September 06, 2016 04:11 PM UTC

GOP Pollster: Wage Hike Finds Favor With Colorado Voters

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Denver Business Journal’s Ed Sealover reports, polling numbers out from GOP-aligned Magellan Strategies spell good news for Amendment 70, the ballot measure to raise the state’s minimum wage–and bad news for Amendment 69, the ColoradoCare single-payer health insurance proposal:

A constitutional amendment to raise Colorado’s minimum wage holds a 13-point lead in the first publicly released poll on the proposal, which came out on Tuesday.

Also, the ColoradoCare amendment to create a statewide single-payer health-care system is getting crushed by a margin of roughly 2-1/2-to-1, according to a second poll put out by Louisville-based Magellan Strategies…

Amendment 70, which would raise the state’s minimum wage from $8.31 an hour to $12 per hour in steps by 2020, gets 55 percent support in the sample of 500 likely 2016 general-election voters that was conducted from Aug. 29-31. Another 42 percent of voters oppose it, while just 3 percent remain undecided roughly two months before the Nov. 8 election.

The numbers for Amendment 70 look even better under the hood, with a bigger margin of Democrats in favor than Republicans opposed–and best of all, a huge lead for the measure among independent voters, 65-35%. The survey also looked at Amendment 69, the ColoradoCare proposal, and the same respondents who score minimum wage so highly are slaughtering single-payer health care 65-27%. Even Democrats oppose Amendment 69, though by a smaller 45-41% margin.

Support for Amendment 70 may be taking even some Democrats by surprise. This past weekend, Gov. John Hickenlooper was interviewed by 9NEWS Brandon Rittiman about the proposal, which he claims to be “undecided” about but as a former bar owner has a natural predisposition against. Hickenlooper didn’t do a very good job talking down the measure, however, bogusly forecasting harm to agricultural employers when farmworkers are exempt from the proposal, and claiming that in downtown Denver servers “already” make $20-30 an hour. While that may be true at the Wynkoop or other higher-end eateries and watering holes, the median wage for tipped workers in Colorado is in reality just over $9 an hour.

If Amendment 70’s numbers stay strong into October, Hickenlooper may want to revisit his knee-jerk reaction to a $12 an hour minimum wage–especially when his own party’s platform is calling for substantially more.

Call it a question of getting with the times.