Thursday, April 29, 2010

Put a fork in him...

Scott McInnis' gubernatorial hopes are over. There is no way that he wins a statewide race after his pandering on immigration and the latest revelations of his past. I don't have exact numbers handy but in 2008 Hispanics made up a little over 12% of the voting population in Colorado and 10% of likely voters, in 2010 both of those number have certainly risen.

With 2.4 million active voters in the state McInnis looking at a deficit of around 40,000 votes if Hickenlooper just wins exactly the same percentage of the Hispanic vote as Obama did. Given McInnis' decision to go the Full Arizona that number will likely be higher. Remember too that of those active voters we'll only see, at best, 60% turnout this fall (in 2006 it was less than 50%). 40,000 votes makes a big difference in an election pool of only 1.2 to 1.4 million people.

1 comment:

Andrew Oh-Willeke said...

I'm not at all convinced that an appearance of overt racism hurts a Republican candidate in a statewide race.

Losing already scarce Republican votes for a GOP candidate, doesn't matter in the electoral calculus if you pick up votes in the xenophobic unaffiliated category, which is surprisingly large.

To lose votes in a serious campaign ruining way, the faith of unaffiliated non-xenophobe suburbanites and cheap labor conservatives has to be lost. I'm not sure that McInnis has crossed that threshold yet.