Free Republic

The autumn skies are bright blue this afternoon in the Mile High City. The vistas of the nearby Rockies are as sublime as the mild breezes that amble down the street. And yet Marilyn Marks could not be more worried. She fears that Republican representative Cory Gardner could lose a U.S. Senate seat in the mail — literally. “Gardner got the Denver Post’s endorsement,” Marks tells me. “Amazing, and he has a real chance of winning. But this ‘100 percent absentee ballot’ disaster is likely to undermine every GOP candidate in a tight race,” adds Marks, a clean-vote advocate with...

Michelle Obama made yet another flub on the campaign trail Thursday when she apparently confused Colorado Democratic Sen. Mark Udall with his Republican rival. Obama spoke in Denver Thursday as part of a campaign event for Udall, who is engaged in a heated battle with his Republican opponent, Rep. Cory Gardner. She touted Udall’s Senate record in her speech, and called him a “fifth-generation Coloradan.” “Mark understands what makes this state special,” she said. The only problem? Udall is not a fifth-generation Coloradan. In fact, he was born in Arizona and his father, former Rep. Mo Udall, served as a...

First lady Michelle Obama on Thursday became the latest political celebrity to get involved in Colorado's heated Senate race. Obama rallied some 1,500 people in Denver to vote for Democratic Sen. Mark Udall as he faces a tight run for a second term. Republicans have targeted the seat as one of the six they need to win control of the Senate. Udall narrowly trails his Republican challenger, Rep. Cory Gardner, in recent polls. Democrats are counting on turning out their base voters, especially younger women, to close the gap. Michelle Obama told the crowd to remember 2008, when her husband...

DENVER — Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and his allies have a clear message for political handicappers and pollsters: You’re wrong. The incumbent and his supporters insist they will shock the pundits on Election Day, even though Udall hasn’t had the lead in a single public poll in more than a month and is facing a rising GOP star in Rep. Cory Gardner. Two new surveys released Tuesday gave Gardner a narrow lead, underscoring Democratic fears that the race for the Senate majority could be lost in a state that voted for Barack Obama twice. Udall’s campaign scoffs at suggestions that...

You know what this means, don’t you? Right: Colorado’s ripe for the picking by GOP nominee Mitt Romney two years from now. C’mon, it’s been hours since I trolled you guys about Romney 2016. I held out as long as I could.Obama’s currently rocking a robust 40/56 favorable rating in Colorado, a state he won twice. Mark Udall’s rating: Almost identical, of course, at 40/54. There’s a perfect example, actually, of why O is now shouting from the rooftops that Senate Dems are his loyal toadies who’ll go on carrying his water for the next two years if reelected. Nothing’s...

For weeks, Rep. Cory Gardner (R) and Sen. Mark Udall (D) have been statistically tied in polls of the Colorado Senate race, with Gardner in the lead but well within the margin of error. Now a new poll, taken over the last four days, shows Gardner leading by seven points. According to the USA Today/Suffolk University poll, Gardner is at 46 percent to Udall's 39 percent. A September poll from the same pollster had Gardner up by just one, 43-42. Both polls have a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percent, meaning neither shows Gardner with what can...

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2014-10-21/gore-to-stand-in-at-udall-fundraiser

PPP's newest Colorado poll finds very close races for both Governor and the Senate. Cory Gardner is up 46/43 on Mark Udall in the Senate race, while John Hickenlooper has a 45/44 advantage over Bob Beauprez in the Governor's race. Both Democrats are doing well with the groups Democrats tend to do well with in Colorado. Hickenlooper is up 49/39 with women, 60/28 with Hispanics, and 59/31 with young voters. Udall is similarly ahead 46/42 with women, 64/24 with Hispanics, and 59/22 with young voters. The problem for the Democrats is that they are down by significant margins with men-...

Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, a Democrat running in a tight re-election race, asked for a do-over during a TV interview on Friday night when he couldn't come up with the names of the three most influential books he'd ever read. 'Oh wow,' he said. 'That's the toughest – the, uh, three most influential books in my life–' Gathering his composure during a live news broadcast on 7News in Denver, he came up with one. 'Profiles in Courage. The, um, uh –.' After a three-second pregnant pause, the stumped senator asked for another chance. 'Let me think. We can play this...

Republican Cory Gardner leads incumbent Democrat Mark Udall in the fourth straight poll of the U.S. Senate race in Colorado. The new Quinnipiac poll of likely Colorado voters finds Gardner ahead of Udall by 6 points, 47 percent to 41 percent, while 8 percent support an independent candidate. With that independent discounted and in a head-to-head match-up, Gardner leads 49 percent to 44 percent. That gives the 2-term House member from Yuma a 3-point lead in the Real Clear Politics average of polls against Udall, a first-term senator. Other recent polls from CNN, Fox News, and the Denver Post show...

This Texan takes bumper stickers to a whole new level. A photo of a truck with Texas tags that features on the tailgate one the most racist decals, complete with a real (and fresh) banana, that targets President Barack Obama was posted to Reddit on Thursday. "Does this Socialist a** make my truck look too big," the decal, which appears to be professionally done, reads. It also includes photo of Obama dressed in Somalian garb from a 2006 meeting in the country. The image was taken in the East Texas town of Tyler at the intersection of Loop 323 and...

U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner, the Republican challenger in the Colorado U.S. Senate race, leads U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, the Democratic incumbent 47 - 41 percent among likely voters, with 8 percent for independent candidate Steve Shogan, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today. Another 4 percent are undecided. This compares to a 48 - 40 percent likely voter lead for Gardner in a September 18 survey by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University. With Shogan out of the race, Gardner is ahead 49 - 44 percent. In the three-way race today, women back Udall over Gardner 49 - 40 percent,...

Republican Cory Gardner has opened a four-point lead in the Colorado Senate race that’s key in determining whether Democrats can hold onto their majority... Gardner held a 50 percent to 46 percent edge on first-term Democratic Sen. Mark Udall in the survey of 665 likely voters, conducted Oct. 9-13. ... Udall is getting clobbered in the all-important suburbs, as well as in rural areas, and his lead in Colorado cities is not enough to overcome that ... Hurting Udall is an underwater favorability rating of 45 percent — with 51 percent of those surveyed saying they have an unfavorable opinion...

Colorado Democratic Sen. Mark Udall has talked about contraception and abortion more than just about any other 2014 candidate. Roughly half of his ads are about women's issues. The focus has been so intense that Udall has been nicknamed "Mark Uterus," with a local columnist joking that if the race were a movie, it would be set in a gynecologist's office. In a debate between Udall and Rep. Cory Gardner last week, moderator Lynn Bartels of the Denver Post used the moniker to describe him. For all of that focus — and the insistence from Democrats that Gardner's record on...

Universities dodge the mandate by cutting back student work hours. Liberals are rebuking businesses for cutting the hours of workers to skirt ObamaCare’s employer mandate. Lo, the people’s republic of Boulder, otherwise known as the University of Colorado, has announced that it too is capping the hours of undergraduate workers to avoid the mandate. ... Undergrads will now be limited to 25 hours of university-provided employment per week, though students can work additional hours at off-campus jobs. Under ObamaCare, large employers must provide health benefits—including free contraception—to all employees who work more than 30 hours a week on average. Otherwise,...

Perhaps the most hard-fought Senate race this year will be ColoradoÂ’s showdown between Democratic senator Mark Udall and Republican congressman Cory Gardner. The RealClearPolitics average of polls in the race shows Gardner holding a lead of 1.3 percentage points. The outcome may determine control of the U.S. Senate, and the margin of victory could be less than the 11,000-vote margin by which Democratic senator Michael Bennet was reelected in Colorado in 2010. But there is a significant difference in this yearÂ’s Senate race. In 2013, a new Democratic state legislature rammed through a sweeping and highly controversial election law and...

Colorado’s Senate race is trending Republican, as the most recent poll, by Fox News, shows Cory Gardner leading Mark Udall by six points. Udall has run a lackluster campaign dominated by a tired, over-the-top “war on women” theme, and this morning the Denver Post, not known as a bastion of Republicanism, endorsed Gardner. Still, the race is competitive on paper. So why has Harry Reid’s Senate Majority PAC just cancelled $289,000 worth of broadcast ads?

During this week’s Colorado senatorial debate, Mark Udall was asked a simple question by the Denver Post’s Chuck Plunkett: With all our technological advances and society’s greater understanding of fetal development do you still support late-term abortions on demand? Udall replied: “To demand that that woman carry that child to term would be a form of government intervention that none of us want to see happen. We ought to respect the women of Colorado and their point of view.” Let me translate this bit of craven polispeak: ‘I support the right to an abortion in all trimesters of pregnancy for...

Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) has one strategy to ensure his reelection: Resurrect the morally and intellectually bankrupt “War on Women.” This effort has centered primary on promoting the fact that Rep. Cory Gardner (R-CO) once backed a personhood measure as a state-level lawmaker. He has since abandoned that position and embraced more politically savvy policies like those which would increase access to over-the-counter contraceptives. Even Politifact has been forced, reluctantly, to call out Udall’s ads which claim Gardner “championed” personhood measures in the Centennial State as “half true.”Nevertheless, Udall’s campaign is clinging desperately to this line of attack against...

At the outset of the Denver Post's senatorial debate on Tuesday night, a moderator asked Democratic senator Mark Udall the following question: "We know that you support a woman's right to choose, but given the advances in scientific understanding of fetal development, where pregnant mothers know at which week babies grow fingernails and can swallow, would you support a ban on late-term abortions and if so at what week?"