DENVER—Sarah Palin courted Colorado voters on Monday, Joe Biden Tuesday and Wednesday, and John McCain on Friday. Barack Obama’s coming Sunday.
Why bother, with the election only days away and with many voters either having voted or having made up their minds?
“If you look at the polls, one thing has remained constant: There are still a lot of undecided voters and ‘soft-decided’ voters,” insists McCain campaign spokesman Tom Kise. “It’s far from over. We’re competing to win and we’re going to win.”
For McCain, Colorado’s nine electoral votes are essential if he is to get the 270 needed to win the White House. His campaign believes those Centennial State votes are within reach, despite Obama’s average 5-point lead in polls here.
Colorado offers Republicans a better chance of success than other target states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia, where Obama has bigger leads in polls, says Floyd Ciruli, a political consultant. If the national race tightens—as many expect—before election day, it could be even tighter here, he adds.
So both campaigns are after stragglers during early voting, Ciruli says.
“There may be a few unattached voters searching for a reason to vote for one of these candidates, but that number is dwindling. This is all about get out the vote. With early voting still under way in Colorado, they see an immediate benefit to this last-minute push,” Ciruli said.
According to the Secretary of State’s office, nearly 20 percent of the state’s 1.6 million voters who received mail ballots have already voted, along with 85,000 who marched to the polls and voted early.
Previously, Colorado was always the bridesmaid and not the bride because it didn’t have enough electoral votes to make a difference.
Now it’s a swing state. Even though Democrats won control of Colorado’s statehouse and governor’s office two years ago for the first time since 1962, the top prize has been elusive. Colorado has voted for a Democratic presidential candidate only three times since 1948, when it went for Harry Truman. Lyndon B. Johnson won here in 1964, and Bill Clinton in 1992.
Colorado also is important to Democrats as a symbol of what they see as a Democratic tide rolling across the Mountain West. Obama is trying to help Democrats wrangle another U.S. Senate seat from Republicans by replacing Sen. Wayne Allard with Democratic Rep. Mark Udall—and GOP Rep. Marilyn Musgrave’s congressional seat with Democrat Betsy Markey.
In the campaign’s final days, Colorado also is attracting third-party candidates, including Libertarian Bob Barr and independent Ralph Nader—not counting dozens of surrogates crisscrossing the state for votes.
Matt Chandler, spokesman for Obama’s Colorado campaign, agrees the battle won’t stop until the polls close at 7 p.m. on Nov. 4.
Chandler was on an RV tour in the tiny northern Colorado town of Walden on Friday with Sen. Ken Salazar and former Gov. Roy Romer. Thirty people showed up at a local cafe during lunch hour to hear them plead for votes.
“Colorado is a key battleground state, and the high number of surrogates we have campaigning here is a reflection of that fact,” said Chandler.
