Joe O’Dea vs Michael Bennet U.S. Senate election 2022 heats up

Recent dueling polls in Colorado’s U.S. Senate race paint pictures of two different contests heading into the traditional start of general election politicking.

The two polls, both from highly rated firms albeit with different political leans, each show incumbent Democrat Sen. Michael Bennet in the lead, but shy of the 50% mark. It’s their findings about Republican challenger Joe O’Dea where they really diverge.

Public Policy Polling, which holds an A- rating from data journalism site FiveThirtyEight and is typically affiliated with Democrats, found 46% of respondents would vote Bennet over O’Dea’s 35% — but 12% are undecided. Further, it found 44% of respondents were undecided on their opinion of the Republican construction company executive.

That poll sampled 782 Colorado voters and has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 3.5 percentage points. But, notably, it doesn’t filter by likely voters and 11% of respondents said they either didn’t vote or voted third-party in the 2020 presidential election. The 2020 general election set a record for voter turnout, with nearly 87% of active voters casting ballots. Only about 2.5% of votes for president were for third-party candidates.

Meanwhile, a more opaquely presented poll shows a dead heat, according to the Washington Examiner. According to the Examiner, that poll showed Bennet with 48% support to O’Dea’s 47%, with 5% undecided. However, the Colorado GOP declined to make that poll available to the Examiner or other media outlets, making it hard to suss out the details of the poll and how its findings were characterized.

Tarrance Group, which conducted the poll on behalf of the Republican Attorney General’s Association, is also highly rated by FiveThirtyEight, with a B+ ranking. That poll surveyed 600 likely registered voters and has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 4.1 percentage points, according to the Examiner.

O’Dea said the election “is gonna be a dogfight” — and one he’s ready for. Bennet, for his part, said he runs every race like he’s 20 percentage points down.

Democratic advantage has been downgraded, but Bennet hopes Inflation Reduction Act, other bills, will energize electorate

While those polls show no conclusive edge for Bennet — and as national prognosticators downgrade the race from likely Democrat to lean Democrat — the incumbent frequently rattles off his party’s recent achievements like the wind is at his back.

A bipartisan infrastructure bill that equals the “most significant investment in infrastructure in this country since Eisenhower was president,” as Bennet put it; a bill to help veterans affected by toxic burn pits; a bipartisan gun bill that encourages states to adopt red flag laws like Colorado’s and earmarks billions of dollars for mental health; a bill to encourage domestic microchip manufacturing; and a strictly partisan climate change bill that included $4 billion aimed at curbing the drought that’s drying the Colorado River.

“Think about that record compared to the chaos of the Trump years,” Bennet said, wrapping up his remarks at a fundraiser for a local Democrat recently. “Think about that investment in America compared to an infrastructure week that never got anything done. Do we really want to go back to that?”

It’s a stark turnaround in mood following a dour turn through the state earlier in the summer. Then, Bennet cast blame on the former president for the loss of national abortion protections and acknowledged how weak it felt to argue spiking inflation was an international problem and not something voters should punish in-power Democrats for.

But since then, gas prices have crawled back down to nearly their lowest point since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, and abortion has become a galvanizing issue for people who want to protect access to the procedure.

“Prices are getting a little bit better. It’s still very challenging for people, but they’ve started to move in a better direction,” Bennet said recently. “That helps. And people are very fired up about Roe vs. Wade and the reversal by the Supreme Court. That’s bringing a lot of people out because they feel like they’ve got to try to save this democracy.”

O’Dea pitches race as “a referendum on the trillions in spending and debt”

As much as Bennet wants to tout the bills as accomplishments, not every Coloradan would agree. O’Dea chief among them.

O’Dea has said he supported the bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed last year, but after that, the list narrows. His website touts endorsements from gun rights groups, and he attacked the Inflation Reduction Act, which largely addresses climate change and health care issues, as something that “goes against everything that we believe in here in Colorado and trying to make it more affordable.”

However, O’Dea did say he supports the $4 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act aimed at the Colorado River drought — though he credits Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, and not Bennet, for securing the money.

O’Dea said that the Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t actually directly address inflation and worried about its spending while Americans worry about their own bank accounts. He also echoed a recent Republican talking point about the bill funding the IRS.

“I wouldn’t be boasted about voting for additional spending and more IRS agents if I was him here in this state,” O’Dea said in an interview.

The U.S. Treasury Department generally estimates that every dollar invested in tax collection results in several more dollars recouped in otherwise owed taxes. But for O’Dea, who cites the national debt as a key issue, the extra agents aren’t worth the cost to taxpayers.

“Whatever is going to get collected is gonna get spent, and that’s the problem,” O’Dea said. “We need to quit worrying about collecting more money from working Americans and start talking about not spending the money.”

He recently unveiled his priorities if elected to the Senate: Reducing spending and the deficit, hiring more police, beefing up border security — including the wall — and promoting renewable and traditional energy development among them. O’Dea called the election “a referendum on the trillions in spending and debt by President Joe Biden and Sen. Michael Bennet that’s caused this inflation crisis.”

O’Dea had made gas prices and inflation a keystone of the campaign. He otherwise explicitly said he wants to avoid what he called social issues, chiefly abortion.

While gas prices have dropped from mid-summer highs, O’Dea notes it’s still more than $1 more per gallon than a year-and-a-half ago. Things like rent and heating bills are likewise still high. In short, even if economic forecasts and models show costs slowing, people aren’t feeling it, O’Dea said.

“(Coloradans are) having to make tough decisions,” O’Dea said. “And when I’ve talked to a lot of people across the state, they’re all very insecure with where we’re headed. And I think they’re ready for a change.”

O’Dea spent $600,000 in August on advertising and outreach, according to his campaign, with a similar amount slated to be spent on ads this month. While he doesn’t distance himself from the Republican Party in the ads — he did host nearly the entire slate of GOP contenders at one of his properties in early August — he doesn’t don elephant ears, either. The first ad doesn’t mention the party at all; in the second, his wife only mentions it to note “he’s an American before he’s a Republican.”

His biography — O’Dea is the adopted son of a Denver police officer and he left college a semester early to start a construction company — is a major throughline in those ads, including a recently launched Spanish-language spot. In the latter, he said he will support securing the border while protecting “dreamers,” or immigrants who arrived in the country without documentation as young children and grew up here.

Bennet, in a gaggle with reporters recently, took a shot at O’Dea over the ad. He both highlighted his work on the so-called Gang of 8 immigration reform bill that he worked on in 2013, which passed the Senate but was sidelined by Republican leadership in the House, and tried to rebuke the middle-of-the-road tack from O’Dea.

“(O’Dea’s) got a bunch of slogans,” Bennet…