Junction Daily Blog: Western Colorado Talk and Opinion

Candidate Forum (yawn) and Another Poll

July 19, 2006

I see the League of Women Voters held their Republicans-only candidate forum last night. It's sad to see the League, an organization I always respected, sink to becoming shills for a single party. While I am sure someone will explain to me that the debate was only for candidates in the August primary, the Democrats are having an August primary too, and all of the Democratic candidates happen to be on the ballot. Not only that, each one of them will be running against a Republican in the fall. It would have been nice, not to mention educational, to see them head-to-head against their Republican opponents. Or maybe at least in the same room at the same time. It's not like they charge for showing up. A little extra voter education never hurts, particularly in an age where the winner is no longer the smartest or most eloquent candidate, just the one with the loudest negative ads.

I suppose you can pardon the voters for becoming ho-hum about such non-events if the candidates themselves can't get worked up about them. Pastor Dan didn't even show up. That's OK, last month he and his opponent told us there is no difference between them, so I guess there's no point in seeing them debate. I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a bold prediction that the District 54 primary will go to the candidate with the best hair, since there are no other discriminators and the candidates are doing their best to make sure that none actually creep into the race.

Reading about the non-event in this morning's paper, I see that Josh is advocating a statewide edict on how school districts spend money, while Matt is saying, "Wait a minute, that may not be such a good idea." Actual Republicans have always been for local control of schools, at least as far back as I remember, and Matt is no exception. What's up with Josh? Well, his family is too young for him to understand what it's like to be a "customer" of public education, so he doesn't get it. Trust me, someday he will. Another example of where a little life experience is worth more than simply tossing a football when it comes to making good decisions. I've watched Penry for the two years he's been my State Representative, and this is just one of a number of times that he's tried to restrict public education. I really don't know what he has against it.

The Denver Post released Yet Another Poll earlier this week on the Governor's race and I didn't run it because I was too busy writing about the Worst of YouTube. That was awful, eh? Basically, the Post poll, like the Rasmussen poll, shows the numbers stabilizing somewhat, with Ritter holding a small lead that's slightly greater than the poll margin of error. Colorado Pols has been tabulating the numbers as they come out so that you can keep them in perspective; I've done them one better by putting the results in a table in which polls taken in the same month line up. That way you can see not only the results for each poll, but also see the movement within each polling house. The Denver Post polls are conducted by Mason Dixon Polling and Research; the Wall Street Journal polls (shown as WSJ) are conducted by Zogby.

Next month I'll probably reduce the numbers to a graph, because html tables give me a headache.

Denver Post	Oct-05	Feb-06				Jul-06
Ritter	42	43				43
Beauprez	36	37				35

WSJ	Oct-05				Jun-06
Ritter	39				44
Beauprez	44				36

Rasmussen		Feb-06	Apr-06	May-06	Jun-06	Jul-06
Ritter		40	41	37	43	42
Beauprez		33	40	39	38	37

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