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Does Don Mares Have A Chance?
05-22-03

With just 10 days to go, all the experts long ago wrote off Auditor Don Mares’s chances of winning the race to replace Wellington Webb as the next Mayor of the City & County of Denver. Mares placed a distant second to restaurateur, home builder, former geologist, and beer magnate John Hickenlooper in the May 6th election with 22.31% of the vote compared to Hickenlooper’s 43.23%. This 21-point lead, if extrapolated fully, meant the results – if just the two of them had been running – would have been exactly 66% for Hickenlooper and 34% for Mares.

This almost two-to-one advantage seems formidable for several reasons. First, the candidates only had four weeks between the first election and the runoff (and much of even that short time period is now gone). This leaves very little time for campaigning or major strategy changes. That limited time is needed to target voters and get out the vote. There really isn’t a lot of time to do much else.

Second, historically, those second-place finishers in the May mayoral election who went on to win the run-off were neck-and-neck with the front-runners – usually separated by a relatively small number of points. To make up a 21-point gap, however, is unparalleled and would be a Herculean feat. It would be of such epic proportion that anyone pulling it off would be credited with one of the biggest upsets in Colorado political history.

Third, even if Hickenlooper dips in the polls, he can afford to because he has a lot of breathing room. The other five contestants in the mayoral race polled just 34.46% of the vote. For Mares to get a majority of the electorate, assuming everyone who participated in the May 6th election votes again, he would need to get 27.71 points out of that 34.46% or more than 80% of that vote. That means Mares would need to get slightly better than 4 out of 5 voters to eke out the slimmest of majorities. The converse is that Hickenlooper needs slightly less than 1 out of 5 voters to win. How could Hickenlooper not get one out of five voters from those who voted for Susan Casey, Phil Perington, Elizabeth Schlosser, Penfield Tate, and Aria Zavaras?

Fourth, speaking of Susan Casey, Phil Perington, Elizabeth Schlosser, Penfield Tate, and Aria Zavaras, while candidates rarely can instruct their voters where to go, Hickenlooper already has the endorsement of those who finished out-of-the-money on May 6th and represent the vast majority of votes not originally cast for Hickenlooper or Mares. With these endorsements, Hickenlooper certainly can assume he will get some support from these voters – and, again, he doesn’t need much.

Fifth, where are new voters going to go? Even if on June 3rd another 10,000 to 40,000 voters join the 112,000 who cast ballots on May 6th, the odds are they are not all going to flock to Mares. Hickenlooper can afford to lose a majority of these new voters to Mares and still win handily. Unlike Federico Pena’s campaign in 1983 – in which thousands of new voters were registered and actually voted – there has been no such effort by the Mares campaign. And it is now too late to launch such an effort. The result is that Mares is unlikely to have enough new voters to overcome Hickenlooper’s lead.

Sixth, Mares needs a major faux pas by Hickenlooper to even begin to dent his lead but none seems coming. The few attacks made against Hickenlooper have bounced off him. He was accused of having several businesses that failed but voters are sophisticated enough to know most entrepreneurs have a number of unsuccessful efforts before they succeed. He was accused of owning a property out of state which went into default but it turned out he didn’t really have an interest in it and only had provided money to a friend years ago to help her buy it. He was accused of not being labor-friendly but even the State Division of Labor & Employment noted he had an outstanding record. In fact, most of the attacks – and they were not made by Mares – only emphasized the validity of Hickenlooper’s "Not Politics As Usual" campaign theme. The "Politics As Usual" crowd’s approach had worn thin with sophisticated voters.

Seventh, even though voters may believe he already has done so, Mares has not "gone negative," and personally doesn’t want to. "Going negative" only would play into Hickenlooper’s theme of being the "non-political candidate" (if there really is such an animal), so Mares doesn’t have a lot of options here anyway. If he continues to take the "high road" – which he has – he doesn’t appear to be able to make up enough ground and if he takes the "low road," he’s similarly unlikely to gain much ground. He’s on the middle road to nowhere right now.

Mares did land a blow when he noted Hickenlooper failed to vote in several Denver elections but, given the 14% turnout in the 1999 mayoral election in which Hickenlooper did not vote, while admitting his failing, Hickenlooper realized that 86% of the voters joined him. Not voting, however, is unlikely to derail the Hickenlooper train.
Mares also is finding it difficult to "go negative" for other reasons. There isn’t a lot one can say about John Hickenlooper that is all that bad. Just like Mares, Hickenlooper is a pretty good guy. Although Mares may once have been concerned about Hickenlooper "going negative" against him, he is assured that it won’t happen. It’s not the type of campaign Hickenlooper wants to run and he doesn’t need to. Plus, it would contradict his entire theme of being different from the rest of the political world.

The one longshot answer to a Mares victory might be voter turnout. If Mares can somehow mobilize his supporters and get the right people to the polls and if this were combined with an incredibly low turnout by Hickenlooper supporters who stayed at home because they though their candidate had a slam-dunk victory guaranteed, perhaps Mares could pull off the upset. The problem for Mares is that the Hickenlooper camp knows it has to turn out the vote and already is focused on motivating its new-found base of voters. The Hickenlooper campaign has the financial resources to do everything it needs to do – keep the campaign fully staffed, stay on television with humorous and attractive advertising spots, and have stay dedicated to getting supporters to the polls.

After the May 6th election, Don Mares initially and quite convincingly argued that the score was "0 to 0." The truth was, the score was more like 66% to 34% in favor of Hickenlooper. And all the polls done after the election have borne this out. The question for Mares remains, "How do I close that kind of gap in four weeks?" So far, no one has come up with an answer. The good news for Mares is that it is likely he can close the gap using his newfound status as an "underdog. It is a sincere, attractive, and convincing way to depict himself and his campaign. Denver voters love an underdog – as Hickenlooper just proved.

The odds are, however, being an underdog won’t be nearly enough. After all, most underdogs lose. That’s why they’re called "underdogs." Mares will be lucky to shave 10 points off Hickenlooper’s lead and see the final results come in somewhere around 55% for Hickenlooper to 45% for Mares – and that’s only if Mares runs a perfect campaign in the final days of the race. Given how far behind Mares started, a ten-point loss actually would be quite an achievement. If somehow he comes all the way from behind and pulls off a victory, he will prove that, indeed, Denver loves an underdog, and Don Mares will be the biggest underdog winner ever seen in Denver mayoral runoff history. Any bets?