DENVER – As we head into the final week ahead of the General Election, both of the major presidential campaigns are focusing on Colorado in a last-minute blitz of the traditionally-purple state.
Chelsea Clinton will campaign for her mother, Hillary, in Aurora Tuesday at 6 p.m. at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library. She’ll visit a Boulder campaign office Wednesday morning.
Her father, former President Bill Clinton, will campaign across Colorado Friday, Nov. 4. The Clinton campaign says the former president will be in Pueblo Friday morning and in Denver and Fort Collins Friday afternoon, though the exact details have yet to be finalized.
Donald Trump’s vice presidential candidate, Mike Pence, will campaign in Loveland Wednesday, making a stop at the Larimer County Fairgrounds at 5:30 p.m.
And Trump surrogate and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will visit a conservative roundtable at Denver’s Independence Institute Wednesday.
Trump made his sixth visit to Colorado since July 1 over the weekend when he held rallies in Golden and Greeley.
The Clinton campaign has also had a heavy presence in Colorado in recent weeks, as Clinton’s pick for vice president, Tim Kaine, held a rally with singer Dave Matthews. Her campaign also bought its first ads in Colorado since this summer earlier this week, according to the Denver Post.
About one-third of Colorado’s active registered voters have already cast their ballots, and figures from the Secretary of State’s Office show Democrats have so far submitted about 28,00 more ballots than Republicans, and more than 100,000 more ballots than unaffiliated voters.
The campaigns are pushing for Colorado as the most-recent polls in Colorado have showed the race between Trump and Clinton has tightened in the state over the past several weeks.
Two polls from Republican research group Remington Research taken over the past two weeks showed Clinton with a two- and single-point advantage over Trump in a four-way race.
Though Colorado’s polls have wavered over the past year, most have shown Clinton with a variable lead. A Real Clear Politics average of the major Colorado polls show Clinton with a five-point lead, and a CBS News/YouGov poll taken between Oct. 26 and 28 showed Clinton with a three-point lead on Trump. The same poll taken from Sept. 21 to 23 showed Clinton had a single-point lead.
Those polls come as the Clinton campaign is again buying ads in Colorado for the first time since this summer, according to the Denver Post.
An ABC News/Washington Post poll released late Monday showed Clinton and Trump are virtually tied in polling, but polling experts have noted that the polls have remained largely unchanged over the past half-year.
FiveThirtyEight analyst Nate Silver tweeted Tuesday morning that even with the new ABC News/Washington Post poll, which some have said is an outlier, added to the FiveThirtyEight forecast, the overall percentage points only change by 0.2 percent.
Our model forecasts the popular vote as Clinton 49.2, Trump 44.7.
What if we removed the ABC/Post poll entirely? Clinton 49.3, Trump 44.5.— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 1, 2016
But Colorado is expected to be one of the state’s that could push either candidate over the 270-electoral-vote threshold needed to clinch the presidential nomination. FiveThirtyEight weights Colorado as the fifth-most important state in the election this year given its “purple” status and ability to tip the election one way or another, despite having only nine Electoral College votes.
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