Jane Norton’s campaign strategy in the Republican Colorado Senate primary race appears clear: she may be viewed as an establishment GOPer, but she’s not going to be defined as not conservative enough.
Take her reaction in recent days to several embarrassing incidents along the campaign trail of her Tea Party backed opponent, Ken Buck.
She called Buck — a county district attorney whose rise in the polls has been largely attributable to his backing from Tea Party activists — “a self-proclaimed tea partier who trashes tea partiers.” That was in response to a video of Buck calling activists in the Tea Party movement concerned about President Obama’s birth certificate “dumb asses.”
And just the other week, Buck had to distance himself at a campaign event from former Rep. Tom Tancredo after the firebrand conservative told the assembled audience that Obama is the country’s greatest threat.
After Buck said he didn’t agree with the former congressman, Norton jumped to Tancredo’s defense, saying in a Facebook post that, “There was a real measure of truth to what Tancredo said.”
Norton’s campaign did not immediately return a request for comment, but criticism of Buck on these two topics is telling of her campaign strategy: by moving to the right and criticizing Buck on these sensitive campaign issues, she’s opening herself up to attacks from Democrats that she’s too far out of the mainstream like many other Tea Party candidates this cycle. But perhaps her campaign thinks that is exactly what is necessary in order to stop the momentum of her Tea Party backed opponent.
“No doubt some of the stuff she puts out for purposes of the primary can/will be used by the Democrats in the general election but that can’t be avoided,” said John Straayer, a political science professor in Colorado.
“If she was sure she was in grand shape for August, well ahead in the polls, then it would be foolish to toss out stuff which the Dems can use later. But right now, she is not a lock and I suspect the game is to pull out all stops and worry about November after the primaries,” he said.
