Maddow: Colorado Polls Have A History Of Being Wrong
RACHEL MADDOW: So a funny thing happened on the way to the re-election of Obama. The Democrats of course held their election in 2008 in Denver. When it came time for the election in 2008, candidate Obama won the state of Colorado pretty easily. He beat John McCain by like nine points.
But in 2012 they knew it was going to be a harder fight, they knew it was going to be close. The public polling had President Obama up one or two points in 2012. The private polling being done by the Mitt Romney campaign showed Mitt Romney winning Colorado. That’s why he was out here still doing Colorado events three days before the election in 2012. The Romney campaign was doing this private daily tracking, and their private daily tracking polls were actually eventually published after the new election by the New Republic, which is how we know this information.
The secret poll on the Saturday before Election Day showed that mitt Romney was going to win the election 48-45. That was Saturday. On Sunday it was 48-46, they still thought Mitt Romney was going to win. But when the polling was over and the actual results came in, President Obama not only beat Mitt Romney in Colorado by 2012, he beat him by a ton: Despite the polls saying otherwise.
So what explains this distance between the polls and the results? It’s an interesting outcome in Colorado, 2012.
Here’s another. This one is from 2010. This was the polling in 2010 for the Colorado Senate race that year. Of the final 18 polls done in that senate race before the election in 2010, 17 of 18 showed that Colorado’s next senator would be a Republican guy named Ken Buck. 17 of 18 polls. Despite those pods, Republican Ken Buck lost and Democrat Michael Bennett won. And if you keep going back in time over the last few election cycles, there is something real and something kind of inexpiable going on in this state over time. That’s, in part, why we're here.
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