An internal poll conducted last week for one of three Democrats hoping to deny U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert another term in Congress shows potential challenger Ike McCorkle leading the Republican by double digits in Colorado’s 4th Congressional District. However, a staggering third of voters surveyed said they were undecided.
McCorkle, a Navy veteran in his third run for the seat, led Boebert 41% to 27%, with 33% undecided in a hypothetical general election race, a poll of likely general election voters released on Tuesday found. Tuesday for the McCorkle campaign.
The same poll showed former President Donald Trump 10 points ahead of President Joe Biden in the district, which encompasses Douglas County, Loveland and the Eastern Plains and is the state’s most reliably Republican congressional seat.
According to results analyzed by Colorado Politics, Trump had 45% to Biden’s 35%, with independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with 6% of the vote and 14% of the votes undecided. Trump won the district’s electorate by a margin of 18.5 percentage points in 2020.
Boebert, a two-term lawmaker representing the Western Slope-based 3rd Congressional District, moved to the 4th CD at the beginning of the year. She will face five other Republicans in Colorado’s June 25 primary for a full term in the seat vacated by Republican Ken Buck when he resigned from Congress in March.
A simultaneous special election between Republican Greg Lopez and Democrat Trisha Calvarese will decide who will fill the remainder of Buck’s term through the end of the year.
Conducted by Gravis Marketing for McCorkle, the nonpartisan polling firm said the May survey interviewed 423 likely voters using online and text responses between May 22 and 24. The survey’s margin of error was 4.7 percentage points.
The pollster said the survey sample included 45% unaffiliated voters, 36% Republicans and 19% Democrats. Hispanic voters represented 9% of respondents. Asked to describe their ideology, 41% of respondents said they were conservative, 38% called themselves moderate and 22% said they were liberal.
An earlier poll conducted for McCorkle by the same company two months later found McCorkle leading Boebert by 7 points, with slightly fewer undecided voters. The March poll showed Trump leading Biden by 13 percentage points, with about the same level of undecided responses.
McCorkle told Colorado Politics that polls show Boebert is vulnerable despite the district’s strong Republican lean.
“Across District 4, we hear the same message from voters across party lines: extremism in Washington is the No. 1 threat to our democracy, and our campaign is the only one to fight it and win,” McCorkle said in a text message.
“Our team’s hard work in this district has already doubled our lead over Lauren Boebert, while other Democrats in this race are still 10 points behind her. The math is clear; we are the only Democratic campaign that will succeed in November.”
A spokesperson for Boebert’s campaign declined to comment on the Democrat’s new internal poll.
McCorkle is running in the primary against first-time candidate Calvarese, a former AFL-CIO speechwriter and National Science Foundation employee, and John Padora, an engineer and addiction recovery advocate.
Boebert’s main opponents are former state Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, R-Sterling, and state Reps. Mike Lynch, R-Wellington, Richard Holtorf, R-Akron, former radio host and nonprofit founder Deborah Flora and business consultant Peter Yu.
According to the most recent campaign finance reports, Boebert and McCorkle were the leaders in fundraising in their core areas. As of March 31, Boebert reported having raised more than $3.4 million and had nearly $1 million in cash on hand, while McCorkle had raised close to $1 million and had more than $150,000 in the bank.
Ballots begin being mailed to voters on June 3 and must be returned to county clerks by 7 p.m. on June 25.
