March 18, 2010 09:58 PM UTC

Hold the Confetti, Really

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

There are two very different narratives taking shape in the wake of last Tuesday’s Democratic caucuses–one is what we’re seeing repeated quite a bit in national press, the story of candidate Andrew Romanoff’s “stunning victory” over appointed Sen. Michael Bennet, which dovetails nicely with the story of Ken Buck’s surprisingly strong finish in GOP Senate preference polls. We don’t begrudge out-of-state reporters for oversimplifying what happened in Colorado this week for the purposes of fitting the whole thing into one paragraph or TV news clip, c’est la vie.

But the other narrative, which we think much more accurately reflects the process in Colorado and the state of this race generally, was reported by the Denver Post’s Lynn Bartels today:

Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff declared victory for the little guy in Tuesday night’s caucuses, saying “Main Street won, Wall Street lost,” but among the pundit class, the results were viewed differently.

By barely cracking 50 percent among the people perceived as his base, Romanoff has a tough row to hoe to compete with Michael Bennet, his $3.7 million in the bank and deep support from the Obama administration, said political consultants Steve Welchert, a Democrat, and Katy Atkinson, a Republican…

Democrats at their caucuses had only one major contested race, the matchup between Romanoff and Bennet, who was appointed to the U.S. Senate in January 2009. Romanoff received 50 percent to Bennet’s 41 percent.

“We just saw the strongest day Romanoff is likely to have,” Welchert said. “The fact that the spread is 10 points evaporates when you’re going to be outspent 10-to-1.”

Atkinson said she had expected Romanoff to top Bennet, but by a wider margin.

With irony that few readers will miss, Romanoff’s biggest defender in Bartels’ story is none other than Colorado GOP chairman Dick Wadhams:

“Are you kidding me?” Wadhams said. “With all respect to my good friend Katy, Romanoff didn’t even get into the race until September, and President Obama just came here and campaigned for Bennet.”

We have a little bit of news to add to this parlor-game debate, which is really just a debate about impressions of impressions ahead of the parts of the primary process that matter: but impressions being the game today, you might be interested in knowing that Romanoff has dropped below the much-balleyhooed 50% threshold in the latest updated caucus preference poll results. As of 12:50PM MDT, Romanoff is sitting at 49.96%–unlike sale prices in the grocery store, a few cents off doesn’t actually make this number more appealing.

Joking aside, our view hasn’t changed: Romanoff didn’t beat Bennet by enough of a margin to make Tuesday’s caucus preference poll “conclusive” either way, and that means Romanoff did not perform well enough to meaningfully affect the same long odds he faced before the caucuses.

Steve Welchert is stating the simple facts of the matter above when he talks about Romanoff being outspent 10-1 in the coming months, and that is all that’s going to matter when it comes to reaching thousands of primary voters instead of hundreds of ardent party-activist caucusgoers. The same thing holds true for Buck on the Republican side; his victory on Tuesday is certainly significant, but if he has another $40,000 quarter of fundraising, none of this will make any difference come August. As we’ve said over and over, the voters who will decide the primary are not all that different than the voters who will decide the general election. They’re not that interested and not well-informed, so it’s going to take a lot of mail, radio, and especially television to get those votes–none of which you can buy with contrived moral rectitude.