“It’s pretty unheard of for an incumbent to be this weak, underperforming the district by over 11 points.”
That’s the top-line takeaway from our guest this week, Andrew Baumann, Partner at Global Strategy Group and lead pollster for the GSG/ProgressNow Colorado quarterly survey, The Rocky Mountaineer. Colorado shocked the nation in 2022 when the 3rd Congressional District was too close to call for weeks after the election, so close in fact it led to a mandatory recount. The race ended with incumbent Republican and the podcast’s 8th favorite member of congress from Colorado, Lauren Boebert, winning by the narrowest margin out of any congressional candidate in the entire country at 546 votes. Colorado’s independent redistricting commission rated the district as an R+9.3, meaning that the last 8 elections they used to calculate the political performance of the district gave any Republican a 9.3% edge. Boebert underperformed the district by about 9.29%, and the latest poll shows her in a dead heat with challenger Adam Frisch, who has already filed for reelection.
Besides Lauren Boebert making the 3rd Congressional District competitive when it absolutely should not be for no reason other than she can’t help but tweet every insane right-wing grievance meme, there was plenty of other news in Colorado Politics last week.
Chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, former State Representative, and Guy Who Had A Job Ian Had When He Still Had Hair, Dave Williams, has been exposed for drawing a taxpayer funded salary while sending incredibly partisan emails as chair of the state GOP. Bente Birkeland of Colorado Public Radio wrote an excellent, deep, detailed, and wildly well-sourced piece on this VERY FUCKING SUSPICIOUS arrangement that Williams has figured out. Read this whole damn story because Bente is a top-notch Colorado politics reporter and it includes delicious, lovely, velvety quotes like this:
House Minority Leader Mike Lynch said Williams’ presence hasn't been widely known at the Capitol this year, noting that he hasn’t been referenced or seen inside the building. But Lynch finds it odd that Williams wanted to step into the role of aide.
“It hasn't caused any real problem. It's just kind of weird,” he said, adding that he didn’t expect Williams to continue working as an aide after he was elected chair.
“I hope he's working and giving somebody advice and he's not just milking big government,” Lynch said.
Good lord.
In other news, 9News had an incredibly fucking depressing story highlighting a bill that has unfortunately become necessary because the federal government and surrounding states have refused to do a single fucking thing about the scourge of gun violence which is now the number one KILLER OF CHILDREN in the country. NUMBER ONE. IT’S NOT REALLY EVEN CLOSE. Republican State Representative Mary Bradfield said all the quiet parts out loud.
And a right-wing dark money group who very obviously broke the law, and still just suck at winning, had a court case overturned because, well, laws don’t matter if you have enough money to hire fancy lawyers to confuse stupid judges, and who will spend as much as they need to to hide their big donors (one of whom is absolutely almost certainly Phil Anschutz).
And DARK BRANDON released his first ad after announcing his campaign for reelection last week. If you haven’t seen it, take a minute to watch it. It’s not just because it made Ian a little misty
Meanwhile Donald Trump released his first ad of the season, which is just dunk after dunk on Ron DeSantis. And his campaign is so shitty they don’t have it on YouTube and I can’t embed it so you need to go see a low quality version of it with terrible audio here, instead of letting me embed it like a functioning fucking campaign in 2023.
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NEW PODCAST: Just Do Your Job! (feat. Andrew Baumann)