September 11, 2009 11:56 PM UTC

Rasmussen Shows Mixed Bag for Bennet

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• by: Colorado Pols

Rasmussen Reports decided to drop a poll into the field on Colorado’s U.S. Senate race at an unfortunate time. While the poll shows that incumbent Democrat Michael Bennet is not very popular, the matchups between potential challengers Ken Buck and Ryan Frazier are all but irrelevant now that Jane Norton has entered the race on the Republican side.

But rather than focus on what the Rasmussen poll does not tell us about 2010, let’s look instead at the small nuggets of valuable information that it does contain.

Bennet outpolls Buck 43-37, but trails Frazier 40-39. While giddy Frazier supporters (both of them) will no doubt point to this as proof that their man has what it takes to be the next GOP Senator from Colorado, that’s not the case. Looking a little deeper into the poll shows why:

Fourteen percent (14%) of Colorado voters have a Very Favorable opinion of Bennet while 18% have a Very Unfavorable view. His opponents are less well known and nearly half the state’s voters don’t have even a soft impression of either candidate. Buck is viewed Very Favorably by 9% and Very Unfavorably by 7%. For Frazier, the numbers are 6% and 6% respectively.

As you can see, Frazier outpolls Buck in a head-to-head despite the fact (or rather, because of the fact) that nobody knows who he is. In this poll, Frazier basically plays the roll of the “generic Republican candidate,” and what voters are saying is that right now they’ll take an unknown Republican candidate over Bennet…but that doesn’t mean they would take Frazier. This would be bad news for Bennet even if he wasn’t facing a difficult primary challenge from former House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, but it’s also not terribly different from what a lot of elected officials are seeing around the country: People just don’t like the incumbents.

To illustrate that last point, take a look at the toplines. Bennet’s total popularity rating is at 43% — not good, certainly, but not awful for an unknown Senator, either. Buck is at 35% and Frazier at 26% when it comes to favorability, which gets back to our earlier point about the head-to-head matchups. Voters appear to like a generic Republican candidate better than Bennet, but Buck and Frazier certainly aren’t popular enough to fill that role. Would Norton poll better in this regard? Perhaps.

The biggest concern for Bennet is in the 34% negative rating he holds. This is pretty high for someone whom the public really doesn’t know at all. It’s a lot easier to move from unknown to favorable than it is from unliked to favorable, and Bennet needs to hurry up on fixing this problem before it starts to snowball on him.