Ever since the primary, a handful of CD5 candidate Doug Lamborn’s supporters have taken to calling him “Landslide Lamborn.”
Just for one, state Rep. Mark Cloer has been heard to crow his prediction about the general election: “Doug will win by a landslide!”
This notion, of course bucks the current thinking – that Lamborn could end up losing what was previously considered a sure bet in one of the country’s most conservative strongholds. (Congressional Quarterly is the latest to weigh in, this week moving the 5th CD race from the category “Safe Republican” to “Republican Favored.”)
So where did this “Landslide Lamborn” thing come from, anyway? Turns out it might well just be the work of an overzealous college newspaper headline writer.
On Aug. 23, senior reporter James Campbell weighed in on the 5th CD race in an op-ed published in The Scribe, the student newspaper at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.
Under the heading “Lamborn by a landslide,” Campbell noted that Lamborn won the primary election with 915 votes more than were cast for second place winner Jeff Crank.
In his analysis, Campbell reported that only 29 percent of the district’s 187,000 registered Republican voted in the primary. He also pointed out that Democrat Jay Fawcett was getting a lot of attention.
What wasn’t noted was that Lamborn received a total of 15,011 votes, or about 27 percent of the primary votes cast. The rest were distributed between the five other candidates vying for the nomination. And, the total number of votes that Lamborn collected represents roughly three percent of the total possible votes in the November general election.
Not a landslide by a stretch, even if you count taking home 27 percent of the Republican vote. But hey, even if it is exceedingly optimistic, the name is kinda catchy.
