August 18, 2009 08:12 PM UTC

AM760 Interview: New Poll Shows Ritter Having Problems With Democratic Base

•  
• by: davidsirota

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

On AM760 this morning, I interviewed Tom Jensen at Public Policy Polling about his firm’s new survey of Colorado voters, which will be released over the course of the week. You can listen to the interview here.

Jensen said the new poll shows that in terms of approval ratings, both Gov. Bill Ritter and Sen. Michael Bennet are relatively weak, but that because Ritter right now seems to have a stronger set of Republican opponents, he is in more re-election trouble heading into 2010. Jensen also said that the new poll shows Ritter is showing signs of particular weakness among self-identified Democratic voters – and that this weakness is his single biggest obstacle to re-election.

I’m not all that surprised by this – over the last year, Ritter has made headlines sticking his finger in the eye of some core Democratic constituencies (I’m looking at you, labor), and his appointment of the little-known Bennet (instead of the better-known Andrew Romanoff) didn’t do him any favors.

Indeed, those moves no doubt pissed off more than a few Democratic activists. And sure, while activists may not comprise a majority of the electorate – or even a majority of self-identified Democrats – they are the folks who tend to talk to a lot of people in their communities (in Malcolm Gladwell terms, they are the Lois Weisbergs). And so it’s quite possible that Ritter’s highest-profile base-alienating moves are an example of so-called “inside baseball” moves having a cumulative slow-motion effect on his Democratic approval ratings.

Listen to the whole interview here – it starts about half way through the clip.

Tune to AM760 tomorrow (Wednesday) between 7am-10am Mountain Time – we’ll be going over the proposed budget cuts Ritter is announcing this morning, and how he can resuscitate his standing with Democratic voters – or whether he even needs to. Hopefully, we’ll get Ritter himself on the air.

NOTE: I know ColoradoPols has raised some important questions about the accuracy of PPP’s overall polling methods – and I think those questions are quite legitimate, especially when considering topline numbers that may be affected by oversampling of Republican voters. However, I also think it’s not a stretch to believe that while PPP’s polls have flaws, they also probably reflect a broad trend that is indeed real – especially the trends they track specifically among self-identified Democratic voters (data which would be less affected by oversampling of self-identified Republican voters).