June 11, 2010 10:27 PM UTC

Coken fails to make ballot - Why did the pundits get it wrong?

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• by: and another thing

The House District 4 race is a perfect example of how a political race on paper can be quite different from the local perspective.  About a year ago, political pundits picked Jennifer Coken as the front-runner — on paper she looked great.  

Coken was the outgoing Denver Democratic Party chair, a professional political fundraiser employed by a well respected environmental non-profit.  Coken’s toughest opponent on paper was Amber Tafoya, a professional lobbyist and attorney whose connections at the capitol and legal world gave her an inroad to her fellow lobbyists’ pocketbooks.  Dan Pabon was the underdog as an attorney with no professional political experience with less time to commit as a parent of a child he had while still in high school.

Fast forward to today…

Coken failed to get enough caucus attendees to get on the ballot and then failed again to make the ballot by getting enough signatures via petition.  

According to Lynn Bartels – http://blogs.denverpost.com/th…

The Coken outcome shocked Democrats. She’s the former chairwoman of the Denver Democratic Party…

Tafoya also failed to get on the ballot through the assembly, had to pay petition gatherers to get on the ballot and has about $2,000 cash on hand.  Pabon was the only Democrat to make the ballot via the assembly and has over $33,000 cash on hand.

All politics is local…

Digging deeper, it is the things not on paper that indicate that Pabon is the likely winner of the race.  A closer look shows that Coken and Tafoya only recently moved to the district while Pabon grew up in the district.  A look at the campaign finance reports show that hundreds of Pabon’s donors live within the boundaries of House District 4, while Coken and Tafoya’s donors come from outside the district or outside the state.  It appears as if Pabon is able to get local support of people within the district while the favored candidates must rely on connections outside the district.

Contrast this race against some of the analysis in the recent Schrager/Witwer book, The Blueprint; one of the lessons Republicans were supposed to learn is that the best candidates to recruit are those with the deepest and most rooted local ties.  Did the political pundits forget this lesson or is this just a errant prognostication?

What should have outsiders to Northwest Denver considered before picking Coken or Tafoya as favorites?