DENVER– Depending on whether or not related legal action restarts in US district court here, Colorado lawmakers plan to take up the question of which voters county clerks will be required to mail ballots to in future elections.
In filing suit yesterday against Denver County over its 2011 election plan, Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler has raised the specter for the second time since he took office in January that he is using his position as head of elections not to expand but to suppress voting in the state.
It would be premature to label Colorado’s Fourth District one of the nation’s swing districts, but that could change as a result of the 2012 election season. A court will decide the new outline of the district next month, but the district is undergoing a more profound transition. It is becoming the thing Iowa is supposed to be.
John Hickenlooper is an officeholder and a politician and yet he is well liked among the public. According to a survey conducted by Public Policy Polling last weekend, Colorado’s Democratic governor garners a 54 percent approval rating and only a 24 percent disapproval rating, a remarkable 30 point spread. Democrats love him, independents love him and Republicans think he’s OK. In other words, Hickenlooper is an odd fish, the Greenback Cutthroat Trout of 2011 U.S. politics, a compellingly strange-looking and endangered species.
Public Policy Polling this week released survey results that showed likely 2012 voters in Colorado mostly held congressional Republicans to blame for the unpopular debt deal reached in Washington and that they so far strongly preferred President Obama to any likely Republican rival. Critics of the survey howled that left-leaning PPP had skewed the results by oversampling Democratic voters in the state. Yes, PPP surveyed more Democrats than it did either Republicans or Independents, all pretty much registered to vote in equal numbers in the state, Director Tom Jensen told the Colorado Independent, and that apparent oversampling is driven not by pollster ideological bias but by the self-selecting pattern established by Colorado citizens polled– and, he said, that’s why PPP numbers have been proven highly reliable over the last two elections.
As the 2012 race in Colorado’s always hotly contested 4th congressional district officially kicked off this week, Republicans in Larimer County, the most populous county in the district, are suffering through another humiliating chapter in the unfolding history of incompetence and corruption that plagued the county party under the recent direction of Larry Carillo. Police issued a felony theft arrest warrant for the former party chairman Tuesday, accusing him of stealing more than $17,000 to pay bills and gambling debts. Carillo is alleged to have unwittingly set up payments to a company created by the department of Homeland Security to fight online gambling and money laundering. Carillo paid more than $27,000 in online gambling debts while he was party chairman.
The sprawling greater-Denver metro region is in news-media crisis. In the information age, when there seems to be more and more to know, there is less and less being reported by the diminishing number of local mainstream news outlets here. So it comes as little surprise that media watchdog organization FreePress this week is highlighting the Denver news market as a negative example for the nation. The organization reports that, on top of shrinking newspaper reporting, the local TV news market is host to a “severe” form of the kind of sly consolidation that media corporations have been effecting across the country for nearly a decade. FreePress says this “covert consolidation,” where direct ownership is never transferred, is gaining momentum and that it skirts federal ownership laws and erodes market variety and competition.
On Monday, Colorado Republican Party Chair Dick Wadhams announced he was ending his bid for reelection. He said he didn’t want to lead a party dominated by inflexible Tea Party “nuts” who know little about how politics works. If new survey results are any measure, this may be Wadhams’ best political move in a long time. Tom Jensen at Public Policy Polling reports Wednesday that the GOP civil war against “rinos” will kill the elephant in the Centennial state.
Political blog site Colorado Pols has named the Ken Buck “Buyer’s Remorse” rape story the second biggest story of 2010 in Colorado.
Politics took on surreal tones in Colorado this year, with relative unknowns elected to major offices while other candidates rose from the ranks of the unknown only to fall back to near anonymity. Earlier this week. Today, we roll out out top two, the order of which could easily be switched.
Do you know where to vote on Election Day? Do you know what to bring with you? Get comprehensive voter information for your state here.
rss