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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2006-11-04

Not A COMPLETELY Useless Poll

So the Rocky Mountain News and Public Opinion Strategies has their most recent poll on the governor's race out.

Fifty-five percent of surveyed voters support Ritter, versus 33 percent for Beauprez.

22 points? Really. Does that seem right?

When Gov. Owens won his first election, it was by about 9,000 votes. So that doesn't really help.

I couldn't find the information about Roy Romer's last election--I figured him being the last Democratic Governor of Colorado, it would help to know how much he won by in his last election. But the SecState's website--conveniently and infuriatingly--only contains information from 1996 on.

So, I made what I considered to be a reasonable assumption: Romer, as a popular incumbent Governor, probably won in a landslide by . . . what?. . . 12-16 points. Does that seem reasonable?

So, extrapolating, I figure reality dictates that a Democrat in Colorado could probably match, but not exceed Romer's electoral performance. So it's reasonable to assume that, at worst, Ritter is up on Beauprez by 16 points.

Which means that this poll is skewed by about 6 points . . . AT LEAST.

And, since it's the same firm and methodology that polled all the other races earlier in the week, it's safe to use this poll as a plumb line for those.

So reality might actually look more like this:

--Amendment 43 is going to win by more like 58-42
--Referendum I is going to be rejected by something like 55-45
--Marylin Musgrave is likely to win by about 54-46
--pot will still lose
--the minimum wage amendment will lose narrowly
--and who knows about the O'Donnell/Perlmutter race; I haven't seen a poll on this one recently, though I know the last set looked bad for O'Donnell

And, granted, that's a bit of a leap of logic to get to this place. But so is accepting a 22 point lead for Ritter.

None of my predictions have changed since a couple days ago, though I will add the following at this point:

:Referendum I will fail, and probably by more than 5 points
:Amendment 43 will pass, and by quite a bit (maybe 15-20 points)
:the Minimum Wage amendment will fall, narrowly
:the Pot amendment will get smoked (c'mon . . . you had to know it was coming at some point)

That's where I see things at this point.

In other words, this new poll does little to illuminate the playing field at this point, though maybe it allows us to make a guess about the slope.
Posted by: Michael / 11/04/2006 02:31:00 AM

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