Of all the Senate races in the country, the one that is perplexing me the most is the one in Colorado. For starters, I cannot for the life of me figure out why Senator Mark Udall is doing so poorly in the polls. Every theory I can come up with has something to do less with Udall than with state politics and a backlash against Governor Hickenlooper and the state legislature. But Hickenlooper is polling ahead of Udall in every survey. So, if it isn’t a backlash against state Democrats, what is it that Udall has done that has so displeased Coloradans? Is it possible that Rep. Cory Gardner is running some kind of great campaign? If so, I haven’t seen anyone arguing that.
While Udall has been prominent in questioning the Intelligence Community, he hasn’t otherwise distinguished himself in the Senate, either positively or negatively. I assume that the CIA isn’t running a subterranean campaign against him, so what gives?
Based on both the polling numbers and the bad trend in the numbers, I am pretty much forced to predict that Udall will lose. But it really is agonizing because the one thing we know is that the shape of the Colorado electorate is going to different this time, and more friendly to the Democrats, because they’ve moved to elections by mail. When a ballot arrives in your living room, your likelihood of voting goes up by several orders of magnitude. Have the pollsters modeled this correctly? Have they correctly predicted either Latino preferences or participation?
There are still reasons to hope that Udall will greatly outperform the polls, but until I understand why he’s doing so badly in the first place, I can’t predict that he will win.
