DENVER — When gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo released a TV ad featuring the candidate on his Harley Davidson, a liberal blog exclaimed that it would likely be enough to clinch the upcoming GOP primary as long as “there is a decent amount of money” behind it.
Turns out: there wasn’t.
Tancredo told FOX31 Denver Wednesday that his campaign spent just $20,000 to run the ad on cable and another $50,000 to run it on digital sites where it’s easier to target the conservatives who are the likeliest primary voters.
“The consultants tell us an amount of money that moves the numbers and we didn’t have enough to do it,” said Tancredo, whose campaign has raised close to $800,000, the most of any Republican gubernatorial candidate.
Tancredo said his campaign made the calculation not to go big on the airwaves after a $500,000 buy from a Democratic independent expenditure committee, Protect Colorado Values, on two companion ads that aim to push conservative voters away from Bob Beauprez and toward Tancredo.
“We felt the Democratic ad was sufficient,” Tancredo said. “It really took the pressure off. We can’t compete with that size of a buy anyway.”
But with six days left until the primary ballots are counted, Tancredo’s absence from the airwaves is causing speculation that he’s not fighting all that hard to win the nomination.
“He’s spent all his money to raise money,” one Republican with a rival campaign told FOX31 Denver Wednesday, noting that Tancredo has paid for email lists of potential supporters.
“If Tancredo has a plan to actually win the governor’s race this time around – and more to the point, if he has a plan to move the state forward – he isn’t telling anyone,” wrote Josh Penry, a former state senator and short-lived 2010 GOP gubernatorial candidate, in the Aurora Sentinel last month.
“Tancredo has a huge name identification advantage, and he’s banking on the fact that the others won’t be able to raise enough money to narrow his edge. Think of it as a high-stakes prevent-defense strategy. Not only is Tancredo not debating, to hear many activists around the state tell it, he isn’t even really campaigning.”
Tancredo, the front-runner for most of the primary campaign, is being bombarded down the stretch by the other campaigns and by two independent expenditure committees, one working on behalf of Beauprez and another newly formed group that aims to help Mike Kopp, whose campaign hasn’t raised enough money to produce and air a TV ad.
The pro-Kopp group, Make Colorado Great Again, has just spent $150,000 mostly on a radio ad attacking Tancredo for supporting Amendment 64 legalizing marijuana and his 2009 statement about contemplating the legalization of all drugs.
That ad sparked an angry rejoinder from Tancredo Wednesday who blasted former Sen. Bill Armstrong, a Kopp supporter, for contributing to the group running the ad.
“He is a poor example of a Christian, that’s for sure,” Tancredo said of Armstrong to the Denver Post‘s Lynn Bartels.
Tancredo is also being attacked in a new radio ad from Red Curve Solutions, a Boston-based firm run by a number of Mitt Romney associates, that he believes is being funded by the Republican Governors Association, which is not supposed to take sides in a primary but is reportedly supporting Beauprez.
“It’s not every day that a Massachusetts company invests so much money to influence a Colorado election,” Tancredo says in an open letter to Red Curve Solutions. “And because your radio ads are such extreme, dishonest, exaggerations, the people of Colorado deserve to know who’s bankrolling you.”
Beauprez, meanwhile, is on the air with his own campaign’s ad, spending more than $100,000 to keep the it running.
The outside group supporting Beauprez, Republicans Who Want to Win, spent $8,400 on its online ad, which one Democratic strategist called “the best ad of the cycle.
“Unfortunately for Beauprez, it’s just not running anywhere.”
Scott Gessler is also spending $66,000 in the last two weeks to keep his campaign’s TV ad, which reminds voters that he is the only candidate who’s won a statewide race, up and running.
Tancredo doesn’t believe his opponents are spending their money wisely.
“When you don’t have a lot of money, you end up wasting it on TV and radio ads,” Tancredo said. “You need a lot of money to move the numbers. Neither Gessler or Kopp are moving the numbers.”