March 05, 2010 10:05 PM UTC

New Rasmussen Polling on Senate Race

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• by: Colorado Pols

Rasmussen Reports is out with new poll numbers on Colorado’s U.S. Senate race.

As we’ve said over and over, head-to-head polling (of general election voters) matching up candidates from different parties is virtually meaningless at this point in the race. Probably 95% of voters aren’t paying any attention whatsoever right now, so polling today is basically asking people their opinions about two people they don’t know anything about. Matchup numbers today will look completely different in three months once the candidates start advertising heavily — that’s when these numbers will tell us something meaningful.

For example, this poll shows that Republican Ken Buck would beat both Democrats Michael Bennet and Andrew Romanoff in a head-to-head race. But as you’ll see below, basically only 22% of voters even know anything about Buck. What this really means is that “unknown Republican” beats “unknown Democrat,” but given the recent anti-incumbent trends, we already knew that.

The only numbers worth looking at this early in a race, which Rasmussen acknowledges, are those that show “very favorable” and “very unfavorable” ratings; in order to have a “very” favorable or unfavorable opinion of someone, you probably know something about them. With that in mind, here are the “very” favorable/unfavorable numbers:

VERY FAVORABLE

Jane Norton: 21%

Andrew Romanoff: 17%

Michael Bennet: 16%

Ken Buck: 12%

Tom Wiens: 11%

VERY UN-FAVORABLE

Ken Buck: 10%

Tom Wiens: 11%

Andrew Romanoff: 19%

Jane Norton: 21%

Michael Bennet: 26%

What does this mean? It looks like a pretty clean slate all around. Nobody’s “very unfavorables” are too bad (and nobody has great favorables, either) which says that there isn’t a huge hurdle for any candidate to overcome. Back in 2005, then-Rep. Bob Beauprez had very high unfavorable ratings more than a year before the election for governor, which portended an uphill climb for Beauprez; for obvious reasons, it’s hard to get people to change a negative opinion about you.

Without seeing detailed results, it’s hard to know how much of Bennet’s unfavorables are because of him personally or because of a negative attitude towards incumbents generally. The most interesting number is Norton’s 21% “very unfavorable” rating; do people dislike Jane Norton, or do they dislike some other Norton? There must be some “Norton confusion” here, because when you add up both numbers, she is as well known as the incumbent Sen. Bennet. Elsewhere, we don’t see anything noteworthy about Romanoff’s numbers, good or bad, and Wiens and Buck remain a mystery to voters.