ELIZABETH, Colo.—As if things aren’t looking bad enough for Bob Schaffer, now he’s getting fashion advice from his own supporters.
Down in the polls, the Republican seeking Colorado’s open seat for U.S. Senate is looking for a last-minute surge of cash and volunteers to take on Democratic Rep. Mark Udall. Today he’s in Elizabeth, a suburb south of Denver, working a small crowd of GOP volunteers.
It’ll be a tight race, he says, but one he can win with their help.
But a couple of supporters mention television ads showing a casual Udall in front of the Rocky Mountains. Why can’t Schaffer work harder on his homey, guy-next-door image?
“Udall has been able to convince people, with his denim shirt and the amber waves of grain or whatever behind him, to convince people he’s this great Coloradan,” scoffs Joy Overbeck, a freelance magazine writer from Kiowa.
Schaffer smiles and replies that he does have such an ad—one showing his family with a barn and cows in the background. Haven’t they seen it?
The crowd looks at him blankly.
And so it goes for Schaffer, a three-term congressman who left the U.S. House in 2002 to honor a term-limit pledge and is vying for the seat being vacated by retiring Republican Sen. Wayne Allard.
It didn’t start out this way.
This summer it appeared Colorado’s Senate race could be the nation’s hardest fought. Television ads flooded Denver airwaves before Labor Day. NBC’s “Meet The Press” scheduled Udall and Schaffer for the show’s first Sunday-morning Senate debate of the season.
More has been spent on this campaign than any in Colorado history, with the candidates hauling in more than $12 million. Millions more have been spent on ads by hard-to-track independent expenditure groups.
Now there are signs Udall is pulling away, buoyed by a national turn away from the GOP and a middle-of-the-road pitch to invest in renewable energy. Schaffer has labeled Udall a “Boulder liberal” and depicted him as too cozy with national Democrats, but the argument hasn’t gained traction.
“I don’t think ‘liberal’ is as bad a tag to have this year as it was maybe before” Democrats made gains in recent state elections, said Scott Moore, a political scientist at Colorado State University.
A mid-October Quinnipiac University telephone poll had Udall leading Schaffer 54 percent to 40 percent, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Even the national Democrats and Republicans seem to be writing off Colorado’s race. Senate campaign committees for both parties confirmed last this week they had no plans to buy more television ads in the last two weeks of the campaign, redirecting the money to tighter races elsewhere.
Schaffer and his supporters insist the contest is winnable.
They note Schaffer has more cash on hand than Udall—$1.5 million to Udall’s $470,000, according to an Oct. 15 federal campaign disclosure report.
In Elizabeth, Schaffer urged volunteers to keep working the phones and knocking on doors because victory is possible in a state that voted for President Bush twice.
“It’s all about communication and the phone calls we’re making right now,” he says. “We’re making the case. And this works in Colorado.”
Schaffer talks up Udall’s former opposition to expanding domestic oil drilling, saying the Democrat won’t help lower gas prices. Schaffer also is trying to tap into the nation’s anti-incumbent mood by criticizing the Wall Street bailout package approved by Congress. Udall voted against it, but Schaffer said Udall and his Democratic colleagues should’ve tried harder to cut spending.
Udall, reached by telephone on a campaign bus tour, acknowledged he leads going into the home stretch.
But he adds, “I’ve been through enough elections to tell you the polls don’t mean anything. … We’re taking nothing for granted.”
Schaffer says he’ll keep working his ground game. He plans to visit 20 counties in the closing days of the campaign, and he can take encouragement from folks like Irene Wilson, a grandmother of nine who volunteers for him in Elbert County east of Denver and Colorado Springs.
“I’m Finnish, and we have this word, ‘sissu.’ It means tenacity, that if you stick to it, you’ll get it done,” Wilson said. “It means it’s not over ’till it’s over because a lot of things change. So I remain positive to the end.”
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