August 20, 2012 08:08 PM UTC

Coors Poll Update Shows Him Beating Perlmutter 98-2

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• by: Colorado Pols

Releasing selected pieces of internal polling is a time-honored tradition in politics, but some campaigns are better than others at the spin.

The campaign for Republican Joe “Not a Beer” Coors announced today that their internal poll shows Coors beating Democrat Ed Perlmutter by 9 points. Of course, the poll was done weeks ago and the campaign isn’t releasing any information about the methodology, as Fox 31 reports:

But Democrats aren’t taking the poll very seriously.

That’s because the survey was done nearly a month ago – and because Coors campaign, which commissioned it, isn’t releasing any crosstabs, more fine-grained results based on different demographic groups…

…Perlmutter, who walloped Republican Ryan Frazier by nine points in 2010, amidst a national GOP tidal wave, doesn’t buy Coors’ poll either.

The Coors campaign might have gotten some real traction if they had just tried harder to make their “internal” numbers a little more believable. Coors beating Perlmutter by 2-3 points? That’s possible. Coors beating Perlmutter by 9 points? Uh, no.

If you’re going to go public with a number that nobody will take seriously, you might as well go BIG — tell the world that your polling has Coors beating Perlmutter by 90 points!

It’s particularly absurd to think that Coors could be beating Perlmutter by 9 points in a poll conducted in July, given that voters are barely informed about candidates for President at that point. Lynn Bartels at the Denver newspaper blog lists the three questions that the Coors campaign made public, and it seems likely that the “who would you vote for” question came after a battery of positive statements about Coors and negative spin on Perlmutter.

Look, Coors is trying hard to portray this as a winnable race by spending a ton of his own money on early TV ads. But we doubt the NRCC will take this poll any more seriously than local media.