{"id":799139,"date":"2019-09-04T14:00:12","date_gmt":"2019-09-04T20:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.summitdaily.com\/?p=370993"},"modified":"2019-09-04T14:00:12","modified_gmt":"2019-09-04T20:00:12","slug":"opinion-mike-littwin-johnston-says-he-couldnt-find-a-positive-way-to-answer-why-not-hick-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/local-news\/opinion-mike-littwin-johnston-says-he-couldnt-find-a-positive-way-to-answer-why-not-hick-question\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | Mike Littwin: Johnston says he couldn\u2019t find a positive way to answer why-not-Hick question"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Mike Littwin<\/strong>
The Colorado Independent<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

The only thing that surprises me about Mike Johnston\u2019s decision to leave the U.S. Senate race is that it happened so quickly.<\/p>\n

The pool is now open for which candidate drops out next. I didn\u2019t think Johnston would necessarily be the first in the 12-person field, but I\u2019m sure he won\u2019t be the last. And it probably won\u2019t be long before the next Dem drops.<\/p>\n

Johnston\u2019s official explanation is on point. He says to beat someone like John Hickenlooper, with near-universal name recognition, in a race that Democrats are desperate to win, the question any Democratic candidate must inevitably answer becomes: \u201cWhy not Hickenlooper?\u201d<\/p>\n

Hickenlooper has the name recognition. He has, or will have, the money. He\u2019s got the party support. He may not, to risk understating the case, be totally in step with Colorado progressives and he did say he wasn\u2019t cut out to be a senator, but he is the only candidate in the Democratic race with statewide victories on his resume. Hickenlooper may have bombed in his presidential bid, but nearly every Democrat in Colorado has voted for him at some point.<\/p>\n

Answering the why-not question, Johnston says, means a campaign focused on reducing Hickenlooper\u2019s advantages, which, he says, means going negative, which, he further says, he didn\u2019t want to do. And though Johnston has shown himself to be a prolific fundraiser and, as of now, easily leads that race in the Senate field, it\u2019s unlikely he or anyone else would be able to match Hickenlooper\u2019s resources. (Don\u2019t be fooled by Hick\u2019s embarrassing presidential fundraising. A Colorado Senate race is a whole different matter.)<\/p>\n

But the unofficial explanation for Johnston\u2019s departure is also on point. Johnston, who lost in the governor\u2019s primary last year, can\u2019t afford politically to lose two high-profile statewide races in two years. And beating Hickenlooper, he knows, is a long shot. In an effort to show he could compete, he released a poll showing that, like Hickenlooper, he could beat Cory Gardner. But that poll apparently didn\u2019t persuade even Johnston that he would beat Hickenlooper.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the message here. If Johnston, a top-tier candidate, recognized almost immediately that he had little chance of winning, what does that say for everyone else?<\/p>\n

\u201cFor everyone in the race,\u201d Johnston says, \u201cbeating Gardner is the primary focus.\u201d Looking at the possibility of the race going negative and hurting the frontrunner, Johnston says, \u201cI just couldn\u2019t take that chance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Johnston says he doesn\u2019t know what he\u2019ll do next. He said it was the first question his 7-year-old son asked him. What he did say \u2014 and this is a safe bet \u2014 was that he probably isn\u2019t done with politics.<\/p>\n

I talked to many of the leading remaining candidates Tuesday to see what they might do next. No one is dropping out \u2014 yet. And none of them seemed too worried about a negative race.<\/p>\n

The good news is that Johnston says no one from the Democratic establishment, which has come down unabashedly \u2014 and lead-footedly<\/a> \u2014 on Hick\u2019s side, tried to force him out of the race. In fact, two of the better-known candidates told me that Johnston\u2019s departure in a divided field would probably benefit them.<\/p>\n

Andrew Romanoff has a slightly different view than Johnston. He says there\u2019s plenty of time to show where the candidates part ways on issues, and that discussing issue differences does not mean going negative.<\/p>\n

\u201cPersonal attacks are off limits,\u201d he adds. \u201cAs I said about Cory Gardner, I\u2019m not going to attack his patriotism. I know he loves America. But we have different views on the issues facing the country. When I\u2019m talking to people \u2026 they want to know what I\u2019m going to do about climate change, about health care, about the border and immigration, about guns, about income inequality. We\u2019re trying to run a campaign that looks just the opposite of Donald Trump \u2014 talking about issues and not tweeting attacks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump is currently tweeting attacks on the mayor of London, who made fun of Trump\u2019s golf-course-based view of Hurricane Dorian. It\u2019s not hard to be the opposite of that.<\/p>\n

But people do remember the ugly 2010 Senate primary race<\/a> between Michael Bennet and Romanoff, and there are still hard feelings on both sides. As I\u2019ve mentioned before, I don\u2019t think negative campaigning will work in this race. It would just send Hickenlooper to another fully-clothed (we hope) shower<\/a>. And I doubt that many of the activist groups that would possibly oppose Hickenlooper will disagree with Johnston\u2019s assessment \u2014 that any risk of helping Gardner is a risk too far.<\/p>\n

No one expects Colorado to be a swing state this time \u2014 if Trump, who lost the state by five points in 2016, carries Colorado in 2020, you can pencil in a Trump rout \u2014 but the Senate race will be among the most watched, and among the most expensive, in the country. If Cory Gardner holds his seat, the Democrats have to little to no chance of taking the Senate.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why the national Democrats are betting on Hickenlooper. He\u2019s the safe choice. The job for the remaining candidates \u2014 including Romanoff, Alice Madden, Dan Baer, Joe Walsh, Angela Williams and the rest \u2014 is to persuade Democratic voters that in 2020, in the era of Trump, they\u2019d also be a safe choice. That\u2019s hardly out of the question. But what we know is that Mike Johnston, a leading contender, didn\u2019t see a safe way to make that case.<\/p>\n

Mike Littwin writes the biweekly column \u201cFair and Unbalanced\u201d for The Colorado Independent. He previously worked at The Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun. Contact him at<\/em> mike@coloradoindependent.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

via:: Summit Daily<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mike LittwinThe Colorado Independent The only thing that surprises me about Mike Johnston\u2019s decision to leave the U.S. Senate race is that it happened so quickly. The pool is now open for which candidate drops out next. I didn\u2019t think Johnston would necessarily be the first in the 12-person field, but I\u2019m sure he won\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-799139","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-20 00:46:57","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSMT The Mountain","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=799139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=799139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=799139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=799139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}