Chase Woodruff Profile picture
Reporter, @NewslineCO
Sep 10 6 tweets 1 min read
Something I think we're seeing a lot of lately are the consequences of the stranglehold that consultant-brained issue polling has on Democratic Party messaging, especially when it comes to crime and immigration. In many cases (Harris and the border) prominent Democrats have just wholly adopted the framing of an issue advanced by Republicans. At most, they just follow advice not to talk about a particular issue at all.
May 2, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
lmao. "oh, so I'm 'richer' just because I gained hundreds of thousand of dollars in equity on my home?" yeah bud that's how it works The conservative position is simple: The free market is sacred and owners of capital earn money by assuming risk, but also they should be bailed out if their investment fails, and also they shouldn't face any tax burden if their investment is too successful.
Dec 13, 2022 12 tweets 6 min read
I’ve been thinking a lot about what a perfect origin story this is for two of this era’s most influential right-wing figures — a fluke dot-com lottery ticket that permanently empowered these doofuses to inflict their megalomania on the rest of us. Online payments are a totally epiphenomenal technology — an inevitable byproduct of society and commerce moving onto the internet at the moment they did.
Nov 10, 2022 6 tweets 3 min read
Major development in the first official SOS update of the day: an additional 1,672 ballots reported from Otero County broke 1,061 Boebert, 611 Frisch — putting Boebert ahead for the first time, by 386 votes. Image Like I've been saying, don't put too much stock in any one estimate of outstanding votes. This caught me off guard because Otero was newly added to the 26-county CD3 in redistricting and I hadn't checked it closely. Positive sign for Boebert. A lot still depends on Pueblo.
Nov 10, 2022 8 tweets 2 min read
Latest and clearest picture of the Boebert-Frisch CD3 race, and there are more ballots left to count in Pueblo than I'd figured.

Frisch is going to need to push his lead back up to 800 votes or so to get out of automatic recount territory. There's a chance this could do it. If there are 7,500 ballots left in Pueblo, Frisch would only need to win them by his current 55-45 margin there to do that (without losing ground from stragglers elsewhere). But we had several updates from Pueblo yesterday and each was almost exactly a 50-50 split.
Nov 9, 2022 14 tweets 4 min read
Nearly 4,000 additional CD3 votes reported from Pueblo in the last update about 15 minutes ago, almost evenly split between Frisch (+1,872) and Boebert (+1,967). Image A small update from deep-red Rio Blanco County netted +153 for Boebert, and Frisch's lead is down to 2,201 votes. This is going to be extremely close. Reports of ~9k ballots outstanding in Pueblo, ~5k in Mesa.
Nov 9, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
About 12,000 more votes counted in CD3 since 1:00 a.m., and Frisch’s lead over Boebert is pretty much unchanged. NYT analysis thinks some of the largest remaining vote is in Pueblo, which seems pretty good for Frisch. A lot could depend on late splits in Mesa/Garfield.
Nov 9, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
Very early, but the first #cosen returns of the night look pretty good for Michael Bennet. With big chunks of the vote in from Jefferson, Arapahoe and Denver counties, he's running about even with Hickenlooper's margins in 2020. ImageImageImage Strong early results across the board for Bennet; these are great margins for a Democrat in Mesa and DougCo, and the totals are over 80% of the 2018 vote. Late returns are gonna have to start breaking super hard, super fast in Rs' direction for O'Dea to have a shot. ImageImage
Nov 8, 2022 5 tweets 3 min read
No sign so far of a late turnout surge in Colorado, per @COSecofState ballot return data. Returns still tracking consistently at about 10% less than the last midterm election in 2018. Image @COSecofState One more official SoS update, maybe the last apples-to-apples comparison we get before polls close — and it does actually show some narrowing of the gap.

1,869,507 returns as of 12:30 p.m. today is only about 5.8% lower than the same point in 2018. Image
Nov 7, 2022 8 tweets 2 min read
In 63 of Colorado's 64 counties, *both* Dem and GOP voters have returned fewer ballots as of today than at this point in 2018.

In the 64th, *one* of the two major parties has returned more ballots than in 2018.

Name the county and the party and I'll be very impressed. (It's not, like, Hinsdale.)
Oct 5, 2022 6 tweets 2 min read
Federal and tribal officials are gathered this morning at the site of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in southeast Colorado, where a 3,500-acre expansion of the historic site managed by the National Park Service is being announced. Image More than 230 members of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes — well over half of them women and children — were murdered in the Sand Creek Massacre by a regiment of U.S. Army volunteers dispatched from Denver by Colorado territorial governor John Evans.
Oct 4, 2022 6 tweets 2 min read
Adding to this: O’Dea’s campaign objected to a line in a story of mine last week stating that O’Dea “suggested” cuts to Social Security and Medicare (he did), then ignored further questions about his stance. The facts here are open and shut. O’Dea straightforwardly suggested “a reduction in some of those programs” in response to a direct question about Social Security and Medicare and “those third rails of politics.” O’Dea’s campaign may wish he hadn’t said that, but he did.
Aug 7, 2022 11 tweets 3 min read
Lots of things about the Manchin climate bill are true at once. It’s far and away the country’s most significant piece of climate policy ever, and it’s nowhere near the level of action scientists say is necessary to avoid the worse impacts of the climate crisis. Beware of anyone telling you that modest or incremental progress doesn’t matter because we only have a narrow window to act. Despite what is (forgivably!) implied by some rhetoric, the climate crisis is not a ticking time bomb.
Aug 5, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
O'Dea, of course, had plenty of opportunity to say this during the GOP primary, when he instead dodged the question and said he'd vote for Trump if he's the nominee. Valiant effort by this talk-radio ding-dong to try to frame what is obviously the politically expedient thing for O'Dea to do as some act of bravery koacolorado.iheart.com/featured/ross-… Image
Jul 22, 2022 7 tweets 2 min read
I ran out of different ways to say this a while ago, but these people are playing an entirely different game now, it very often works for them, it’s only going to get worse and journalism as we know it can either adapt or die There used to be two basic guardrails on the ability of even fairly powerful political figures to abhor and ignore the press: 1) the soft power of norms, decorum, the shared desire to live in a free, informed, small-d democratic society, and more importantly,
Jun 7, 2022 5 tweets 3 min read
“None of the candidates clearly answered whether anything should be done to address climate change.” coloradosun.com/2022/06/07/col… Kulmann comes the closest to engaging with reality, but there are at least three major half-truths and omissions here: 1) the “humans contribute” dodge; 2) a falsehood about what made natural gas competitive; and, most importantly, 3) evasion about the future of fossil fuels.
Jun 6, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
The 2022 Western Conservative Summit was a dark fantasia of misinformation and conspiracy theories, where activists and candidates justified an extreme authoritarian agenda by hyping up imaginary existential threats and biblical apocalypticism: coloradonewsline.com/2022/06/06/gop… Notorious bigot Frank Gaffney, making his 13th consecutive WCS appearance, accused US elites of being in thrall to China, predicted an imminent world war and called for "something like a national unity government,” a term referring to quasi-legal bodies formed during coups d'état
Apr 10, 2022 9 tweets 4 min read
Newsline was denied access to the Colorado GOP state assembly yesterday. Pressed for an explanation, party leadership repeatedly sent identical statements calling us a “partisan Democrat organization” but refusing to point to any specific issues with our coverage. Fortunately, I don’t think it had a major impact on what we were able to report to readers. Key events inside were widely shared, and the long lines to get in meant I got to spend an hour outside talking to a couple dozen delegates and attendees.
Mar 22, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
It’s obvious at this point that for-profit journalism simply no longer exists in any real sense. There’s no model that works. Show’s over. cnbc.com/2022/03/22/buz… Different sectors and outlets are falling towards this reality at varying speeds — print faster than broadcast, hedge fund victims faster than independently owned papers — but in the long run none of them are going to be able to defy gravity.
Feb 11, 2022 5 tweets 3 min read
John Eastman (center, in the hat), the former @CUBoulder “visiting conservative scholar” and Trump attorney who sought to overturn the 2020 election, appearing at an event in Castle Rock tonight with FEC United’s Joe Oltmann, who’s called for mass hangings of political opponents. @CUBoulder U.S. Senate candidate and state Rep. Ron Hanks is also there. He brags about being in D.C. on Jan. 6 and says, “I’m the only Senate candidate talking about election integrity, and the reality is that’s what people want to talk about.”
Jan 13, 2022 8 tweets 5 min read
As @GovofCO prepares to give his State of the State address inside the Capitol, environmental activists are outside holding a “State of the Climate” rally.

“We are on fire, Polis,” reads a banner. The rally was organized by a “United for Colorado’s Climate,” a coalition of progressive enviro groups including the Sierra Club, 350 Colorado, Colorado Rising, Green Latinos, Cultivando and many others. You can read their demands in detail here: actionnetwork.org/petitions/unit…