It’s election season, and the best-funded, liberal strategy using 527s is in full-swing in Colorado.  Bob Boswell, Republican candidate for CO House district 50, is one of the most recent candidates in the political crosshairs of Tim Gill and Pat Stryker, Colorado multi-millionaires who fund Democratic candidates in CO.

Read more about Tim Gill here and here.

A Denver Post editorial on Sunday, identified Gill and Stryker as donating $75,000 apiece to the group Accountability for Colorado, which funded a direct mailer claiming that Boswell “wants to bring America’s nuclear waste to Colorado.”  The Colorado Education Association, is another donor to the group.

The same editorial interviewed Boswell who said that the smear piece is based on a statement on his campaign web site favoring “nuclear power and reprocessing fuel.”

Boswell was targeted again on Monday.  The Greeley Tribune published a story in which another group, Colorado Ethics Watch (CEW), funded by Gill and Stryker through the Colorado Democracy Alliance, questioned the ethics of a fundraising letter Boswell sent to lobbyists.  A donation request of lobbyists is a legal fundraising effort according to the Colorado Ethics Watch spokesperson much later in the same article, but that doesn’t stop the CEW spokesman from using it as a basis to question Boswell’s ethics.

The direct effort to misinform voters about a candidate is familiar territory to Accountability for Colorado.  The strategy against Boswell is straight out of the Colorado Democracy Alliance playbook used in Colorado and other states.

The common strategy works like this:

1) A direct mail piece or two is sent out to mislead voters about the candidate, then

2) the question of an ethics violation is published to more publicly question the candidate’s reputation.

The direct mail piece and the ethics question are brought by two different groups funded by the same large donors.

The network of organizations which work together to elect Democrats was outlined in the recently-published book, “The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado (and why Republicans Everywhere Should Care),” by Colorado journalist, Adam Schrager, and lawyer, Rob Witwer.

Another Republican candidate in Colorado, Keith Swerdfeger, is also a target of Accountability for Colorado, according to the Pueblo Chieftain.

Colorado candidates are certainly not the only ones to experience the one-two punch from the team of 527 groups, and it’s likely that more of these scenarios will play out during the election season.  Follow the money, my friends, to find out who wants the more conservative candidate to lose.

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