Conservatives might want to take comfort from this Public Policy Polling poll in Colorado, but I would advise some caution. It shows Barack Obama’s job approval at only 49%-45% positive, and freshman Senator Mark Udall (but senior senator by 16 days over appointee Michael Bennet) with 41%-46% negative job approval. By party identification the sample is 38% Republican and 36% Democratic, not too much different a balance from the the 30% Republican and 31% Democratic in the 2008 exit poll. PPP has Obama at 46% approval from Independents, lower than the 54% who voted for him according to the exit poll.

But I think something here does not quite add up. I had not heard of PPP, a Democratic firm, until the 2008 cycle, and I found their results in several states erratic, well off the general trend in some cases, varying wildly from week to week in others. And I have some doubts about the exit poll in Colorado. I see here that PPP shows Obama with 51%-42% job approval from voters 18 to 29—not all that high. But when I go to the exit poll, I see that they show 18-29s as N/A. You would think that would mean that there are too few of them to be a statistically reliable sample. But no, they are 14% of an electorate in a sample of 1,254 and the exit poll does show results for the elderly age group, which is listed as 13% of the electorate. Moreover, when you extrapolate from the available numbers what the 18-29 results must have been, in a state that voted 54%-45% for Obama, you find that young voters voted only 53%-43% for Obama, or just about the state average. (Did the exit poll people suppress these numbers because they considered them implausible?) The most pro-Obama age group here was the 45-64s, roughly the Baby Boomers.