ENGLEWOOD — The sun is nearing the mountain horizon as U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet steps from the campaign bus and enters déj… vu.
Days before the election, Colorado’s Democratic Senate candidate is trailing in most polls. The race is focused on social issues such as abortion. An unpopular president is hurting the party’s ticket. And the contest is coming down to which side energizes more voters.
For Bennet, it feels like the closing moments of his 2010 campaign — but it’s 2014, and the candidate is U.S. Sen. Mark Udall.
Four years ago, Bennet defied expectations and won his seat by 1.7 percentage points. Now, in a similar political atmosphere, Udall is attempting to use Bennet’s playbook to score another upset in a Republican-leaning election year.
“I think the reason it’s going to be the same or better is we have a great candidate in Mark Udall and we’ve got a field operation that is four times larger,” Bennet said at a recent campaign stop in Arapahoe County outside Udall’s bus.
But for all the similarities, the 2014 election differs significantly from 2010, jeopardizing Democratic plans for a sequel.
Republican challenger Cory Gardner is a better candidate. Outside money floods the state. Conservative get-out-the-vote efforts are leveling the playing field. And a new all-mail voting system is an unknown X-factor.
“I think the biggest difference is we have different candidates. Cory Gardner is not Ken Buck,” said Owen Loftus, the state GOP spokesman who worked on Buck’s 2010 Senate campaign.
Gardner left a safe congressional seat to challenge Udall and managed to avoid the messy and expensive party primary that weakened Buck. And Gardner has avoided mistakes that hurt Buck, such as when he compared homosexuality to alcoholism and a victim’s rape to “buyer’s remorse.”
Democrats seized upon the missteps in 2010, emphasizing social issues to help drive unaffiliated and women voters to their side. Bennet won women by a 17-point advantage, according to exit polls.
“These were Coloradans who voted Republican in other races, but they just couldn’t vote for Ken Buck after that scorched-earth campaign,” said Dick Wadhams, the chairman of the state Republican Party at the time.
Buck received fewer votes than the Republican candidate for attorney general, state treasurer and secretary of state, all races that the GOP won in 2010.
Democrats suggest the GOP candidate’s strength is the fundamental difference this year. “Cory Gardner has run a stronger campaign than Ken Buck — by a lot,” said Craig Hughes, a prominent Democratic strategist who managed Bennet’s campaign in 2010.
In a recent interview, Buck said he stumbled at times, but he attributed his loss to Democrats’ ground game.
“They had a better get-out-the-vote effort in 2010 as a result of having started with the micro-targeting earlier. It’s something you have to do for a number of years to accumulate the data,” said Buck, who is running for Congress in the 4th District.
The Democratic opponent is different, too. Unlike Bennet, who was appointed to the Senate seat in 2009, Udall has a longer record in Washington that gives his opponents more room for criticism. Before he joined the Senate in 2008, boosted by President Barack Obama’s campaign, Udall served five terms in the U.S. House.
Republicans cast him as an insider and note he voted with Obama 99 percent of the time.
“I think Sen. Udall probably faces more challenges than Sen. Bennet did because (Bennet) was new to Washington,” Hughes said.
Udall’s campaign suggests Gardner is just as conservative as Buck, but the Democratic emphasis on social issues isn’t as potent this year.
Buck and Gardner once supported personhood initiatives only to reverse themselves in their campaigns.
“I think there is a little more fatigue over this issue,” said Kjersten Forseth, who led ProgressNow, a Democratic-aligned organization that played a key role in 2010. “So we are having to have the conversation over and over again when really we shouldn’t be.”
Outside groups are spending about $50 million this year to define the candidates — far more than the $22 million in 2010, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
But on the Democratic side, polls show the attacks are not moving the needle. Gardner held at least a slight lead in nine of the last 10 surveys.
Democrats again point to Bennet’s campaign to bolster their spirits, noting that he led only one poll in October before he won.
What made the difference in 2010, according to Democrats, is a high-tech door-to-door campaign to identify like-minded voters and get them to vote.
Bennet and his top campaign aides now lead the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. He named the $60 million national effort this year the “Bannock Street Project” after the Denver location of the Democrat’s outreach office.
The Democrats’ paid field staff in Colorado is three times as large as Bennet’s operation, and Udall’s team counts four times as many active volunteers. The Udall campaign operates 25 field offices across the state compared with the 14 for Bennet four years ago.
“I think where the improvement is coming is with the precision that we have to be able to target people,” Bennet said. “That gets better every cycle.”
Republicans dispute the hype surrounding the Democratic ground game.
“At a certain point, you have to ask them, ‘Where was the impact all the way down the ballot? If it’s so magical, why did it have an impact only on Sen. Bennet’s election?’ ” said Chris Hansen, Gardner’s campaign manager.
While Democrats are eager to talk about their operation, Gardner’s camp won’t disclose details, except to say it has a large and effective get-out-the-vote campaign.
A conservative group, Americans for Prosperity, is running its own operation that has targeted 80,000 less-committed voters with phone calls and another 40,000 with knocks on doors, a spokesman said.
In other ways, it’s clear Republicans are taking lessons from Democrats, who used peer pressure and other tough tactics in the final days to get voters to the polls in 2010.
A new GOP flier sent to select homes warns that “Voting is a matter of public record” and “Your neighbors are counting on you to vote.”
Frank Mataipule, a 36-year-old unaffiliated voter who lives in Denver, is among the voters targeted by Gardner.
Mataipule traditionally votes Democrat and calls himself “a fan” of Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper. But he said he’s taking a close look at Gardner after liking what he read in a handful of mailers about the Republican.
“He seems like a good candidate,” he said.
The state’s new all-mail ballot system is the wild card in this election. In 2010, about 70 percent of voters received mail ballots, but this year is different, operatives for both parties argue, because 2.8 million registered voters received a ballot, including those who don’t normally vote.
“Anybody who tells you that they think they know what will happen is crazy,” Hughes said.
