Colorado Sun: Gardner “Damned If He Does, Damned If He Doesn’t,” Refuses to Answer Questions About His Record Ahead of Increasingly Uphill Election

From “I Cannot and Will Not” Vote for Trump to “Unbreakable” Support – Gardner Now Won’t Say If There’s a “Red Line that Trump Could Cross that Would Lead Him to Abandon His Support of the President”

“Recent Public Polling Doesn’t Really Have Any Positive Signs for Gardner” 

A new Colorado Sun analysis details the “damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t” position Senator Cory Gardner finds himself in as he enters 2020 saddled with a damaging record and his “unbreakable” support for a president unpopular with most Coloradans. The report notes how Gardner refuses to answer questions about the evolution from his 2016 stance that he “cannot and will not” vote for Trump to today’s devout support: now he won’t say if there’s a “red line that Trump could cross that would lead him to abandon his support of the president.”

Senator Gardner has managed to please no one with his spineless calculation to back the president at all costs — least of all the unaffiliated voters whose support he desperately needs: “recent public polling doesn’t really have any positive signs for Gardner. A survey in October by Keating Research, a Telluride-based Democratic pollster, showed that Democratic and unaffiliated voters don’t like either Gardner or Trump.” It’s why one unaffiliated Colorado voter stated, “He says he’ll do one thing and then flip over and go with Trump. I don’t trust him at all.” 

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Colorado Sun: Does Cory Gardner have a breaking point when it comes to Trump? The political climate suggests he better not.

By Jesse Paul

Key Points:

• In 2016, when Donald Trump ran for president, Colorado’s Republican U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner didn’t mince his words about the GOP nominee: “I cannot and will not support someone who brags about degrading and assaulting women.”

• Gardner was reacting to an “Access Hollywood” recording of the candidate bragging about sexual assault. He said he didn’t vote for Trump, instead casting a ballot for Mike Pence, now vice president, as a write-in candidate. 

• Flash forward to today, and Gardner’s political world is now spinning in the opposite direction.

• Gardner made an early endorsement of Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. He has a direct line of communication to the president — they speak on the phone fairly regularly. And he has refused to answer questions about whether Trump’s interactions with Ukraine’s president — which are now the subject of impeachment proceedings — were wrong.
  
• Gardner is mostly mum on how and why his stance on the president has evolved over the past three-plus years, but political math provides important context as to why he may not have a choice, politically speaking, when it comes to his support for Trump.

• It’s difficult, if not impossible, to see a path to victory for Gardner that doesn’t include the president, according to interviews and an analysis by The Colorado Sun of polls and voter statistics. In many ways, he’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t: Democrats will attack him over his ties to the president regardless and he risks losing Republican votes by splitting from Trump.

• And then there’s the problem of unaffiliated voters, an unpredictable group who appear to lean left and don’t like Trump.

• In a recent interview, Gardner declined to answer questions about his views on Trump and instead attacked Democrats. He has said, when explaining his support of the president, that he could never support someone who backs policies he said are socialist, including government-run health care or the Green New Deal.

• Asked whether there is a red line that Trump could cross that would lead him to abandon his support of the president, Gardner didn’t directly answer.

• Among those votes are some that have drawn some serious ire from progressive Coloradans, including supporting a plan to dismantle former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and supporting Trump’s use of a national-emergency declaration to secure funds to build a wall along the Mexico border. 

• And those are the points on which Democrats plan to pounce. They believe the tighter they can tie Gardner to Trump, the more they can tap into the Democratic and unaffiliated voters in Colorado who despise the president.  

• Recent public polling doesn’t really have any positive signs for Gardner.

• “I would have a tough time explaining any path to victory at this point (for Gardner),” said Chris Keating, who leads Telluride-based Keating Research and has worked for Hickenlooper. “I just don’t see a scenario where he wins.”

• Keating thinks that the days of Colorado voters splitting their ballots between politicians in different parties are over because of the increase in polarization. “Let’s just take Democrats and Republicans out of the equation because they are just going to cancel each other out,” he said. 

• That means the race will be won or lost with unaffiliated voters, and Keating’s polling suggests they aren’t likely to support Republicans — or at least a Republican tied to Trump. 

• Several Democratic and unaffiliated voters recently told The Sun that Gardner’s ties to Trump are either a nonstarter when it comes to their potential support for him or, at the very least, a major part of why they aren’t backing him now.

• Alan Schwartz, another unaffiliated voter who said he leans left but has backed Republicans in the past, made a thumbs-down motion when asked about Gardner. “I feel he is a butt-kisser,” said Schwartz, adding that he was upset about Gardner’s support of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation. “He says he’ll do one thing and then flip over and go with Trump. I don’t trust him at all.” 

Read the full story here.

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