April 14, 2015 01:38 PM UTC

New Poll Shows Voters Don't Like Either Coffman

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• by: Colorado Pols

Okay, that headline is a bit misleading, but that was the point; when you’re 18 months from the next election, you can find anything you want from polling a largely uninformed and indifferent public.

There are a few interesting nuggets in the latest poll results from Quinnipiac University’s dart-throwing public polling outfit, but for the most part, results from a new “swing state” poll feature a bunch of different names and numbers that don’t mean much of anything. Let’s take a look at the new updates from Quinnipiac, shall we?

In an early look at the 2016 U.S. Senate race in Colorado, U.S. Rep. Michael Coffman, a Republican, runs better than his wife, State Attorney General Cynthia Coffman, against Democratic incumbent U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet.

No shit, Sherlock. Congressman Mike Coffman is in his 26th year as an elected official in Colorado, a career that spans five different offices. His wife, Cynthia Coffman, was just elected Attorney General last November. There are probably still people in the Attorney General’s office who have yet to meet Cynthia — why would the average voter know anything about her?

Matchups show: Michael Coffman gets 43 percent to Bennet’s 40 percent. Bennet leads Cynthia Coffman 44 – 36 percent. Colorado voters approve 46 – 29 percent of the job Bennet is doing and give him a 40 – 27 percent favorability rating. Michael Coffman gets a 30 – 23 percent favorability rating, with 47 percent who haven’t heard enough about him to form an opinion. [Pols emphasis] For Cynthia Coffman, 75 percent haven’t heard enough to form an opinion.

Again, we’re 18 months from the next election, and Mike Coffman — who is likely to run for re-election in CD-6 rather than make the jump to Senate — has a statistically insignificant lead in a hypothetical matchup with Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet. Cynthia Coffman, meanwhile, is believed to be more interested in a future run for Governor than a 2016 campaign against Bennet; this is good for Cynthia, apparently, since Bennet would win handily in another hypothetical matchup with someone whose last name is Coffman.

On the other hand, this paragraph does give us some useful information, particularly regarding Mike Coffman’s favorability ratings. Mike Coffman has an unsettling — for Mike Coffman, anyway — favorability rating of just 30%, with 23% disapproving and a surprising 47% who have no opinion on Colorado’s longest-serving elected official.

Now, here’s where the Quinnipiac poll goes completely off the rails:

Only 18 percent of Colorado voters say they’ve tried marijuana since it became legal January 1, 2014. That includes 39 percent of voters 18 to 34 years old, 16 percent of voters 35 to 54 years old and 10 percent of voters over 55 years old.

Just 18% of Colorado voters have tried marijuana since it became legal in Colorado? That seems really, really, really low, doesn’t it? Consider a SurveyUSA poll done at the end of 2014 for the Denver Post:

In the confidential survey, not quite one in four adults (22 percent) said they use marijuana, and most of those people — 70 percent — said their level of use had stayed the same since legalization…

…Among the more than three-fourths of Coloradans who said they don’t use it themselves, 73 percent said they know someone who does. And 59 percent of the nonusers said they voted for legalization.

 At the end of 2014, if SurveyUSA is to be believed, 22% of Colorado adults admitted to using marijuana, and 3 out of 4 adults said they know someone who does use marijuana. What these results really show is that Colorado voters are still disinclined to admit to using marijuana. We’d really just like to know what percentage of Coloradans forgot the question after they were asked.

As political junkies, we love polls just as much as the next, er, junkie, but this Quinnipiac University poll is more useless than usual. Michael Bennet is running for re-election in a Presidential year, which is a huge advantage for a Democrat, and Coffman (either of them) have a much less tangible explanation for why Bennet should lose in 2016.