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Farewell, political attack ads

They’ll end after election, but they’re sure to return

DENVER – Come Wednesday, a calm will come over Colorado’s airwaves.

While the winner in the U.S. Senate race might still be undetermined – taking into account the dreaded recount scenario – at least one thing will be certain. The incessant political attack ads will cease.

But only temporarily.

Colorado has been ground zero in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United decision, a 2010 ruling in which the high court opened the floodgates to a wave of unlimited spending by corporations and unions.

As of a real-time update Friday, $93 million had been spent between candidates and outside interests in the state’s U.S. Senate race alone, according to the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks federal campaign spending. That number will continue to grow as Tuesday’s election nears.

The more telling part is how outside groups outspent the candidates. While candidates spent $27.1 million, outside interests spent $65.9 million.

“One of the things we see with outside spending is the level of negativity is so high,” said Kathy Kiely, managing editor at the Sunlight Foundation. “As the amount of outside spending increases, so does the amount of negativity, of smears. You have to wonder what’s the long-term effect of all of that on citizens.”

The largest source of outside spending in the U.S. Senate race came from Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, or Crossroads GPS, a spin off of American Crossroads, the super PAC GOP strategist Karl Rove helped start. It has spent $8.6 million opposing U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, the Democrat seeking re-election.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee has joined with $6 million.

On the other side, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has spent $8.1 million opposing U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner, the Republican from Yuma seeking to unseat Udall in the nation’s second most expensive U.S. Senate race.

NextGen Climate Action, a group funded by San Francisco billionaire and environmental activist Tom Steyer, has pumped $6.5 million into opposing Gardner. Right behind NextGen, the Senate Majority PAC has fueled attacks on Gardner with $5.2 million.

“Are people going to be more or less inclined to go to the polls? More or less cynical about their elected officials?” Kiely asked.

There’s also the elections landscape of Colorado to consider as the nation watches the Centennial State in determining the fate of power in the Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate. Political insiders across the country say “as goes Colorado, so goes the nation.”

The most recent polls offer no clear picture of the outcome. Udall and Gardner remain in a toss-up.

A final Denver Post poll released Thursday has Gardner at 46 percent and Udall at 44 percent – a statistical tie within the 4-percentage-point margin of error.

A Quinnipiac University poll, also released Thursday, has Gardner leading Udall 46 percent to 39 percent among likely voters.

Republicans continue to dominate Democrats in early voting. Numbers released Friday show 475,677 Republicans already have voted, compared with 371,190 Democrats, meaning 28 percent more Republicans have returned ballots.

Unaffiliated voters are lagging, with 290,600 having returned ballots, making up about 25 percent of the ballots returned. They represent about a third of the state’s voters.

But there may be a factor the pollsters have overlooked – the so-called “presidential surge voters.” These voters are younger and lean left. They tend to not regularly vote, other than in presidential elections, and they largely use only cellphones, which makes them harder to reach.

There are 1 million active registered voters in Colorado who fit the category, according to a recent report by left-leaning research group Project New America.

Because of a change in Colorado law, all registered voters receive a mail ballot this year. The previous “inactive” voter status was eliminated for a system that sends all voters a ballot, whether they are regular voters or not.

The Project New America report released last week said 83 percent of those surge voters voted or planned to vote this time around, which could tip the election.

“This is a subsection of folks who are for all intents and purposes an unlikely electorate,” said Andrew Myers, president of Myers Research & Strategic Services, which conducted the survey. “But we know today that they’re proving themselves as voters.”

pmarcus@durangoherald.com



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