Coors Concedes, Despite Losing By Only 2%

The headline is meant to be ironic. Over at View From a Height, I've been getting lots of hits on "Margin of Litigation," as though it were either a scientific term like "margin of error," or a legal term. Of course, it's neither. It's more like a wish, frankly, and that margin seems to be growing, rather than shrinking.

Last night, though, Pete Coors didn't have either on his side, at least by traditional standards, and was man enough to admit it. No recounts. No depending on absentee or provisional ballots to drag things out. Very gracious, very nice, very thankful and appreciative, but also very vanilla, which probably best encapsulates the reason that he lost.

Of course, we also lost control of the state legislature, both houses, which means that we don't yet know if Salazar was riding a Democrat tide here last night, or had coattails. Over the next day or two, as we start to analyze the data, we'll post some of the analysis here. For the moment, it just looks like Salazar was able to get enough votes out west and in the high country to offset Coors's advantage in Colorado Springs and in the even-more-thinly-populated eastern plains.

Coors is a good man who was never really able to capitalize on the resources of the statewide party to the extent that he should have. Speaking for myself, I doubt that Schaffer could have done much better statewide, but it be interesting to compare parallel-universe state maps. I suspect they would have been very different.