Trump’s visit to Colorado Springs Saturday comes amid tightening poll numbers
Donald Trump’s stop in Colorado Springs will come as the GOP nominee is mounting a comeback in Colorado, according to polls that show he has narrowed, closed or – in one poll – overcome Hillary Clinton’s once sizable lead.
Trump will be at the Colorado Springs Airport on Saturday night as he flies in for an event at the jetCenters of Colorado, a venue that has hosted other presidential hopefuls over the years in airplane hangars or on the tarmac of the private flight center’s operations.
When Trump visited Colorado Springs on July 29, he was trailing Clinton by 10 points or more in most major polls.
He returns Saturday with two polls indicating Trump has closed that gap to five points and a rolling online survey conducted by Reuters and Ipsos that shows Trump is up three points.
Colorado pollster Floyd Ciruli said that the smaller shift toward Trump follows a national trend, which makes sense given that Colorado is a swing state that tends to fluctuate with national sentiments. But he said he is skeptical of the rolling polls indicating Trump is now leading the state.
“It’s not impossible, but it would be a tremendous amount of voter shifting,” Ciruli said.
“Is this race close? I would put it at two points nationally and four points here. I’m just not certain that a rolling panel, if they have enough people and then they weigh it, really is the same as going out and doing a good random sample of 500 people over three nights.”
Ciruli does traditional random sample phone polls.
Mark Waller, an El Paso County commissioner who is working on the Trump campaign, said he thinks online polls might be more accurate.
“There is a huge debate of where the election is in the nation right now,” he said, noting that the switch to cellphones over landlines has made traditional polling incredibly difficult.
“There’s a tremendous feeling that online polls are definitely more accurate this election.”
The Reuters/Ipsos poll is a continuously updated data stream that can catch nearly real-time fluctuations in voter opinion. This isn’t the only poll to show the race tightening.
NBC News and The Washington Post have teamed with SurveyMonkey to do a weekly tracking poll. Between Sept. 5 and Sept. 11, 16,220 adults who took other surveys on the website were randomly selected to participate in the NBC presidential poll.
Across the nation, Clinton is leading by four points.
The Trump and Clinton campaigns say they aren’t taking anything for granted in Colorado.
Trump recently spent around $600,000 buying TV ads in Colorado, according to filings that had been filed last week with the Federal Communications Commission. Clinton hasn’t been on air in several weeks in Colorado, but that could change at a moment’s notice, sources say.
FiveThirtyEight (run by famous statistician Nate Silver) and RealClearPolitics.com still have Colorado listed as a “likely” Clinton state instead of a toss-up state.
But most everyone seems to think Clinton’s lead has taken a hit after a rough weekend for her, including her “basket of deplorables” statement and her pneumonia diagnosis after her “overheating” incident at the 9/11 ceremony last weekend in New York.
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Contact Megan Schrader: 719-286-0644





