Colorado Lefties were apoplectic when The Denver Post had the audacity to endorse Rep. Cory Gardner, what will they do to poor national prognosticator Stu Rothenberg as he dares to call BS on their so-called “vaunted” ground game not making up the difference? Yesterday, for his blog RothenBlog for The Hill, Rothenberg became the first prominent prognosticator to have the courage to say what the polls, and election forecasts have been telling us for a while: Udall is behind the eight ball. As Rotherberg writes:
Colorado (Sen. Mark Udall, Democrat): From Pure Tossup to Tossup/Tilts Republican
… Given the polls and our view that the GOP ground game has been seriously underestimated, we now believe Gardner has a narrow advantage.
Given how gun-shy the 2010 Bennet and 2012 Obama victories in Colorado have made professional pollsters and the political talking class about Colorado, the fact that even they are starting to come around to a Gardner victory is just one more sign that Udall’s retirement is quickly approaching inevitable.
To follow up on that, another well-known prognosticator, Larry Sabato, followed suit this morning and changed Colorado from “toss-up” to “leans Republican.” As he writes:
…Gardner is unquestionably a superior candidate to Ken Buck, the Republican who fumbled the 2010 race against Sen. Michael Bennet (D). And some pollsters have no doubt learned from their past mistakes. Gardner’s lead in polling averages is around three points, right around where we’d expect him to be to have a good shot of winning. So we’re calling Colorado Leans Republican…
The many prediction models made by various organizations this election cycle, don’t have the burden of worrying about being wrong, all they can do is compute the numbers that are fed to them. In a telling sign of how far Udall has fallen away from victory, The New York Times “Leo” model now says such people like Scott Brown in New Hampshire, gaffe-prone Bruce Brayley in Iowa, and Mark “I swear Murkowski likes me” Begich in Alaska, have better shots at winning than Udall does. At just a 16% chance to win Udall has a better chance of winning the lottery and then being struck by lightning than beating Gardner come next Tuesday (approximately). Even the liberal enclave of The Huffington Post can’t jazz the numbers enough to give Udall better than a 38% of winning.
We guess this means Coloradans want a Senator who knows how to do more than hike mountains and vote with Obama.