Today’s piece of peculiar polling comes from Quinnipiac, which surveyed Colorado and discovered the state feeling especially reddish. Most startlingly, the poll had Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz tied in a 2016 trial heat.
Now you never know, but barring some very strange twists and turns between now and then, i’d say the odds of Ted Cruz beating Hillary Clinton in a purple state in a presidential contest are somewhere between “none” and “requiring events as crazy as Cruz is.” It’s unlikely many Coloradans outside the conservative activist GOP base have much of an idea who Ted Cruz is or what he stands for, so this is an eminently disposable data point.
But somewhere in Wingnuttia, there are industrious folk recording this poll for the “GOP needs to move right to win” file. Frankly, most “constitutional conservatives” rank electability relatively far down the list of priorities, preferring to wait for a big, radical win that could lead to the repeal of the New Deal and Great Society programs as opposed to a simply RINO win. But since regular Republican voters do tend to care a lot about nominating electable candidates, this Q-poll will go into the memory banks with a big red marker.
