Posted by
NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Wednesday, February 28, 2007 2:45:07 PM
Over the summer, I made many hundreds of phone calls for Bob Beauprez. I learned a lot, and I try to bring what I learned to this blog.
I wasn't a "production" caller. Production callers don't really care if they actually talk to the person at the other end of the line. They're just racking up numbers. Rather, I used some techniques that I described months ago which allowed me to talk to voters in more depth.
I found out early on that Bob Beauprez was in trouble. It was obvious that he was losing the moderate part of the party, which thought him too conservative, AND he was losing the fiercely conservative part of the party which thought him too moderate (which I found pretty amazing).
The conservatives still held, and probably still hold Bob responsible for Coors winning the Republican primary in 2004. By and large, they had not voted for Coors in the 2004 general election, and they were determined not to vote for Bob in the 2006 governor's race. I began thinking of them "occasional Republicans."
The more I dug into the reasons for this dislike for Bob, who was almost certainly as conservative as most, if not all of the occasional Republicans who hated him (hate is a strong, but accurate description, I think), the more I came to realize that at least part of the problem originated with the 2004 state assembly. It seems that there were about 400 more votes counted in the Senate race than there were state delegates.
This indicated that someone had stuffed the ballot box. The Schaffer folks thought they had a chance to knock Coors off the ticket if they got more than 70% of the vote. They thought that the 400 votes were put in the box by the party leadership to keep Coors on the ballot, and they still counted Bob Beauprez as a part of that leadership.
As someone totally uninvolved in the situation, I thought that almost anything was possible. It was possible that Coors got the 400 votes as the Schaffer folks suspected. It was also possible that the Schaffer folks put the 400 votes in to knock Coors out of the race.
This past weekend, I took the opportunity of my volunteering at the Leadership Program of the Rockies retreat to ask the question of a Republican activist.
He told me it was just a screw up. The volunteers handing out the credentials weren't properly briefed and they were issuing ballots to both delegates and alternates until they ran out of ballots. Then, when late arriving delegates complained that they weren't getting a ballot, the decision was made to issue more ballots. Not replacement ballots, more ballots!
Because the ballots handed to alternates were handed out randomly, he thought it probable that the final results were accurate, percentage wise, even if the vote total was inaccurate. In the end, percentages are what matter at the assembly.
Bob Schaffer went on to lose to Pete Coors in the primary. The Schaffer supporters used the ballot mistake at the assembly as a mental crutch for their candidate's inability to win the primary. They believed that there shouldn't have been a primary.
After hearing the explanation, I think they are wrong. Coors got on the ballot legitimately. Beauprez was uninvolved, and it was dead wrong for Schaffer and his supporters to sit out the 2004 election. Once Schaffer had taught his supporters that it was "acceptable" to sit out the 2004 election, they chose to sit out 2006, as well.
Even if the leadership understands that the 2004 assembly ballot fiasco was an honest mistake, it is clear that the rank and file does not. This needs to be fixed, and fixed now. Otherwise, the war within the Republican party will continue. Perhaps Dick Wadhams can begin the process at the meeting this Saturday.