Early results from the Western Slope indicate that John McCain is holding his own in that region. McCain is only running several points behind Bush's 2004 margins in Mesa County and elsewhere.

Schaffer is posting numbers comparable to the Beauprez/Rowland ticket in 2006 in the region. This indicates that Bob Schaffer will most likely lose the region by a wide margin. It is unlikely he can make up the deficit elsewhere in the state.

The MSM will stall calling either of the statewide races in Colorado on election night until the last minute. Partly because many counties are slow to report and they want to avoid any embarassing errors and partly to maintain suspense as long as possible.

There are a few key counties to watch that historically begin reporting very quickly after the polls close. Keep an eye on these four counties and you will get a good idea of who will carry Colorado by comparing the 2008 returns to the 2004 returns. Watch to see if the Republican (McCain or Schaffer) is meeting or within a few points of Bush's 2004 margin or if there is a shift of five or more points towards the Democrat on election night.

El Paso County
67% Bush
32% Kerry

Colorado Springs is among the most conservative cities in the country. Keep an eye on the results as they role in to see if John McCain is underperforming Bush's 2004 returns. If McCain is struggling among the base, this is where it is going to show.

Mesa County
Bush 67%
Kerry 32%

The ticket-splitting nature of the Western Slope has turned the 3rd Congressional District into a kind of kingmaker in statewide races, much like Ohio or Florida at the national level. Mesa County will be among the first to report on the Western Slope and a swing towards either party here will be a bellwether for the entire region.

Boulder County
32% Bush
66% Kerry

Boulder County is a liberal foil to El Paso County's conservatism. It's worth watching to see if Obama or Udall can improve upon John Kerry's 2004 margin. If they can, it shows that excitement surrounding the Obama campaign can squeeze out even more voters in traditionally blue areas. If not, it shows that even if enthusiasm surrounding John Kerry was lacking he still was able to tap out the Democratic vote in these areas.

Jefferson County
52% Bush
47% Kerry

The margins in Jefferson County closely matched the statewide margin in 2004. This time around, polling shows McCain and Obama tied in the county. JeffCo will be a bellwether for the suburban vote in the Denver Metro area and will reflect any movement towards either candidate statewide.

Despite the wishes of ColoradoPols (also known as the Mark Udall for Senate/ ProgressNow Press Office), the NRSC is going to continue to play a role in the state on behalf of Bob Schaffer and will be running this ad starting next week:

Sorry, Jason Bane. Maybe ColoradoPols can take a break from spreading misinformation about the Senate race and go back to promoting posts from "anonymous" users attacking JeffCo Republicans for a while.

As we enter the final stretch of the election, polling from Rasmussen Reports is showing a move in Colorado towards the Republican candidates in the presidential and U.S. Senate races:

President
McCain: 47%
Obama: 50%

Senate
Schaffer: 44%
Udall: 46%

Polling has also shown that over the last few days the presidential contest in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania has narrowed to a virtual dead-heat and that Obama's lead in Michigan has almost evaporated. Unless Obama makes a good showing in the debates, he may be faced with a steady erosion of support between now and election day.

The Tarrance Group released new polling data showing the Colorado Senate race and presidential race in dead-heats.

U.S. Senate
Udall: 40%
Schaffer: 39%

President
McCain: 47%
Obama 45%

There's still a lot of undecideds in the Senate race. The media barrage from both sides might be turning people off to both candidates rather than giving one of them a real advantage.

But don't you dare call Mark Udall or any of his supporters "liberals"...

August 24th, outside the Pepsi Center.

July 14th, outside the first Schaffer/Udall debate.

Over the weekend, Vladimir Putin initiated in what can only at this point be called an all-out war with neighboring Georgia, a United States ally in the region. Reuters offers more details on the Russian offensive including this:

Russia and Georgia clashed on land and at sea Sunday despite a Georgian cease-fire offer and claim of withdrawal from the separatist province of South Ossetia, officials from both countries said.

Georgian officials said Russian planes bombed an area near the Georgian capital's airport and Russian tanks moved from South Ossetia into Georgian territory, heading toward a strategic city before being turned back.

One wonders what Mark Udall thinks of all this. Russia appears to be getting more and more aggressive with U.S. and E.U. allied nations in the former Soviet bloc. It was only a few months ago that Mark Udall and the DSCC were happily mocking Ukraine, the largest counter-balance to Russian power in Eastern Europe, to score a few cheap political points against Bob Schaffer.

Mark Udall & Co. can mock Bob Schaffer all they want for maintaining good relations with American allies in the region, the Russian invasion of Georgia proves that this is more important than ever. Just like "Big Oil Bob," this is yet another Democratic smear against Schaffer that is about to backfire.

Whoever launched the "SchafferFamilyValues" website sure didn't want to be found, which indicates that at least on some level they realized that going after a candidate's kid has no relevance on the election and is a fairly sleazy thing to do (or they were skirting some campaign finance laws in the process). They didn't attach their name to it, the leftist blogs where it first turned up aren't talking about it, and the domain name was registered using a proxy service.

After all of that trouble to stay anonymous, our shadowy Democratic hit men surely wouldn't leave their traces all over the source code of the site itself, would they?

As it turns out, they did. They didn't realize that the HTML generated by Facebook not only displays information on the profile you're viewing, but also splays a unique identifier code tied to you along with your full name all over the code of the page. Here are a few examples from the SchafferFamilyValues site:

The ID code and name match up to Tess Vella, a student at the University of Dayton. She apparently added Schaffer as a friend on July 30th which would seem to indicate they didn't really know each other and that she added Schaffer specifically for the purpose of publishing his profile.

Now it seems fairly obvious that a random college student in Ohio with no apparent web design experience wouldn't be lobbing attacks like this at a Senatorial candidate in Colorado, so it's probably safe to assume that this was at the behest of a friend who needed access to Justin Schaffer's profile. Here's where it starts to get interesting.

In what is surely a massive coincidence, out of Tess Vella's 77 friends on MySpace only one of them lives in Colorado. In an astronomical coincidence, her one friend in Colorado happens to be Steve Fenberg, the Executive Director of New Era Colorado, a "non-partisan" group in CD-2 dedicated to registering new voters and introducing young voters to candidates (as illustrated in this gushing post entitled "Udall Just Squeezed My Shoulder. Again.").

Now, it's probably going to impossible to ever say definitively whether or not New Era Colorado or any "rogue staffers" they might have were really responsible for this. What we do know for certain is that the copy of Justin Schaffer's Facebook profile floating around originated for certain with Tess Vella.

Update: NEC responds to RMR request for comment:

Hello,
Neither Steve Fenberg nor New Era Colorado have anything to do with the schafferfamilyvalues.com website.  The first we heard about this site was when it was posted on coloradopols.com and, frankly, don't even know enough about "mirror" sites to understand how it works.  We would be happy to discuss this further if you have any concerns, but honestly, New Era Colorado doesn't have any interest in the personal lives of politicians' kids.

Whoever launched the "SchafferFamilyValues" website sure didn't want to be found, which indicates that at least on some level they realized that going after a candidate's kid has no relevance on the election and is a fairly sleazy thing to do (or they were skirting some campaign finance laws in the process). They didn't attach their name to it, the leftist blogs where it first turned up aren't talking about it, and the domain name was registered using a proxy service.

After all of that trouble to stay anonymous, our shadowy Democratic hit men surely wouldn't leave their traces all over the source code of the site itself, would they?

As it turns out, they did. They didn't realize that the HTML generated by Facebook not only displays information on the profile you're viewing, but also splays a unique identifier code tied to you along with your full name all over the code of the page. Here are a few examples from the SchafferFamilyValues site:

The ID code and name match up to Tess Vella, a student at the University of Dayton. She apparently added Schaffer as a friend on July 30th which would seem to indicate they didn't really know each other and that she added Schaffer specifically for the purpose of publishing his profile.

Now it seems fairly obvious that a random college student in Ohio with no apparent web design experience wouldn't be lobbing attacks like this at a Senatorial candidate in Colorado, so it's probably safe to assume that this was at the behest of a friend who needed access to Justin Schaffer's profile. Here's where it starts to get interesting.

In what is surely a massive coincidence, out of Tess Vella's 77 friends on MySpace only one of them lives in Colorado. In an astronomical coincidence, her one friend in Colorado happens to be Steve Fenberg, the Executive Director of New Era Colorado, a "non-partisan" group in CD-2 dedicated to registering new voters and introducing young voters to candidates (as illustrated in this gushing post entitled "Udall Just Squeezed My Shoulder. Again.").

Now, it's probably going to impossible to ever say definitively whether or not New Era Colorado or any "rogue staffers" they might have were really responsible for this. What we do know for certain is that the copy of Justin Schaffer's Facebook profile floating around originated for certain with Tess Vella and that the only clear connection she has to anyone in Mark Udall's political orbit is Steve Venberg and the New Era Colorado crew.

(- promoted by Rocky Mountain Right -)

The latest "controversy" surrounding Bob Schaffer that has been cooked up by ColoradoProgressPolsNow is the shocking revelation that Bob Schaffer's teenage son has offensive items on his Facebook profile just like 95.4% of all teenage college students do.

A commenter named "CO Democrat" at Squarestate issued a strongly worded denunciation of the attack with which I agree 100%:

Why is it that people can't just mind their own business?
This is horrible, juvenille, ass-backwards bullshit.  Don't just leave the children out of it.  Leave everything that isn't pertenent to what they stand for as politicians and what kind of politician they are and leave everything else be.  I am so over this shit.

Oh, wait. That wasn't about Schaffer's son. That was about when a far right-wing blog launched an equally tasteless and pointless attack on a Democratic politician's daughter.

You would think that oppo researchers in both parties would have better things to do like, oh I don't know, researching the candidates themselves. This fad of stalking teenage children of politicians is a little odd. What's next? Partisan operatives with beat-up old vans offering candy to 5 year-old children of politicians in exchange for telling if Daddy uses curse words at home?

It's official folks, the Schaffer-Udall race is again a dead heat. A third poll in a row has found Schaffer and Udall tied. A new poll from Zogby International has found both candidates at 40% of the vote:

Schaffer (R): 40%
Udall (D): 40%

The latest poll from Quinnipiac showed both candidates tied at 44% and the latest Rasmussen poll showed Udall with a 3-point lead inside the margin of error.

It takes a special kind of candidate to blow a 10-point lead in a matter of weeks, the same kind of candidate who would pledge during a debate to show up for a key vote and then not manage to show up for it. Mark Udall is that kind of candidate.

View more polling trends at the RMR Poll Tracker.

The NRSC has put out a response to Mark Udall's hypocritical campaign commercial complaining that he is being picked on by scary special interest groups. An interesting complaint given that the airwaves are saturated with attacks on Bob Schaffer by far-left environmentalist groups, but I digress. The NRSC response draws from that one pesky thing that keeps dogging Udall in this race: his hyper-partisan leftist voting record.

Mark Udall pledged in Monday's debate that he would vote against allowing the House to go into recess before an energy plan was put forward. Not only did he not vote, the measure for the House to go into recess passed by only one vote. The Denver Post reports:

Democratic Senate candidate Mark Udall missed a critical vote today that might have kept Congress from going into summer recess until it passed an energy bill, breaking a vow he made in a recent debate.

Udall spokeswoman Taylor West said the Boulder County lawmaker was on his way back to Washington at the time and that the vote was called with only ten minutes notice. Udall asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to delay the vote but without success, and the resolution passed by one vote, 213-212.

With gas prices the number one worry of voters, promising to try to keep lawmakers in session until they took action was a bold stroke, but missing that vote could be an equally costly political mistake by the five-term congressman.

Udall's staff said the Democrat stayed in Colorado to attend several campaign-related events, including a meeting with Hispanic leaders and a fund-raising event a circumstance that Udall's Republican opponent quickly jumped on.

"While Coloradans are paying $4 a gallon for gasoline, I guess it wasn't important enough for (Udall) to show up for work this week," said Dick Wadhams, the campaign manager for Republican Senate candidate Bob Schaffer. "He made a commitment Monday, he didn't even show up for work Tuesday, and then he missed the vote today."

West said that her boss will send a letter to Pelosi today objecting to the fact that the vote wasn't delayed long enough from him to make it from the Washington airport to the capitol.

Unbelievable. Does Colorado really want someone in the Senate who can't even manage the logistics of showing up for one vote? Especially after such a fuss was made about it in the debate?

From Coloradans for Economic Growth:

It's never a good sign when a candidate blows a ten-point lead in a manner of days but that's exactly what Mark Udall has done. A new Qunnipiac University poll places Schaffer and Udall tied at 44% of the vote:

As the presidential race has tilted a bit toward McCain, GOP Senate candidate Bob Schaffer has moved into a dead heat after trailing Democrat Mark Udall by 10 points a month ago," Brown said.

In the U.S. Senate race, U.S. Rep. Mark Udall, the Democrat, and Republican Robert Schaffer are tied 44 - 44 percent, compared to a 48 - 38 percent Udall lead June 26.

There are a number of factors that could have contributed to this so it's hard to say which one is the main cause. Quinnipiac thinks that Udall's implosion is due to a McCain surge. There's also the matter of Udall's incredibly bad debate performance and his agitation of his anti-war base.

If I were Mark Udall, I would be hoping that it wasn't the debate that caused this shift since there is another about to be taped on July 28th.

Sen. Jim DeMint's Senate Conservative Fund has endorsed Bob Schaffer for Senate. From their press release:

Schaffer scores highly on each of the 10 conservative policy goals identified by SCF, but his leadership on three policies in particular stand out:

• Promote energy security: Schaffer supports an "all of the above" policy to solving our nation's energy crisis, including oil and gas exploration, expanded refining capacity, and additional nuclear facilities. He supports allowing the refinement of oil shale in the West, which would produce at least 800 billion barrels of oil.

• Eliminate wasteful spending and keep taxes low: Schaffer opposes wasteful earmarks, supports a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget, and will fight to reform entitlement programs that will otherwise bankrupt our nation.

• Give parents more school choices: Schaffer is determined to save American children from our failing public educational system. He will fight to break the unholy alliance of liberal politicians and teachers unions, which has helped institutionalize mediocrity and failed children across the country.

"I'm confident Bob Schaffer will make Colorado proud and be a hero in the Senate for all Americans," said DeMint. "I worked with him in the House of Representatives and saw him stand up to Republican leadership when they were wrong. We need that kind of courage in the Senate.

DeMint also endorses Schaffer in a YouTube video in which he discusses Schaffer's credentials and platform.