DENVER – Incumbent six-term Congressman Doug Lamborn leads his primary challengers in Colorado’s 5th congressional district even after high-profile court challenges delayed his making the primary ballot, according to a new poll released Wednesday.
The poll, conducted by Louisville-based by Magellan Strategies on May 20 and 21, asked 519 likely Republican primary voters in the district which of the five candidates they preferred if they had to vote that day.
Thirty-seven percent of respondents picked Lamborn; he was 10 points ahead of El Paso County Commissioner Darryl Glenn, who garnered 27 percent. State Sen. Owen Hill received 10 percent support in the poll; Tyler Stevens received 3 percent; and Bill Rhea received 2 percent support.
About one in five respondents – 21 percent – said they were undecided for whom they would vote.
Eighty-four percent of poll respondents were registered Republicans, while the rest were unaffiliated. Seventy percent were over age 55, and 87 percent were over age 45. Thirty-seven percent identified as “Trump Republicans,” while 21 percent said they were “traditional Republicans” and 21 percent identified as evangelical or Christian Republicans. Sixteen percent of those surveyed said they weren’t sure.
The poll shows Lamborn receives most of his support from people who identify as “very conservative” or “conservative,” and that self-proclaimed moderates were more likely to choose Glenn over Lamborn. Moderates were also the most likely to be undecided.
Ballots for the primary will be mailed statewide on June 4, and the Magellan poll gives more insight into where the state’s most hotly-contested congressional primary stands ahead of their delivery.
Magellan Strategies’ David Flaherty, the principal researcher on the project, said in his analysis of the poll that some hand-wringing done in recent weeks over whether a crowded field would help or hurt Lamborn seemed to be justified by the poll numbers.
“We view these results as an old movie that most Colorado veteran political observers have seen before. … While a Doug Lamborn loss is entirely possible based on the results of this survey, the challenge is much more difficult when voters have more than one non-Lamborn candidate to choose from,” Flaherty wrote.
He noted that support for Glenn and Hill combined in the poll matched support for Lamborn and said Lamborn’s “cross-over appeal” among various conservative groups make him hard to defeat.
That being said, the poll has a +/- 4.3 percent margin of error, and with 21 percent of respondents still undecided, Flaherty said that the race was “far from over.”
