number necessary by the deadline of November 13th to qualify a recall question against Gov. Jared Polis for the ballot. Just like last year, collecting that historic number of signatures would still fall well short of the 30% or more in excess needed to cover the expected percentage of invalid signatures that arise in the verification process–but presumably 631,000 is the campaign’s initial target.

The problem, of course, is that we have absolutely no way of knowing whether this claim has a basis in reality–and plenty of reasons to suspect it does not. The first thing the current recall campaign would logically try to do, assuming they’re in possession of the data, is reach out to the of signers of the 2019 Polis recall petition. That effort claimed to have collected more than 300,000 signatures after the full 60-day campaign, but the true number will never be known since they were never turned in for verification by the Secretary of State.

The thing is, an outreach campaign to those signers just by itself would be a huge logistical undertaking that there’s been no sign of actually taking place. We’re more than three weeks into this recall petition campaign, and it’s true that the campaign needs to be at well over 200,000 signatures collected to be on track for success by the deadline–but apart from this graphic that claims all is well, there’s very little sign of the field campaign that would actually be required to produce those numbers. And even if in the most charitable benefit of the doubt we assume they can get all 300,000 alleged 2019 petition signers to sign again, accounting for an early pad to their numbers, that’s going to leave them distantly short of the number needed just like 2019.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say the Recall Polis 2020 campaign is being completely honest about their numbers, and have actually managed through a herculean yet somehow concealed effort to collect over 200,000 signatures to qualify a recall election question for the ballot at some point after the 2020 elections.

Folks, do you realize how much effort is not being put into winning the election on November 3rd if this is true? The energy expended by Republicans on organizing the Polis recall petition drive on the scale they are claiming is underway now, with a deadline ten days after the election, is such a perfect diversion of resources that Democrats should raise money to help them. Any Republican with even the most minimal sense of self-preservation should be screaming at the top of their lungs to abandon this folly and focus on what actually matters while they still can.

For all of these reasons, we’ll believe it when we see the proof. And we doubt that will ever happen.