In the long term, Holtzman's loss may prove Republican Party's gain

Alan Gathright, Rocky Mountain News

Published June 2, 2006 at midnight

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Marc Holtzman's "Black Thursday" may be remembered as the day lady luck returned to Bob Beauprez and a star-crossed Republican gubernatorial campaign was spared a bruising primary fight.

"This might just be the lucky break the Republicans needed," said Eric Sondermann, a Denver political analyst.

"(Democratic candidate) Bill Ritter has looked for many months like the lucky candidate in terms of all the bullets he dodged among other Democrats while the Republicans were spilling blood," he said. "This might go down as they day where luck smiled in the other direction."

For weeks, the state GOP leadership and legions of lawmakers had been begging Holtzman to take his potent money machine and bow out of a primary battle to avoid savaging front-runner Beauprez.

But Holtzman was vowing to fight on - right up until he ran his own campaign into a ditch by failing to gather enough signatures to get on the ballot.

"This is what the Republicans have wanted all along," Sondermann said. "The stars seem aligned against them, just given the tenor . . . that it could be a good Democratic year."

Now, he added, "Beauprez completely shifts gears. Everything he was doing was geared toward the August primary. All of a sudden, the clock just fast-forwarded and August didn't happen."

Now, instead of bankrupting his campaign battling another Republican, Beauprez can fix his cross hairs on Ritter in the November general election.

"Beauprez wins in that he's not going to get endlessly beat up rhetorically by Holtzman and his money machine," said John Straayer, a Colorado State University political science professor.

But Straayer said Beauprez may miss how Holtzman's hard-line stand against taxes and immigration made Beauprez look comparatively moderate - an image he'll need in order to beat Ritter in the fall.

"Now Beauprez is standing out there all by himself as the guy who's got to explain how you're going to run a really good government at the same time you're trying to cut off its revenue," Straayer added.

"It's up to Ritter to explain what his vision is and how it differs from Beauprez's vision," Straayer said. "I think the task for Ritter now is to pressure Beauprez to explain how he's going to run the state of Colorado on the kind of finances that are likely to be available given Beauprez's stance against (referendums) C and D and his opposition to taxes generally."

What happens next?

• Holtzman has five days to request a protest hearing from Gigi Dennis, the secretary of state. Because this includes all days, not just business days, he must request the hearing by Tuesday.

• The Secretary of State's Office will provide Holtzman with copies of all the pages of his petitions, lists of all the names accepted and all the names rejected.

• The hearing will be conducted by the secretary of state or the deputy secretary of state. At the hearing, the burden of proof is on Holtzman, and he must go through the lists signature by signature to show where mistakes were made.

• By law, the secretary of state must rule on the appeal within 48 hours. The primary ballot must be certified by June 9.

• The Holtzman campaign can request an extra day for the hearing because it did not receive the letter from Dennis until late Thursday.

gathrighta@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5486

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