In a poll conducted for Rocky Mountain News & CBS4
Sen. Barack Obama has surged to a commanding, double-digit lead in Colorado amid soaring anxiety about the country's direction and a massive shift of independent voters into the Democratic column, a new poll finds.
After weeks of devastating economic news, Obama now leads by 12 percentage points - 52 percent to 40 percent - in the latest Rocky Mountain News/CBS4 News poll.
"Clearly, the beginning of October is not a happy time in American history, and voters are sort of internalizing the financial crisis," said pollster Lori Weigel.
Interestingly this represents a 15% swing since the last poll from the same pollster.
The survey of 500 likely Colorado voters was conducted Tuesday through Thursday by Public Opinion Strategies of Alexandria, Va., the largest Republican polling firm in the country. Obama's lead was well outside the poll's margin of error of plus or minus 4.38 percentage points.
I'm always more comfortable when we get corroborating results from both Democratic and Republican pollsters. I have heard 2nd hand "close" results from internal campaign polling, but that was a month ago at this point, and have not heard updates of that since.
I can report anecdotally that davidsirota's diary regarding registrations being invalidated are not occurring in my swing county of Broomfield.
A senior county clerk has noted that only 8 registrations have been invalidated, all from illegibility. Their standard has been that if a registrant has appropriate identification, they can and have been registered.
Turnout in Broomfield has been light but steady in early voting. Officials expect the majority of voting to be done by mail in ballot, and perhaps only 20% to be done in person on November 4th.