DENVER— Independent voters get to vote in this year’s June primary election, but pollsters predict not very many will.
Due to a new change in Colorado law approved by voters in 2016, unaffiliated voters will get both the Democratic and Republican party primary ballots in the mail, but are only allowed to complete one of them.
Unaffiliateds make up the largest group of voters in Colorado. With 1.2 million people, they make up 35 percent of the electorate.
This change is making life a little less certain for the pollsters predicting the outcome of the June 26 primary.
“We have to kind of make a guess,” said pollster David Flaherty, with the Republican firm Magellan Strategies.
His firm published polls on the primaries for both sides recently, which show a clear frontrunner in each party.
Jared Polis has a 13-point lead in the Democratic poll and Walker Stapleton has a 13-point lead in the Republican poll.
Flaherty says overall, he expects a mere five to ten percent of the state’s unaffiliated voters to participate in the primaries.
“They’re afraid of picking the wrong candidate who doesn’t share their values,” Flaherty said.
He also expects unaffiliated voters to play a bigger role for Democrats than Republicans, which make some sense when you recall that Colorado voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. At most, Flaherty expects 20 percent of the ballots in the Democratic race to come from nonpartisan voters and about half than many in the GOP race.
9NEWS political analyst Floyd Ciruli, a pollster himself, thinks those numbers will be about right.
“It’s very difficult to predict,” Ciruli said.
The amount of independent turnout could sway the result in the Democratic race if you believe the Magellan poll.
Even though Polis is ahead overall, Cary Kennedy leads Polis by 6 points among unaffiliated voters.
