McCain's Colorado ticket: 'Skiing uphill'

by Jim Tankersley

ARVADA, Colo. -- Forget Ohio, forget Florida, forget Missouri and North Carolina and Indiana. John McCain could sweep them all and still lose the presidency--unless he can engineer a comeback worthy of local football legend John Elway here in Denver's swing suburbs and their Virginia cousins.

Colorado and Virginia loom as the final barrier between Democrat Barack Obama and the White House, based on the size of his leads in state-by-state polling. Winning either state would likely vault Obama past the requisite 270 electoral votes. To stop him, McCain must either carry both states, neither of which was a top-tier battleground four years ago, or pull a Pennsylvania upset.

Both paths look daunting for the Republican nominee. Polls show McCain trailing by double digits in Pennsylvania. In Virginia, which last voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 1964, rapid demographic changes have tilted the playing field away from the GOP and helped Obama open a lead in most polls.

McCain's mountainous task is perhaps best illustrated here, at the foot of the newly snow-dusted Front Range. President George W. Bush won Colorado by 100,000 votes in 2004. Democrats have surged to match Republicans on the voter rolls, and young people have registered in record numbers. If the '04 election were held today in Colorado, and all demographic groups performed as they did then, strategists say John Kerry would win by 75,000 votes.

Further complicating things, McCain confronts a deficit of at least 5-1 in ad spending and field offices in Colorado. "It's worse than running uphill," said Lori Weigel, a Republican pollster for Public Opinion Strategies who is based just outside Denver. "It's like downhill skiing, uphill."

See the rest of the story on McCain's Colorado challenge in today's Tribune and here in the Swamp:

Republicans say McCain could still defy the odds if he can stoke Colorado's long-standing aversion to taxes and spread an anti-tax message through the yellow-leafed suburban streets. Veteran Democratic politicians fear the effects of late character attacks on their candidate. Neither side is ready to call the state for Obama.

But almost everyone says it leans his way. The evidence is on display in Arvada, in Jefferson County northwest of Denver. Bush beat Kerry in this county by 5 percentage points in 2004, slightly better than his margin statewide. That year, registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 9 points in Jefferson County. Now the advantage is down to 2 points.

Here in Arvada's Old Towne district, where a do-it-yourself pottery studio and a tea room coexist with family-run Mexican restaurants and an Army surplus store, interviews suggest McCain is struggling with voters his party traditionally wins.

Stephanie Jaklich, a dental hygienist and mother of four, is a registered Republican who initially backed Mitt Romney. She worries about education and the Iraq War. After watching the final presidential debate this month, she said, "I'm done"--and prepared to cast an early ballot for Obama.

Polls show Obama has passed McCain in the past month among a key suburban demographic: college-educated. Nearly two in five Jefferson County voters have at least a bachelor's degree. In Virginia's battleground Fairfax County, it's nearly three in five. GOP strategists say they've also lost ground among the independent voters who make up roughly a third of Colorado's suburban electorate.

Colorado and Virginia top the list of potential "tipping points" for this election, said Nate Silver, founder of the data-heavy politics Web site fivethirtyeight.com and an Obama supporter, and it's "all about demographics."

"Although the McCain people say they're going to compete in Pennsylvania, there's no evidence that it's tightening," he said.

There's mounting evidence that Virginia and Colorado could defy Republican predictions that they would "come home" to McCain. Despite Bush's wins, Democrats have recently won high-profile statewide races in both states.

The Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., have added more than 300,000 residents in the past decade--and they tend to be more liberal. The Richmond area is home to a sizable African-American population, which Obama mobilized effectively in the state's primary.

In Colorado, by the Obama campaign's count, 200,000 new voters ages 18 to 29 have registered in the past two years; polls show that's a group that splits heavily for Obama. Democrats have also made inroads in rural areas that long favored Republicans. Obama has opened offices in remote towns in the Rockies and along the state's Eastern Plains.

On a rural bus tour last week, Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) pitched Obama as a backer of a recent farm bill and a defender of Colorado water rights. He later predicted Obama would win half of rural counties and carry the suburbs, a recipe for statewide victory.

Republicans see ways for McCain to rally, starting with pocketbooks. "John McCain has to convince people his policies will free up the economy and open up new jobs," said Mike Ciletti, a GOP consultant in Denver. Others say McCain must paint Obama as a tax-raising risk.

"He's got to hammer the tax message," said Dick Wadhams, the state Republican Party chairman. Later, he added, "It's hard to see how he wins the nation without winning Colorado."

McCain has scaled back ad spending but swung through the state last week. Colorado Republicans compare his situation to a now-famous predicament for Elway, the Denver Broncos quarterback who appeared with McCain in Colorado on Friday: backed up on his own 2-yard line late in the fourth quarter, on the road, down a touchdown to the Cleveland Browns in the conference championship.

Ask any Browns fan how that turned out.