Mike Coffman: 'Ultimate Escape Artist' Has Voter Power Vs. Crow

AURORA, CO – By Mike Littwin for The Colorado Independent. I know better than to believe — I mean, really, truly, from-deep-in-my-gut believe — that Mike Coffman is going to lose his CD-6 seat in Congress.

Sure, it looks like he’s going to lose, but haven’t we been here before? Haven’t we seen the five-term incumbent facing the best the Democrats could throw at him in races that were for months seen as toss-ups, only for him to win handily in the end?

Well, yes. We’ve seen it repeatedly.

So, why would the answer possibly be no this time?

Ask the national Republicans. This isn’t Democratic wishful thinking. This is hard-headed decision-making by the guys who are paid handsomely to make these decisions. In the home stretch, with two weeks to go, Republicans are allocating their money where it can be most effective, which does not seem to be in backing Coffman even though he holds a seat in a must-win district. First, a Paul Ryan-linked Super PAC took back a million bucks for TV ads. Then, just last week, the National Republican Congressional Committee, which has spent $2.1 million on Coffman, dumped him in the home stretch, taking back another million.

These guys know Coffman’s story. They know he’s the ultimate escape artist. They knows he’s the Colorado Democrats’ white whale. They know he keeps winning in a Dem-leaning district that Hillary Clinton won easily. They know that in dealing with a diverse community, Coffman is one of the rare Republicans to have made that work.

But they also know Donald Trump’s terrible numbers in Colorado and Coffman’s tough road in dealing with those numbers and with Trump himself.

The New York Times/Siena College pollsters have come to the district twice to check the progress there. In the first, upstart Democrat Jason Crow led Coffman by 10 points. In the second, just a week ago, Crow was ahead by 9.

There’s polling and then there’s history. Yes, it’s clear that history rarely applies to Trump. If it did, he wouldn’t be able to get away with tarring the caravan of Central Americans from violence-torn countries as not only including “bad people,” but also “unknown Middle Easterners.” It’s a three-fer for Trump — bad Latinos, scary terrorists and, I guess, George Soros. Yes, Trump keeps saying the marchers are being paid to make the trip by Democrats, which always means Soros. The absurdist implication here is that terrorists/cartel gang members have decided to attack America by first marching 1,500 miles — alongside many hundreds of crying children. Or maybe they’re just coming for the imaginary 10% tax cut.

READ MORE at The Colorado Independent

Image: Jason Crow and Mike Coffman at a candidate forum in Denver on Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2018. (Photo by Rachel Lorenz for The Colorado Independent)