Suburbs are key to victory in Colorado
The road to victory in many of the most competitive states in this year’s presidential election winds through the strip malls, traffic jams, limping economies and slumped housing markets of the suburbs.
Nowhere is the trend more pronounced than in Colorado, where two counties near Denver — Jefferson and Arapahoe — have become a central focus for both campaigns. Once reliably Republican, these suburban counties have grown more diverse and less partisan — and home to the largest concentration of the unaffiliated voters widely expected to decide the election.
The likely prize for the campaign that succeeds in reaching these voters is the entire state and, in a razor-thin national contest, perhaps even the election.
“You show me who wins Arapahoe and Jefferson counties and I’ll show you not only who wins Colorado,” said Eric Sondermann, a nonpartisan political consultant in Denver, “I’ll show you who's sitting in the Oval Office next January.”
full: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/suburbs-are-key-to-victory-in-colorado/2012/09/12/69c756ec-fcd8-11e1-b153-218509a954e1_singlePage.html
