Mark Udall in CO has had a few bad polls lately with some polls showing him down as much as 7%. I'm not going to unskew the polls by looking at poll crosstabs, but I will look at the early vote reported in CO and do some comparisons to 2010. Believe me, I would rather Udall was up in the polls, but it's way too early to be wringing our hands and writing him off. If we work a little harder at getting our supporters to turn in their mail in ballots and to vote on election day, Udall will win.
Keep in mind CO senator Bennet was behind by a similar margin in 2010 and ended up winning by just under 1%. Obviously the ballots won't be counted until the evening of the election, but we can make some inferences about the turnout and compare it to 2010 to see if we're heading for a similar election.
Now don't let your eyes glaze over as we go through a few numbers here.
Dem 34.6
Rep 40.7
UAF 24.0
Those are the final results of the early vote in 2010. If we beat those numbers by the end of the early vote, it'll look good for Udall. If we don't beat them, Udall is toast.
First we need to look at CO's voting situation. In CO. you can be an active, or an inactive voter, and the great Dems in the legislature have been doing the exact opposite of voter suppression and are trying to give everyone the opportunity to vote.
In Colorado, a voter is listed as inactive if they did not vote in the previous even-year general election and failed to respond to notifications asking for an update on their status.
Prior to the 2011 election, Gessler, a Republican, issued an order that said mail ballots could be sent only to voters who voted in the last general election.
So the voter pool probably expanded and our turnout should be higher. And Udall released 2 polls last week showing him up by 3 points. The media completely dismissed the polls as biased because they were "registered" rather than "likely" voter polls. Those polls caught my attention.
So as of today, the numbers reported by the secretary of state for returned ballots are:
Dem 31.7%
Rep 43.9%
UAF 24.3%
Wow! those numbers look pretty bleak for the Dems. In 2010 the Republicans had a 6.1% early vote advantage, and now they have a 12.2% advantage. Doom and gloom, wring our hands, gnash our teeth.
But these are the numbers compiled by the secretary of state, as reported by the individual counties. The problem is, just as on election day, some counties are good at reporting numbers, while other counties aren't.
Well you would have to be absolutely crazy to load up the 2010 turnout numbers by county into a spreadsheet, then add the county early vote numbers reporting to the SOS, and then extrapolate those numbers to the 2010 turnout numbers to try and smooth out the poor reporting between counties.
Well anyway, here's what I found.
One of our most bat shit Tea bagger craziest counties in CO is Douglas county. It turns out they've reported 23.4% of the total votes they cast in 2010, While the far more liberal Boulder county has reported 15.9%, and the Dems biggest county, Denver with 11.9%. Well you can see where this is going.
So if you look at the party active voters in each county, and their turnout in 2010, and you look at how much early vote each county is reporting in 2014, and at what the turnout will be if 2014 is just like 2010, here's what you get.
Dems 33.2%
Repub 42.2%
UAF 24.4%
So if everything continues like it is today, and turnout is in the same proportion as 2010, instead of the 12.2% advantage the totals show for the Repubs, they actually have a 9% advantage. And that 9% advantage is 2.9% better than 2010. Senator Bennet won in 2010 by 0.9%, which means if we're repeating 2010, Mark Udall is down by 2%, if he's performing just like Bennet, not the 7% that some polls show.
However, across the country the Republicans have been doing better than 2010 in getting their supporters to the polls early. They've gotten a lot better at that. The big question is, are these new voters or are they cannibalizing election day voters and just getting them to vote early? I'm finding it hard to make a case that the Republicans are going to have a better turnout than their bat shit crazy Tea bagger turnout of 2010.
Since Dems have such a hard time getting their supporters to vote at all, I suspect that if they're successful, the new voters will vote late. So the thing I'll be watching in CO is whether that current 9% extrapolated Republican advantage starts shrinking the closer we get to election day. Over the last few days, there is some evidence that it is doing exactly that.
And then there's this from NBC News
according to a new poll of 400 Coloradoans who voted in the 2012 presidential contest but not the 2010 midterms, plus those who were recently registered.
This poll, conducted by the Democratic-leaning group Project New America, finds that 82 percent of these so-called "drop-off" voters have received a ballot in the mail. And a combined 83 percent say they've already voted (22 percent of them) or are planning to vote (another 61 percent).
That suggests turnout in Colorado's upcoming Senate and gubernatorial races could be significantly higher than in past midterms -- approaching the size and composition of a presidential-year electorate.
...
Who are these drop-off voters? They're younger than Colorado's 2010 voters; more of them are minorities; and they're more likely to be Democrats.
And according to the poll, they're backing Udall over Gardner by 14 points, 48 percent to 34 percent.
So with election day registration in CO, that 2% disadvantage of Udall's could be easily washed away with a good GOTV! GOTV! GOTV! effort.