October 11, 2022 11:07 AM UTC

Heidi Ganahl Embraces the No-Mentum

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

Let’s start today’s lesson with three numbers: 17, 17, 18.

In the three most recent publicly-available polls in the Colorado race for Governor, these are the margins in which incumbent Democrat Jared Polis is shown to be leading Republican challenger Hiedi Heidi Ganahl. According to a new poll out today from Marist, Polis now leads Ganahl by 18 points — a one-point increase from polling in late September showing Polis with a 17-point advantage.

As it turns out, spending 10 days talking about nonexistent “furries” invading Colorado schools is not a particularly useful exercise when it comes to voter outreach.

Mail ballots start their journey to voter mailboxes on Monday. While Ganahl is finally running television ads — though not many — she is refusing to participate in the two gubernatorial forums that would attract the widest audience (those two forums, combined, are hosted by 9News, Denver7, The Denver Post, and Colorado Public Radio). In other words, there’s very little chance that Ganahl can reach more than a few handfuls of undecided voters before most people have cast their ballots.

Ganahl’s campaign seems to be anticipating bad news on Nov. 8, but it’s still a little jarring to see that the Republican nominee for Governor won’t be in attendance when the GOP hosts its Election Night Party:

You might recall that in the days before the June 28th Primary Election, Ganahl was planning to eschew a public election night party in favor of a smaller gathering at her home. As we noted at the time, we hadn’t seen a major party candidate avoid a public Election Night party since Republican Senate candidate Jon Keyser barricaded himself inside his living room in 2016.

Ganahl eventually changed her mind and decided to hold a watch party at the same facility where Tina Peters was finding out that she would not be the GOP nominee for Secretary of State. Perhaps Ganahl will shift course again before Nov. 8, but her absence from the invitation above is a pretty good sign that she has come to the realization that she is not going to be Colorado’s next governor.

At least we’re all in agreement on that point.