Tea Party Cools On Colorado Favorite

(NewsCore) - Colorado Tea-Party activists who wanted a fresh face, an everyday Joe new to politics, thought they had found their man in gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes -- but now many of them are expressing buyer's remorse, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

Several Tea Party leaders across the state withdrew their endorsements and urged Maes to quit the race following a string of stumbles, including his admission to the Denver Post that a dramatic paragraph in his website biography about his experience as an undercover police investigator "might have" been incorrect.

"It wasn't an easy decision," said Nikki Mata, the cofounder of a large Tea-Party group that withdrew support. But the cumulative effect of Maes' missteps, she said, convinced her that he would only drag down the rest of the Republican candidates on the ballot. "He needs to step down."

Several establishment Republicans also distanced themselves from Maes. On Friday afternoon, Republican Senate nominee Ken Buck -- who just days earlier pledged "absolute" support for Maes -- withdrew his endorsement, saying it was clear to him that Maes was "struggling to determine the best path for his campaign, his family and for Colorado."

Maes spent Friday talking to supporters and critics, emerging late in the afternoon to declare that he would fight on through November. "I'm proud to say I'm in it to win it," he said.

Those Tea-Party activists sticking with Maes said he was being attacked by the U.S. press and political insiders over insignificant issues. "We have clamored, dreamed of someone who would be willing to stand up to the system ... and Dan has done this over and over," Nancy Rumfelt, the leader of a Tea Party group, wrote in an email to her group's members. "I choose to stand with Dan Maes."

Still, state Republican leaders tried for weeks to force Maes out, saying he could not raise the money and did not have the gravitas to compete against the well-funded Democratic candidate, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper. Further complicating the Republican Party's chances was the fact that former Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo is making a third-party bid for governor and is expected to siphon off conservative votes.

The latest controversy arose this week when the Denver Post examined a claim on Maes' online biography that the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) placed him undercover to probe a gambling ring in Liberal, Kan., where he served for two years as a police officer. Maes wrote that he "got too close to some significant people in the community" and was fired from the police department because of it.

The KBI told the newspaper it had no record of Maes working with the agency; the candidate then acknowledged that he might have included "incorrect comments" in his biography. His spokesman, Nate Strauch, said Maes did provide some "secure" information on the gambling ring to state investigators and considered that to be "undercover" work.

Read more: Wall Street Journal