Bennet, O’Dea spar on issues in final Colorado Senate debate

Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet and Republican challenger Joe O’Dea clashed repeatedly in their last debate Friday over inflation, abortion and Bennet’s effectiveness through his 13 decades in Congress.

O’Dea hammered Bennet for voting with President Joe Biden 98% of the time, blaming him for a paying spree that brought on inflation and failing to safe the U.S. border with Mexico. But it was his use of a misleading statistic, that Bennet has only passed one particular bill in his 13 several years in the Senate, that established off the generally delicate-spoken Democratic senator.

“You’re a liar, Joe,” Bennet snapped.

O’Dea was referring to a lone standalone bill that Bennet authored, but that charge is wildly misleading for the reason that most senators, Bennet provided, see the broad majority of the bills they write move as aspect of larger offers. Bennet has experienced many actions pass that way, which include — he famous — billions of dollars in wildfire and drought prevention and, in a different evaluate, funding for rural locations to raise world-wide-web access.

O’Dea, a businessman and very first-time candidate, stored repeating the misleading statistic, making use of it to demand the typically tutorial-audio Bennet with incompetence. “Michael Bennet does not get effects,” he claimed frequently.

The debate in the northern Colorado city of Ft. Collins was the only whole one particular aired on television as O’Dea tries to display a way for the GOP to acquire a condition shifting towards Democrats. Previous President Donald Trump missing Colorado by 13 percentage details in 2020.

O’Dea kicked off a feud with the former president — for whom he voted two times — by stating before this month that he’d guidance an additional candidate in the 2024 GOP presidential major. Trump called O’Dea a “RINO” — a Republican In Name Only.

Still, Bennet saved tying O’Dea to Trump, consistently reminding his viewers that his rival experienced voted two times ahead of for the ex-president. “He voted for Donald Trump 2 times, just after the children were being divided from their moms at the border,” Bennet claimed of O’Dea as he listed a lot of controversies from the previous president.

O’Dea has experimented with to target the marketing campaign on crime and inflation, which led to his sharpest assault on Bennet when he questioned the Democratic senator about the $5 trillion in recent federal investing: “Do you regret the paying?”

“I regret the inflation that people today are struggling with,” Bennet replied, incorporating that it was brought on by “broken source chains globally” and vitality problems.

Bennet went on the assault on abortion, even while O’Dea is the scarce Republican who backs abortion legal rights — at least by means of 20 months of being pregnant, soon after which he thinks the method really should be banned. Bennet noted that only about 1% of abortions occur after that date, all, he stated, heartbreaking circumstances with a late-arriving well being concern.

The senator explained “the actuality of women acquiring the worst knowledge of their lifestyle, the previous matter they want is to have Joe O’Dea in there with them.”

O’Dea reiterated his guidance for abortion rights up to five months of being pregnant. “Michael Bennet has voted for abortion up to the instant of beginning.,” O’Dea stated. “I believe that is extreme.”

In reaction to a issue about when he is disagreed with Biden, Bennet stated some of his objections to the president’s procedures, like Biden’s university student personal debt forgiveness prepare, his vacation to Saudi Arabia earlier this 12 months and lifting a pandemic-associated restriction on immigrants looking for asylum at the southern border. O’Dea was asked about what priorities of the prime Senate Republican, Mitch McConnell, he could block. He said he did not imagine any a lot more of previous President Barack Obama’s health and fitness treatment law required to be repealed.

However national Republicans have admired O’Dea’s endeavor to retain the race away from social problems, they have not invested a lot income in encouraging his marketing campaign, a sign of the tough hill O’Dea has to climb in order to unseat Bennet.

Colorado Republicans have not gained a top-tier race in the state considering the fact that 2014, when Cory Gardner ousted Democratic Sen. Mark Udall. But Gardner was kicked out of business by the state’s voters in 2020, and he was the only prime-of-the-ticket statewide Republican winner since 2004.