Beauprez has a lot to smile about this morning.
A new Denver Post/SurveyUSA poll released today has Rep. Cory Gardner up by 2 points over Sen. Mark Udall (46%-44%), while former Rep. Bob Beauprez and Gov. John Hickenlooper are tied (46%-46%). While the Colorado Lefties are already up in arms over the poll showing Udall and Hick winning Hispanics by smaller margins than what “conventional” wisdom predicts, they fail to mention that the poll also has Hispanics making up 15% of the electorate, which is even better than Democrats best-case scenario of 14%.
Diving deeper into the demographics of the poll, the poll has a 35R, 32D, 33U breakdown, which would be a dream scenario for Democrats as the current make-up of those who have turned in their ballots as of today (according to Magellan Strategies) is 41.6R, 32.4D, 26U. That is a lot of unaffiliated voters Democrats are going to have to convince to turn out in just five days.
Adding to the necessity for Democrats to chase ballots like crazy, both Beauprez and Gardner are up by 2 and 3 points, respectively, among those who have already voted.
Another poll that the Lefties are trying to push is a poll they would have you believe is done by Public Policy Polling, since PPP was the most accurate pollster in 2012. Unfortunately for Democrats this poll is a League of Conservation Voters one done by PPP. Which is all to say, as this tweet points out, PPP does not consider this one of their polls:
@Taniel To be clear, PPP considers the polls it does for firms (like this for LCV) as separate from their normal ones. Also: no cellphone?
— Jeff B@AoSHQDD (@EsotericCD) October 30, 2014
To complicate things, LCV decided to pinch pennies and opted for no cell phone callers, only landline phones. As one national pollster joked:
hot on the heels of PPP’s landline-only poll in Colorado, I’ll be revealing the results of my n=1000 random telegraph interviews. (1/2) — Logan Dobson (@LoganDobson) October 30, 2014
i’ll have my smoke-signal-poll released just as soon as the wind dies down (2/2)
— Logan Dobson (@LoganDobson) October 30, 2014
Since it is quite cheaper to do a landline-only poll, it could be possible they did many landline-only polls and selected the one that best could tell the story they wanted it to. We’re not saying… we’re just saying.
Any close political observer would be right to point out that historically landline-only polls favor Republicans, but the problem with a left-leaning organization like LCV doing one is that we can’t be sure how they weighted the poll to compensate for this well-known fact.
@davidsfr we have no clue what weighting they are using to try and correct for it.
— Harry Enten (@ForecasterEnten) October 30, 2014
As we see from the poll itself, the poll has a 38R, 37D, 25U split to go along with a 53-47 female to male ratio. All of that funkiness just to get Gardner and Udall tied at 48%, and Beauprez and Hick tied at 47%.
If this LCV poll was the one we were relying on to give us hope going into the final week of an election, we would certainly not feel too good about our position. Then again, Colorado Democrats don’t have much else to cling to at this point.