Turns out U.S. Rep. Jared Polis has a lousy record over the history of his congressional career for missing votes, and it got even worse after he started running for governor.
How bad? He missed nearly 67 percent of all votes during the primary campaign.
Over his career, Polis has missed 5.5 percent of House votes. That might not seem like a high number, but according to Colorado Politics, the average absentee rate is only 2.4 percent.
Ouch.
To see what a strong voting record looks like, we compared U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman’s and Polis’s 2014 absentee record.
Coffman missed 0.7 percent of House votes, while Polis missed 8.9 percent of votes cast.
Polis had the 34th highest absentee voting record out of 441 House members.
So how does Polis respond?
His campaign accused Republican gubernatorial candidate Walker Stapleton of missing meetings.
Meetings.
That’s a safe attack for Polis, because Congress doesn’t do roll calls at congressional hearings so we don’t know how many committee meetings he’s missed. Nor can we find how many committee votes he’s missed.
But if he’s missing that many House floor votes, the odds are good he’s also skipping a boat-load of committee hearings.
One source familiar with high profile hearings held by the Natural Resources Committee when Polis was on the panel in 2015 and 2016, said they don’t recall seeing Polis up on the dais very often.
Granted, that’s anecdotal, but so is most of the criticism being slung at Stapleton.
Unfortunately for Polis, Missing votes on the House floor is widely documented, and his record is abysmal.