Rasmussen has been acting as a terrible outlier the past couple of days, the only "reputable" pollster showing polls moving towads the Republicans. Calling bullsh**t here.
That's funny--Rasmussen is the only pollster who has had any consistency in this race. The only poll (besides, ironically, Rasmussen's February poll) showing Hickenlooper winning was the liberal PPP poll showing him up by a ridiculous 11 points. McInnis led by six points last months and Rasmussen has him with the exact same lead. To me that suggests that, far from being an outlier, Rasmussen has pegged this race pretty well. You should know that Rasmussen uses a different model that naturally favors Republicans, because he samples likely voters. In Colorado, for example, registered voters are roughly in thirds (R/D/U), but in active voter registration Republicans have a 40,000 vote advantage over Democrats (unaffiliateds are now a plurality of active voters). And if you test voter enthusiasm, every model suggests that Republicans will turn out better than Democrats. Which basically means that, yes, Rasmussen is probably right.
What you're seeing is a realignment of politics to 2004 numbers. If you look at Obama's net approvals it looks almost identical to the '00 and '04 elections maps: Florida, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Ohio are mixed, the Gore/Kerry states have Obama up, and the Bush states have high negatives. Colorado is simply demonstrating that the idea that the state has undergone an idealogical sea change were unrealistic.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/04/14/how_bad_could_2010_really_get_for_democrats_105152.htmlAll of that said, however, we're still a long way out from November. And until this year Democrats have dominated state politics for a couple of elections. I've always assumed that the GOP would eventually regroup and take back most of the seats that they lost. My hunch is that that is exactly what we're seeing this year, aided by a toxic national climate for Demos.
