Tom Tancredo's Bid for Colorado Governor Puts His Party on Alert

New York  Times: 

By Jack Healy

June 23, 2014

Tom Tancredo’s Bid for Colorado Governor Puts His Party on Alert

DENVER — Tom Tancredo, the firebrand former congressman, Harley-Davidson biker and perennial headache for Colorado’s Republican leaders, was taking fire from all sides last week in the final days of his primary campaign for governor. His rivals were slamming him on the airwaves. Moderate Republicans were warning that Mr. Tancredo’s name on the ballot could doom their chances in crucial races across this swing state.

But for the moment, Mr. Tancredo’s big peeve was an online commenter who had smeared him on his campaign’s Facebook page, falsely attributing racist language to the candidate. Mr. Tancredo’s people had pulled the remark, but he still was piqued. “We’re going to sue his ass from here to Omaha,” Mr. Tancredo said, scrolling through his phone.

Fifteen years after he built a national reputation as an inflammatory foe of illegal immigration, Tom Tancredo, 68, is still campaigning, without apology, as Tom Tancredo. He skipped the debates ahead of Tuesday’s four-way Republican primary. He defied calls to drop out of the race. He embraces marijuana legalization. He says President Obama should be impeached, but notes that “you can’t criticize him because he’s black and if you do, you’re a racist.”

To Mr. Tancredo’s thinking, if one is going to go through all the rigors of a political campaign, “You should do it for a reason and be unwilling to modify your positions, just because you fear that some people out there will be turned off by it,” he said. “That’s not a reason to soft-pedal certain things.”

His supporters cast the campaign as an upstart taking on the party establishment, saying that the same populist undercurrent that helped a little-known conservative challenger oust Representative Eric Cantor this month in the Virginia primary could carry Mr. Tancredo to victory on Tuesday. Never mind that, in this race, the upstart spent a decade in Washington, made a third-party bid for governor in 2010, has raised more money than his rivals and is a front-runner in the view of many political analysts here.

Waving a banner of state sovereignty, gun rights and smaller government, Mr. Tancredo earned endorsements from the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin and a Tea Party group in the conservative Colorado Springs area. Supporters say his uncensored conservatism is the party’s best hope of beating the well-funded Democratic governor, John W. Hickenlooper, this November.

“If Republicans run a traditional campaign with a traditional candidate, we will have a traditional outcome: We lose,” Mr. Tancredo said in an interview. “I am not a traditional candidate.”

But many Republican leaders fret about nominating a candidate who has called Mr. Obama the “greatest threat” facing America and once called Miami a third-world country. In a year when Democrats are scrambling to keep control of the Senate, Republicans here say that Mr. Tancredo’s views could energize Colorado’s Democrats while alienating moderate Republicans and unaffiliated voters.

“It is a real mess,” said Dick Wadhams, a former chairman of the Colorado Republicans. “If he’s the nominee, he will become the defining face of the Republican Party. The Democrats will make sure of it. He has said so many inflammatory things — the list is unbelievable.”

In particular, Republicans here say, his candidacy could hurt their efforts to unseat the Democratic senator, Mark Udall, who is locked in a tight race with Representative Cory Gardner, a Republican from eastern Colorado. And they worry that Mr. Tancredo’s anti-immigration reputation could tip the scales in a competitive House fight in suburban Denver, where the Republican incumbent, Representative Mike Coffman, embraced an immigration overhaul after redistricting brought more Hispanic voters into his district.

Some Republicans have urged Mr. Tancredo to abandon the race. Others have stepped in to try to chip away at his support.

One group, Republicans Who Want to Win, flatly declared in an ad that Mr. Tancredo could not beat Mr. Hickenlooper. The Colorado-based group is supporting Bob Beauprez, a former congressman who lost his 2006 bid for governor by double digits. (The other two Republicans vying for the nomination are Scott Gessler, the secretary of state, and Mike Kopp, a veteran of the Persian Gulf war in 1991 and former state senator.)

Some Democrats, apparently eager to face Mr. Tancredo in November, have even tried to nudge the race in his direction. A group with ties to progressive and Democratic groups ran an ad that emphasized Mr. Tancredo’s opposition to Mr. Obama’s health care law and declared him “too conservative for Colorado” — a criticism in a general election, but a potential badge of honor in a primary. Fox31 Denver first reported the ad’s provenance.

Last week, a radio commercial from a Massachusetts-based group attacked Mr. Tancredo as a “big spending Republican in Washington” who frequently switched positions. The group, Colorado Campaign for Jobs and Opportunity, has ties to a consulting firm run by several people who worked on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns.

Mr. Tancredo called the ad one of the nastiest of the campaign season, but said it was hardly surprising.

“I have a rocky relationship with the party and always have,” he said. “The party’s just a mechanism that you go through. There’s no philosophic base to it. I don’t really have any loyalty to the party.”

That is precisely the appeal for supporters like Dan Englert, 53, a self-employed handyman who stood astride a pedestrian bridge one afternoon and waved Tancredo campaign signs at afternoon commuters.

Mr. Englert, shielded from the sun by a camouflage National Rifle Association baseball cap, helped out in last summer’s successful efforts to recall two Democratic state senators who had voted for tough new gun-control laws. He said Mr. Tancredo was one of the only prominent politicians who spoke up for the recall effort.

“Everybody else told us, ‘Don’t do it. It’s a waste of time. You’ll bring shame to the party,’ ” Mr. Englert said. Colorado’s Republicans were “scared to death of what Tom represents and what he can do,” he said. “It’s about grass roots and ‘We the People.’ ”

But in the twilight of the campaign, as voters mailed in their ballots and his opponents stepped up their criticisms, Mr. Tancredo dialed back his profile. He was not airing any commercials to rebut the attacks, and acknowledged that the recent barrage had probably hurt him in the polls. He gave interviews and attended campaign meetings, but also found time to help his wife deal with a broken-down car and to walk the dog.

“It’s all pretty much over,” he said. “You’re not going to change any minds now. I can go to my grandkids’ games. I enjoy that mightily. I really feel quite guilty. I get to do things I enjoy.”

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