DENVER – Colorado voters are increasingly displeased with President Donald Trump and are looking ahead to 2018’s political races with high interest, according to a new poll released this week.
The poll from Keating Research, based in Telluride, shows two-thirds of state voters have an unfavorable opinion of the president, and three in five think he is “dishonest and tells lies.”
The poll also shows that Coloradans’ opinions of the direction the country is headed has gone downhill since March.
Sixty-three percent of those polled said the country was going in the wrong direction, while 33 percent said it was going in the right direction in the November poll. In March, half of respondents said the country was headed in the wrong direction, while 41 percent said it was going in the right direction.
The percentage of respondents who see Trump in an unfavorable fashion increased from 55 percent in March to 64 percent in November, according to the poll, and 26 percent of those viewing him unfavorably were Republicans. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, took all of Colorado's delegates while trying to earn the presidential nomination last year.
But the negativity toward Trump didn’t quite extend to Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., whom survey respondents said they viewed more favorably (44 percent) in November than they did in March (39 percent). Slightly more people viewed him unfavorably (38 percent in March, 40 percent in November) in the latest poll.
Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, meanwhile, saw a six-point jump in his popularity among those polled, jumping from a 51-percent favorable rating to a 57-percent rating between March and November.
The poll also found that people in Colorado are either very excited for next year’s elections, or rather unconcerned.
One question asked on a scale of 1-10 how interested a person was in next year’s congressional and governor’s office elections. Forty-three percent of respondents answered with a “10,” while 21 percent answered with a “5” or lower. The average score was a 7.8.
But Keating said that Democratic interest in next year’s election is higher, and “is further proof that the increase in turnout among Democrats in the 2017 election is a harbinger of things to come in the 2018 election.”
The Keating Colorado Poll came close to predicting Hillary Clinton’s five-point win in Colorado in the 2016 election, and conducted this poll independently, Keating said.
The survey was conducted between Nov. 9 and 13 and used 500 telephone surveys (half land-line, half cell phones) among active voters in Colorado who voted in 2014 or 2016. The voters surveyed broke down to 32 percent Democrats; 35 percent unaffiliated/other; and 33 percent Republicans. The margin of error is 4.4 percent.