September 17, 2018 10:20 AM UTC

Jason Crow's Big Lead Kicks Off The Week's News

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• by: Colorado Pols

We wrote last week about a poll underway in Colorado’s red-hot CD-6 race by the New York Times and Siena College, which showed Democratic candidate Jason Crow opening a double-digit lead over incumbent Rep. Mike Coffman. This poll was especially interesting because the results were released in real time–and after the early results excited Democrats, we’ve all been waiting to see if the results would change before the end.

As the Denver Post’s Anna Staver reports, those results held steady:

Colorado Democrats are starting to believe this could be the year they finally flip Colorado’s most competitive congressional seat.

A New York Times poll of the 6th Congressional District completed Friday put Democratic challenger Jason Crow 11 points ahead of U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Aurora.

Crow’s 51-40 lead was outside the poll’s margin of error, but it also showed 9 percent of the people who responded haven’t made up their minds or wouldn’t say how they plan to vote.

Years of disappointment in this district have left Democrats extremely wary of signs that Coffman might actually be about to lose his seat. Coffman defeated highly qualified and base-beloved challengers in 2014 and 2016, and the 2018 nominee Jason Crow has worked very hard to convince the party faithful that he has a viable shot.

Given that Coffman was never once caught behind his Democratic opponent in a publicly-released poll before this year, these results are nothing short of electrifying for longsuffering Democrats. The mounting backlash against President Donald Trump is set to be felt first by Trump’s enablers in the Republican Party, and Coffman has been less successful triangulating off the party brand since Trump’s election than ever before. The delicate political balance that Coffman has managed since redistricting has been unbalanced by Trump, and the split tickets that kept Coffman in office while Democrats won the district in every race above CD-6 may finally be set to, as they say, “come home.”

For Democrats in 2018, hope springs eternal.