The NRA wants to punish lawmakers for trying to prevent more of these tragedies. Today, the voters speak.
As voters head to the polls in both the Colorado Springs and Pueblo areas of Colorado, the Atlas Project has put together a
comprehensive look at the NRA-fueled recalls. Some of the more notable nuggets:
- State Sen. President John Morse's SD-11 is 33.2 percent Dem, 25.1 percent Republican, and 41.7 percent other. President Barack Obama got 61.2 percent of the vote, but Morse got just 50.6 percent of the vote in 2010. And Republicans have a plurality of "super voters"—those who voted in 2010, 2011 and 2012 elections in the district.
- Sen. Angela Giron's SD-03 is 45.2 percent Dem, 22.9 percent Republican, and 31.9 percent other. President Barack Obama got 59.7 percent of the 2012 two-way vote, and Giron got 55 percent of the vote in 2010. Democrats have a solid advantage in "super voters", 14K versus 8K Republicans.
- Yet word from my sources in the district has been that Morse is in better shape than Giron. Weird, if accurate.
- Democrats dramatically outspent Republicans. Combined, Democratic-aligned groups spent $2.3 million, while GOP-aligned groups spent just $482K—$361K of that directly from the NRA. Indeed, without the NRA, there's no recall. Furthermore, most of the spending on the Democratic side has been from the campaigns themselves, not outside groups. (Note that our fundraising has been directly to the two candidates, which can use the money most effectively.)
- You guys contributed about $150K of the $913K raised by Angela Giron (16 percent), and $160K of the 658K raised by John Morse (24 percent).
- Democrats have run 2,346 of the 2,490 ads aired in the campaign. The Republicans running in the recalls haven't run a single ad. Now if either Democrat loses this recall, it'll be further proof for my theory that TV advertising is increasingly irrelevant. But this is a special case—Republican wingnuts don't need to be told by the TV box that there's a recall. They're activated and motivated. It's lower-performing Democratic voters that need to be educated and mobilized. Thus it follows that every single Republican ad in the race has been negative, but only two of the nine Democratic ads follow suit.
- The inability to use vote-by-mail added dramatic uncertainty to the elections. In 2012, 52.6 percent of voters in SD-03, and 38.3 percent in SD-11, voted by mail.
Polls close at 6 pm PT/9 pm ET. Normally, we'd liveblog it on the front page, but Obama's Syria speech will have a liveblog of its own. So for Colorado updates, head on over to Daily Kos Elections as soon as the polls close.
