Gap between GOP, Democratic strategies is clear in Colorado
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In Colorado, which has not voted for a Republican for president since 2004 or for governor since 2002, a taut local Democratic Party has linked arms with a cautious and free-spending Clinton campaign. The state’s Republicans, divided and outnumbered in voter registrations, are counting on voters to come home; the Democrats are simply counting voters.
Nowhere is the difference greater than in El Paso County. The conservative heart of Colorado, anchored by the Air Force Academy and James Dobson’s organization Focus on the Family, it casts nearly as many votes as Denver does. In 2012, Republican nominee Mitt Romney netted nearly 60,000 votes out of 290,175 cast in El Paso County. Two years later, now-Sen. Cory Gardner (R) won the county by nearly 70,000 votes, making up most of his statewide victory margin.
Democrats do not dream of winning the county, but they have played to cut into the red advantage. The field office that Young visited was one of four in the county and one of 30 opened for the campaign’s final stretch — on top of the 32 offices set up months earlier. According to the campaign, 1,000 volunteers have crossed the county and made 8,000 voter contacts; since April, volunteers have knocked on 400,000 doors. In the waning days, the campaign was sending out waves of canvassers from each site.
The Republicans’ campaign was harder to calculate or to see. On Saturday morning, the El Paso County Republican Party office — the only one — was bustling with people working the phone banks who made their calls in front of a flat-screen TV tuned to the Fox News Channel. One volunteer took a break from working the phones to talk about the success she was having making converts on Facebook; another, not far away, whispered loudly that voting machine software is owned by billionaire liberal philanthropist George Soros. (It is not.)
First-time volunteers, encouraged to show up for 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. trainings, trickled in. Plenty of canvassers, county chairman Jeff Hays said, were using an app loaded with real-time information about which voters needed to be contacted.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-colorado-gap-between-democratic-republican-strategies-is-clear/2016/11/06/807ab01a-a476-11e6-8fc0-7be8f848c492_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1