March 03, 2026 10:52 AM UTC

It's Silly "Poll" Season for Long-Shot Challengers

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• by: Colorado Pols

With the party caucus season in full swing and the June Primary Election coming up fast, we’ve reached that point in a given election when long-shot challengers try desperately to convince voters that they have a great shot at winning…if you squint really, really, really hard.

Democrats Julie Gonzales (U.S. Senate) and Milat Kiros (CO-01) are both touting new “poll” results for their respective campaigns that are so absurd that they do more to demonstrate the implausibility of their efforts than to generate enthusiasm.

The biggest lift is being done by Working Families Party (WFP) on behalf of Gonzales, whose campaign against incumbent Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper is already running on fumes. Late last week, WFP released a three-page “polling” memo explaining in excruciating detail that Gonzales has a theoretical seven-point lead over Hickenlooper…

…But only after respondents are told a bunch of nice things about Gonzales and “other things” about Hickenlooper:

After reading a battery of positive and negative arguments about each candidate (with a balanced number of positive and negative arguments on both candidates), Gonzales moves into a significant 7-point lead (outside the margin of error) with less than a quarter of respondents remaining undecided…

…Though Hickenlooper leads the race today, this contest could shape up as a strong contender for the upset of the cycle. After being presented with equal information about the two candidates, voters are open to supporting Julie Gonzales, who could emerge as the winner of this race.

Of course, the “poll” memo doesn’t offer up any actual examples of the “positive and negative arguments” offered for each candidate, which is not a simulation of, you know, reality. If you tell someone that Julie Gonzales will give every Coloradan a free pony and John Hickenlooper eats live babies, you can come up with all sorts of fun numbers to justify a potential outcome. The more accurate measure of the Democratic Primary for U.S. Senate is the first question from the WFP poll:

We have a hard time believing that Hickenlooper is only at 45% at the jump; he has the single most recognizable name in Colorado politics after serving as Denver Mayor, Governor, and U.S. Senator. Regardless, Gonzales is only at 13% and does not appear to have the resources to get her message out to Democratic voters in any meaningful way, while Hickenlooper was the only candidate in Colorado to raise at least $1 million in each quarter of 2025.

Naturally, political journalists in Colorado aren’t buying this nonsense:

In the race for CO-01 in Denver, Milat Kiros seems to have finagled a similar poll showing that she can totally defeat Rep. Diana DeGette, the longest-serving Member of Congress in Colorado history.

This is the same nonsense. If you tell people that Kiros is the second-coming of AOC and DeGette is a lizard person, then Kiros has a shot!

Maybe.

As is the case with Gonzales, Kiros would need to increase her fundraising just to be able to afford fumes; even if this narrative battery were effective, Kiros has absolutely no way to communicate these points with voters.

“Poll” results like these are a last-ditch effort by underdog campaigns to convince potential supporters that they would not be wasting time or money on a hopeless cause. But for anyone with a passable understanding of politics, they end up serving as confirmation of a suspected fate.