An internal poll conducted last week by one of three Democrats who want to block Rep. Lauren Boebert’s reelection to Congress showed that potential challenger Ike McCorkle was leading Republicans by double digits in Colorado’s 4th Congressional District, but a full third of voters surveyed said they were undecided about who they would vote for.
McCorkle, a Marine Corps veteran running for office for the third time, is leading Boebert 41% to 27% in a hypothetical general election, with 33% undecided, according to a survey of general election voters released by his campaign on Tuesday.
The same poll showed former President Donald Trump leading President Joe Biden by 10 points in the state’s most reliably Republican district, which covers Douglas County, Loveland and the Eastern Plains.
According to a Colorado Politics poll, Trump’s approval rating was 45%, Biden’s was 35%, while independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had 6% support and 14% were undecided. Trump won the district’s voters by 18.5 percentage points in 2020.
Boebert is a second-term representative of the Western Slope-based 3rd Congressional District, which moved to the 4th earlier this year. She will compete against five other Republicans in Colorado’s June 25 primary to fill the seat vacated by Republican Rep. Ken Buck, who resigned from Congress in March.
A simultaneous special election between Republican Greg Lopez and Democrat Trisha Calvarese will determine who will serve out the remainder of Buck’s term, which runs through the end of the year.
The May poll, conducted by Gravis Marketing for the nonpartisan polling firm McCorkle & Co., surveyed 423 voters through online and text responses from May 22 to 24. The poll had a margin of error of 4.7 percentage points.
The pollsters said the sample included 45% independents, 36% Republicans and 19% Democrats. Hispanic voters made up 9% of respondents. When asked about their ideology, 41% of respondents said they were conservative, 38% were centrist and 22% were liberal.
An earlier poll conducted by the same firm for McCorkle two months later gave her a 7-point lead over Boebert with slightly fewer undecided voters. A March poll gave Trump a 13-percentage-point lead over Biden with roughly the same number of undecided respondents.
McCorkle told Colorado Politics that despite the district being strongly Republican, polls show Boebert weak.
“Across the 4th District, we are hearing the same message from voters across party lines: extremism in Washington is the greatest threat to our democracy and our campaign will 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 the other Democrat in the race is still 10 points behind. The math is clear: we are the only Democratic campaign that will succeed in November.”
A spokesman for Boebert’s campaign declined to comment on the Democrat’s new internal investigation.
McCorkle will face off in the primary against Calvarese, a first-time candidate who is a former AFL-CIO speechwriter and National Science Foundation employee, and John Padula, an engineer and addiction recovery advocate.
Boebert’s main opponents are former state Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg (R-Sterling), state Reps. Mike Lynch (R-Wellington) and Richard Holtorf (R-Akron), former talk 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 top fundraisers in their respective primary races. Through March 31, Boebert reported raising more than $3.4 million and had nearly $1 million in cash on hand, while McCorkle had raised nearly $1 million and had more than $150,000 in his bank account.
Ballots will be distributed to voters starting June 3rd and are due to be returned to county clerks by 7pm on June 25th.
