Joe O’Dea Was Worth a Shot

If I may expand on some of the points made by Bobby Miller about the Colorado Senate race: Joe O’Dea was clearly not a great, A+ candidate. If he had been, he would not have lost by twelve points to Michael Bennet, who had won by 1.7 points against Ken Buck in 2010 and 5.7 points against Darryl Glenn in 2016. With an estimated 91 percent of votes counted, O’Dea at this writing has drawn 969,426 votes: just 14,000 fewer than those Cory Gardner earned in a winning race in 2014. But with population growth and higher turnout, Bennet has already surpassed Mark Udall’s total by nearly 300,000 votes.

Colorado, which was a reliable red state from 1952 to 2004, has gotten progressively bluer, and also progressively more hostile to Donald Trump. Trump lost the state by 4.9 points in 2016; Hillary Clinton was unpopular in Colorado, and 9 percent of the state’s voters chose third-party candidates such as libertarian Gary Johnson, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and independent Evan McMullin. In 2020, by contrast, Trump lost Colorado by 13.5 points and took Gardner down with him. Gardner added half a million to his vote total from 2014, but lost by 9.3 points to John Hickenlooper, who hammered him for opposing the first Trump impeachment.

In a state where the general electorate has turned decisively against Trump, it was always going to be difficult to strike the right balance. O’Dea, as a first-time candidate for public office — a businessman like Trump — may not have struck precisely the best balance, but what was the alternative? Gardner, a more skilled politician, wasn’t able to navigate that choice either — and Gardner didn’t run in 2022. After other political amateurs were eliminated by the state convention, the alternative to O’Dea was Ron Hanks, 2020 election truther with no money who would have been a poor man’s Doug Mastriano in a bluer state than Pennsylvania — which is exactly why Democrats tried so hard to bankroll Hanks. As it turned out, O’Dea’s 42.3 percent of the vote at present is still higher than Trump’s 41.9 percent two years ago.

Absent a better choice than O’Dea, some in the Trumpiest precincts of the right have argued that the party should not have spent any money on O’Dea. But simply abandoning states is a bad idea. First of all, early in a race, it’s worth spreading around seed money to see which races look competitive. In mid September, Bennet was at 46.5 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average, Mark Kelly at 46.3 percent, Raphael Warnock at 46.8 percent, Maggie Hassan at 47.3 percent, and Patty Murray at 48.5 percent. I don’t know how those races looked in non-public polling, and O’Dea was the least popular among these five candidates’ Republican opponents (down eight, about a point lower than Don Bolduc). But it was a reasonable decision to test which races could catch lightning in a bottle, assuming it was to be the big Republican year people were expecting.

With Jared Polis, too, pulling away in the governor’s race, abandoning O’Dea would have meant doing nothing on a statewide level to help turnout down the ticket — such as in Colorado’s eighth House district (which Barbara Kirkmeyer seems to have lost by less than a point) and third House district (where Lauren Boebert presently leads by a third of a point). We can quibble about marginal dollars, but committing resources in Colorado to keep the bottom from dropping out was not a bad idea. We saw in states such as Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania that strong statewide tickets can help with close House races, and weak statewide tickets can do the opposite.

Lacking a coherent case against O’Dea other than the simple fact that he was an inexperienced candidate in a tough position in a blue state, Trump and his toadies have resorted to calling O’Dea . . . fat, which is hilariously self-unaware. It’s also juvenile and bizarrely elitist, coming from supposed tribunes of the common man. (Have you seen the common man in America these days?)

At the end of the day, the desperate screeching directed at O’Dea is simply meant to distract from the fact that Trump-backed and “stop the steal” candidates did disproportionately badly on Election Day, and the closer they were associated with Trump’s election challenge (and the less they had in common with experienced Republican politicians), the worse they did. That reality is sinking in for Republicans across the country this week, and that is why Trump and his hangers-on are afraid.