How soft is Ritter's support?

Pols points us to a new Rasmussen Poll,

A new poll shows 41 percent of Coloradans say Gov. Bill Ritter is doing a "good" or "excellent" job, a 13-point slip from May that comes after Ritter was getting high marks since his election in 2006.

Rasmussen Reports polls, the latest of which was released Tuesday, show Ritter's job-approval rating dropping each month since May, when 54 percent of Coloradans rated the first-term Democratic governor as doing a good or excellent job.

Rasmussen's July automated telephone survey of 500 likely voters had a 4.5 percentage point margin of error and showed 11 percent of Coloradans said Ritter was doing an "excellent" job, while 30 percent said he was doing a "good" job. Meanwhile, 28 percent said he was doing a "fair" job, 25 percent gave him a "poor" rating and 6 percent said they were not sure.

Evan Dreyer, spokesman for Ritter, discounted the Rasmussen poll.

"The governor does not care about polls," Dreyer said. "He's not trying to win a beauty contest. He's governing and leading to make a positive difference in people's lives."

As I noted over there, I'm hearing numbers like 55% approve from private polling. That's a pretty significant drop from his 70%+ last year and no matter what Dreyer says that is surely worrisome.

Political capital is fleeting and if you fail to spend it when you have it you cannot always count on it still being in the bank later. I think the governor is learning this lesson right now.

I'm still hearing the same complaints about many of the governor's top staffers - arrogant, rude, hard to work with. And that's coming from people who worked hard to support the governor during his campaign.

What happens if his severance tax measure fails? That could be a blood in the water moment for the Colorado GOP.

I still think, barring a major scandal, that he'll win re-election but that's partly because the GOP doesn't have a good candidate to challenge him. The people I talk to are pretty luke warm on his performance thus far, They support him because he's a Democrat and is competently leading state government but his leadership on actual substantive issues has been lacking.