The polling looks pretty grim for Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO). If you take out explicitly Democratic-leaning polls, he hasn’t led in any poll since the beginning of October. Udall’s campaign believes they can beat the odds by recreating the strategy that led to an unexpected Senate victory in Colorado in 2010.
A big part of that is appealing to women. But another crucial piece is turning out Hispanic voters — and one Latino pollster told BuzzFeed on Tuesday that there is some evidence that the polls are underestimating Hispanic support for Udall.
And now one Udall-aligned group has made a significant TV buy for Spanish-language spots with early voting underway and less than two weeks to go until Election Day.
The Service Employees International Union purchased nearly $240,000 on Tuesday, according to the group’s filings with the Federal Election Commission, and released two new Spanish-language spots.
The ads hit Udall’s Republican challenger, Rep. Cory Gardner (R-CO), for blocking immigration reform, voting to deport DREAMers and cutting funding for education.
Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), whose winning 2010 strategy Udall has tried to emulate, won Hispanic voters by a 2-to-1 margin. Matt Barreto, co-founder of the Latino Decisions polling firm, told BuzzFeed Tuesday that the public polling seems to be off in gauging the Hispanic vote.
He pointed particularly to an Oct. 13 Denver Post poll that showed Gardner winning Latinos, 49 percent to 35 percent. Barreto said that polls conducted only in English fail to capture the true complexion of the Hispanic vote and Spanish-language polls find more robust support for Udall.
“The mainstream polls are just plain wrong in their Latino samples,” Barreto said. “Even if you give other polls the benefit of the doubt and assume the rest of their statewide numbers are correct — if you pull their Latino numbers out and put ours in — instead of Udall being down by 3, he’s up 3 to 4.”
But others worried that Udall’s campaign hasn’t paid adequate attention to the Hispanic electorate — which might help explain the major final-weeks ad buys for Spanish-language ads by SEIU.
“He’s made the campaign mainly about women and hasn’t done a very good job of connecting with and communicating to Latino immigrant voters,” immigration activist Frank Sharry told BuzzFeed. “He’s clearly better than Gardner on immigration, but he hasn’t taken full advantage of it.”
