The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel editorial board decided not to endorse candidates this year, but the editorials they printed about Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District and the U.S. Senate race still praise the Democrat candidates and bash the Republicans.
The Sentinel’s decision not to endorse candidates this year was most likely a business decision. The paper’s owner must have realized his views and the views of his liberal editorial board do not match their readers’ views so they took the easy way out and claimed to not be endorsing any candidates:
What we won’t do is explicitly tell voters who we think they should vote for. We’ll highlight each candidate’s perceived strengths and weaknesses based on their responses to direct questioning and let readers make up their own minds.
But now the Sentinel is trying to have it both ways. They still want to trash Republicans, but they don’t want their community to get mad at them and cancel subscriptions.
So they published non-endorsement endorsements where they embraced liberal candidates whose positions are out of step with Coloradans on the Western Slope.
But Western Slopers aren’t fooled that easily.
As many will remember, both Democrat candidate Diane Mitsch Bush who is running in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District and Senate candidate John Hickenlooper snubbed the Western Slope by refusing to participate in the Club 20 debates. Hickenlooper once even referred to rural Coloradans as “backwards.”
Both U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner and Bush’s opponent Lauren Boebert have spent months traveling across the Western Slope to talk with voters and stakeholders in every county.
Meanwhile, both Hickenlooper and Bush have chosen to spend their campaign hiding in their basements.
If Bush and Hickenlooper won’t show up when they want votes, then they will never show up if they are elected.
This should’ve been a simple endorsement for the Sentinel. Gardner brought the Bureau of Land Management to Grand Junction, and their editorial trashing his accomplishments is a slap in the face to the people living in Grand Junction who he has helped by giving them a voice in Washington.
Not as many voters pay attention to editorial board endorsements anymore, and that’s probably because liberal editorial boards like the Sentinel have lost touch with their own readers.