Buck has led by 4-6 points in most polls taken up to this point, but Bennet has closed the gap in recent weeks as questions about his handling of a rape case have surfaced and he has made statements regarding homosexuality and climate change that many people have taken issue with.

In the governor’s race, the poll–of 621 likely voters–showed Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, the Democrat, leading comfortably.

The 9NEWS/Denver Post poll has Hickenlooper with 49 percent of the vote, American Constitution Party candidate Tom Tancredo with 39 percent and Republican nominee Dan Maes with 9 percent of the vote. A poll, released Oct. 22, showed that race in a virtual tie between Hickenlooper and Tancredo, but that poll had been conducted by a Republican firm.

According to the 9News/Denver Post poll, Hickenlooper has gained ground recently among unaffiliated voters. A few weeks ago, the same pollsters found Tancredo leading Hickenlooper 46-38 among independents; today they found Hickenlooper leading 49-41 in that key group.

The poll has Republican incumbent Attorney General John Suthers leading Democrat challenger Stan Garnett 47-36. In the Treasurer’s race, the poll has Republican challenger Walker Stapleton leading incumbent Democrat Cary Kennedy 42-39. In the Secretary of State race, the poll shows Republican challenger Scott Gessler leading incumbent Democrat Bernie Buescher 37-34. As the low polling numbers in each of those races suggest, pollsters said many voters had not yet made up their minds on these races.

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Tom 'Tank' Tancredo

Hickenlooper posted a lengthy response to Tancredo’s web ad on his own website. This link takes you directly to that page.

Hickenlooper then released this ad, and vowed to run a positive campaign.

He also released a statement in response to other ads Tancredo is running:

“As candidates running for governor of Colorado, we each have a choice to make. We can present a positive vision for our state or we can attack our opponents with false statements that only increase the partisanship. Congressman Tancredo has obviously made his choice, and his attacks will surely continue to pollute the airwaves until Election Day.”

Then, Wednesday night, Tancredo turned his chops on Maes.

Tancredo issued a statement saying he was looking forward to a two-man race with Hickenlooper. He pointed to a new Fox News poll showing Tancredo leading Maes 34-15, but with Hickenlooper still on top with 44 percent.

Tancredo said he’s looking forward to a two-man race with Hickenlooper after moving up in the polls and narrowing the gap with Hickenlooper to just 10 percentage points.

Tancredo said that Maes committed earlier this year to drop out of the remaining gubernatorial debates if he dropped below 20 percent in the polls.

On the Sept. 9 Caplis and Silverman Show, during a discussion of whether Tom Tancredo should be included in the gubernatorial debates, Maes stated that there needs to be a benchmark for being invited to the debates.

“If you’re polling 20 percent, come on board, and if you’re not, then you don’t come,” Maes said on the show.

“Here’s what’s different about me and career politicians,” Maes continued. “When I set a rule, I live by it, and I don’t change the goal post when it doesn’t suit me well.”

A Maes spokesman told The Denver Post that Maes was speaking hypothetically and had not committed to dropping out of either the debates or the race.

The poll, conducted Sept. 17-21, has a margin of error of about 3.5 percent, though it is higher in some cases.

Bennet trails badly among men, 56 percent to 36, while holding a smaller lead among women, 52 to 41 percent.

Buck leads in all age groups except he trails Bennet by one point among those 50-64. Among those 65 and older, though, Buck enjoys a 15-point lead.

Bennet has a slight lead among voters who earn less than $50,000 a year but trails by 10 points among those who did not attend college.

Republicans and Democrats support their own by wide margins, but independents favor Buck 50-36 percent. Self-described moderates, on the other hand, favor Bennet by a whopping 59-33 percent.

In Denver, Bennet leads by more than 2-1. Buck leads almost everywhere else.

Maes can’t raise money and the latest CNN/Time/Opinion Research poll shows him trailing badly. As it stands now, not only would he finish last, but even Tea Party supporters favor American Constitution Party candidate Tancredo 51 percent to 35 percent.

“This poll is enormously encouraging,” Tancredo said in a press release touting the poll.

Overall, of just over 1500 Colorado voters spoken to Sept. 17-21, Democrat John Hickenlooper still has a healthy lead, with 47 percent of the vote, followed by Tancredo at 29 percent and Republican Maes at 21 percent.

It is no surprise that Hickenlooper is leading in Denver, 68 percent to 19 percent for Tancredo. In the suburbs, Hickenlooper leads 50 percent to 31 percent over Tancredo. On the Front Range generally, it tightens to 36 percent for Hickenlooper, 35 percent for Tancredo and 26 percent for Maes.

Support for both Tancredo and Hickenlooper falls off dramatically once you leave the I-25 corridor, where Hickenlooper and Maes tie at 37 percent and Tancredo polls only 22 percent.

Men and women both favor Hickenlooper, but while Hickenlooper leads strongly among women, among men, his lead is only 39 percent to 35 percent for Tancredo. Hickenlooper leads strongly in all age groups. Hickenlooper leads strongly in all income brackets, but Tancredo leads slightly among people who did not attend college.

Ninety-five percent of Democrats say they will vote for Hickenlooper. Of independents, 41 percent favor Tancredo and 40 percent favor Hickenlooper. The margin of error is about 2.5 percent. Republicans still favor Maes, but with less than a majority, 48 to 38 over Tancredo, with Hickenlooper picking up 10 percent of Republican votes. People describing themselves as moderates like Hickenlooper 65 percent to 25 percent for Tancredo, with Maes picking up only 7 percent. Conservatives, meanwhile, support Tancredo 45-40 over Maes, with 12 percent liking Hickenlooper.

Maes and Tancredo did not return phone calls.

Tancredo’s campaign manager said, in a press release, that Tancredo’s campaign “will continue to gain support as more and more Republicans focus on the governor’s race and the ethical plight of Evergreen conman Dan Maes, who has been struggling amid allegations of corruption, campaign finance violations and resume padding.”

Maes’ most recent campaign finance foibles have to do with not filing disclosures in a timely fashion, for which he has been fined at least $3000—and which he has not yet paid. Other problems have to do with the fact that he “returned” $300 to a campaign donor who is not on record as being a campaign donor. The Secretary of State’s office is powerless to investigate that apparent violation unless someone files a complaint.

Sections of state law that would seem to come into play in this case are:

1-45-106 (1)(a)(II) In no event shall contributions to a candidate committee be used for personal purposes not reasonably related to supporting the election of the candidate.

1-45-108 (1)(a)(I) All candidate committees…shall report to the appropriate officer their contributions received…who has contributed twenty dollars or more…

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From Nate Silver:

Here is a version of the graph we produced in 2009, but updated to include the dozen or so polls that have been conducted on it since that time, as listed by pollingreport.com. I have also included opinions on gay marriage from the General Social Survey, which asked about gay marriage as long ago as 1988.

The LOESS regression line now shows 50 percent opposed to gay marriage and 49 percent in support — basically too close to call.

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Latest numbers after the jump.

Gallup’s Monday poll suggests voters are once again split on health reform, finding 47 percent of voters believe the new legislation is “a good thing” while 50 percent believe it’s a “bad thing.” That’s within the sampling error (+- 4 percent) but it’s a change from numbers that showed people slightly more positive than negative toward the bill the night it was passed.

The Gallup/USA today poll conducted March 26 to 28 suggested Democrats overwhelmingly supported the bill while Republican voters mostly opposed it. Almost exactly half, 54 percent, of unaffiliated voters thought the bill was “a bad thing.”

According to Gallup, 57 percent of Americans without health insurance like the bill. Old people are split: 45 percent liked it but a solid 52 percent of Americans 65 and older don’t like the bill.

The largest difference was between between income brackets where 60 percent of those who make less than $20,000 were pleased by health care reform but only 39 percent of those who make $50,000 to $75,000 like it.

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Schaffer’s campaign manager, Dick Wadhams, told the Rocky his campaign’s internal polling indicated the race was closer but didn’t release figures.

Last week, both campaigns lost the support of their national parties’ Senate campaigns, with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) pulling its advertising to concentrate on more competitive races and the National Republican Senatorial Committee leaking word it would move to defend vulnerable incumbent Republican senators. The contest is already the most expensive in Colorado history, counting more than $12 million raised between Udall and Schaffer and more than $20 million poured into the race by outside groups from both sides.

The Rocky-CBS4 poll found Schaffer barely ahead, 47-45, in the eastern plains he represented in Congress from 1997 to 2003. His margin improves in the Colorado Springs-Pueblo region to 43-39, but not enough to challenge Udall’s wider leads everywhere else in the state.

Udall performed best in Adams, Boulder and Broomfield counties — part of the 2nd Congressional District, which he has represented since 1997 — garnering 56 percent to Schaffer’s 25 percent. In the suburban counties of Arapahoe, Jefferson and Douglas, Udall leads 54-37, on the Western Slope and in the mountains it’s 54-38, and in Denver the Democrat is ahead 55-26.

The poll was conducted last week by surveying 500 registered voters and has a margin of error of 4.3 percentage points.

The atmosphere at the event was overtly partisan towards the left side of the aisle.  Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” greeted a diverse crowd of reporters ad nauseum, be it serious journalists from The Guardian and the LA Times, bloggers blogging away on their laptops or even a polite homeless man with a tote bag full of old newspapers and an odor to match his stained sweatsuit who sat down next to this writer midway through the talk and started to take down profanity-laden notes (though this could have just been another blogger).

Many in the crowd greeted each other with hearty pats on the back and congratulations tempered with hugs and pecks on the cheek usually not seen in the stodgy, oak-lined corridors of the National Press Club.

Despite all the reasons that Greenberg gave for Democrats to be optimistic, the overall message was that more can and must be done to ensure a liberal majority in the future.  Borosage warned that even though this election was “the end of a conservative era that began in 1980″, voters are still “unclear what Democrats stand for.”  This may be attributable to the lack of an overarching party message in favor of a more localized, straightforward tone.

When asked by Colorado Confidential, Pariser responded that Democrats were “moving back to their roots,” a trend seen in the party’s Western Strategy.  This thought was echoed by Greenberg, who said that there was “a major change in the map” in states like Montana and Colorado, places that used to be off limits to Democrats but are not anymore. 

Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and Montana are the only states where more people approve of the President’s performance than disapprove.  The President is least popular in Rhode Island, where just 23% of those surveyed approve of his performance.  For the nation as a whole, the weighted average approval rating for the President was 37%.

Nixon had higher approval ratings than President Bush does now, until October of 1973.  He resigned on August 9, 1974.

The poll surveyed 600 adults in each state from October 12 to October 15, creating a margin of sampling error of +/- 4 percentage points.

Q: If the election were today, and you were standing in the voting booth right now, who would you vote for? Republican Scott Tipton? Democrat John Salazar? Libertarian Bob Sargent? Or some other candidate?

Democrats Hold House Seat in CO3:
In an election for the U.S. House of Representatives today, 9/18/06, in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District, incumbent Democrat John Salazar defeats Republican challenger Scott Tipton by 11 points, according to a SurveyUSA poll conducted exclusively for KUSA-TV Denver. Salazar’s 11-point margin is unchanged since the last poll in August.

Salazar gets 94% of Democrat votes. Tipton gets 75% of Republican votes. 21% of Republicans cross over and vote for the Democrat. Independents prefer Salazar 64% to 20%. Tipton wins among voters age 35-49 but loses in other age groups. Salazar leads by 7 points among whites and by 44 points among Hispanics. Those who approve of President Bush’s performance in office support Tipton by 61 points. Those who disapprove of Bush support Salazar by 74 points.

President George W. Bush’s approval rating among likely voters in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District is 45%.

The district covers most of the Western Slope and wraps south to Pueblo. In 2004, Salazar won with 50% of the vote compared to his opponent, Greg Walcher of Mesa County at 47%. Republicans have 160,000 registered voters followed by 140,000 registered Democrats and 134,000 unaffiliated voters.

SurveyUSA of Verona, NJ, was the source of this information and graph.  Photo of the Club 20 Salazar/Tipton debate by Leslie Robinson.