Get ready for two very intense, quick fights in two state-legislative races that will carry a great deal of national weight on the gun-control issue:

A Denver judge Thursday ruled petitions submitted to oust a pair of Democratic senators from office are valid, a pivotal ruling that sets in motion Colorado’s first-ever recall election of state lawmakers.

“The petitions here substantially comply with law,” Denver District Court Judge Robert Hyatt said in his oral decision from the bench. “Recalls are a fundamental right of Colorado citizens.”

Shortly after Hyatt handed down the decision Thursday, Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper signed an executive order to set the recall election date of Senate President John Morse of Colorado Springs and Sen. Angela Giron of Pueblo for Sept. 10.

Both are the targets of recalls by constituents for their support of stricter Colorado gun laws implemented this month.

Suddenly, every gun-control supporter and Second Amendment advocate will be focusing on these two state-legislative districts, hoping to send a signal about the post-Newtown gun laws.

Finally, an honest politician!

A Colorado state lawmaker, discussing her bill to eliminate the right to carry concealed weapons on college campuses, argues against an amendment that would seek to measure whether violent crime increases or decreases after its implementation.

“I don’t know how on earth they can draw a casual relationship . . . I make no assertion that this bill will either increase or reduce violent crime. That is not the premise of the bill . . . I suppose more knowledge is better than less.”

Oh, I suppose!

This video is the work of Ben Howe and the folks at Revealing Politics.

A headline you don’t see often: “Man convicted in 1997 murder case running for Colorado Springs council.”

If you’re wondering how this candidate can be walking the streets . . .

Flakes served 12 years and five months in prison for his involvement in the shooting deaths of Andy Westbay, 13, and Scott Hawrysiak, 15.

Westbay and Hawrysiak were gunned down on Valentine’s Day while walking home after playing video games at a friend’s house.

Authorities at trial alleged that Flakes, 16 at the time, and Jeron Grant, then 17, drove up behind the boys on Canoe Creek Drive and that Grant got out and shot them with a 12-gauge shotgun.

Neither Flakes nor Grant was convicted of pulling the trigger, which enraged the community. Instead, juries in separate trials convicted each of accessory to murder.

I guess Flakes can count on his opponents’ going negative, huh?

The RNC sends along:

Exit polls show 60 percent of voters say economy is the number one issue and 60 percent say economy is getting worse or has stagnated. Voters say Romney is the best to handle the economy and they trust him to handle the deficit.

Update from Ohio – high turnout in GOP counties, low turnout in Dem counties and Biden went to Cleveland. Clearly Chicago is nervous.

Good news from the Florida panhandle, Republicans continue to outnumber Dems in Colorado, Romney had a great showing in Pittsburgh and Paul Begala is concerned with the drop in enthusiasm with young voters.

For what it’s worth, I’m hearing the GOP turnout in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, may be a record; this county was key to Pat Toomey’s win in the 2010 Senate race. The Romney campaign also sounds quite pleased about the turnout in “coal country” of Pittsburgh. But then again, these are sometimes in the eye of the beholder.

A GOP source sends along this information about three key counties in Colorado:

Adams County (lean D county) — strong Republican turnout based on morning data — on track to win since first time in 1984.

AB/EV margins will be hard for them to overcome today. Right now — it’s a virtual tie. E-day is 3696 D, 3549 R

Arapahoe (Swing County) — 4,860 Democrat & 5,271 Republican — Election Day so far.

Over 83% of the vote was AB/EV — 75,653 Democrat & 75,812 Republican.

Jefferson County (Swing) — 78,738 Democrat & 85,378 Republican for AB/EV.

Waiting on Election Day.

In Colorado, about 325,000 people have voted early as of October 24. According to the Secretary of State’s office, of those, 126,539 are registered Republicans, 120,965 are registered Democrats, and 75,030 are “unaffililiated,” with the remainder split up among Libertarians, Greens, etc.

Colorado Peak Politics claims to have a source with access to today’s figures, with significantly higher totals and a similar, slightly larger edge for the GOP:

• R: 187,824 (39.7%)
• D: 171,971 (36.3%)
• U: 108,421 (22.9%)

They add that the Denver Post poll has Mitt Romney with a four percentage point edge among unaffiliated voters.

All in all, reason for cautious optimism about Colorado.

The only bit from the Morning Jolt I’m posting today is the closing addenda:

ADDENDA: Ryan Mahoney, regional press secretary of the RNC, shares a photo of a heck of a crowd for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado.

Mollie Hemingway: “GOP guy in Colorado says 9400 seats at Red Rocks amphitheater. Had 15K requests for Romney event. C-470 at standstill.”

Crowd size doesn’t tell us everything, but it tells us something about grassroots enthusiasm.

Middle Cheese writes in on a topic he’s been examining a while, how Obama and Romney stack up on the Latino vote.

Conventional wisdom holds that Mitt Romney is faring so badly with Hispanic voters that he cannot possibly win.

A recent CNN/ORC poll of Hispanics nationally finds President Obama has the support of 70 percent Hispanic voters compared to 26 percent for Mitt Romney. By comparison, John McCain got 31 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2008 and George W. Bush got 44 percent in 2004, according to exit polls.

Nationally, I think the more relevant comparison is George W. Bush, who was a two-term Governor of a border state, and got 35 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2000.

Further, national polls can be deceiving because they survey Hispanics from populous states like California and New York, who are overwhelmingly Democratic voters.

Let’s look at the polls of Hispanics in the key battleground states of Florida, Nevada, and Colorado. Now the polls are all over the place, depending on whether they surveyed registered voters or likely voters. However, comparing some recent polls to the 2008 results produces some very interesting trends:

PPP Florida Poll this week shows Romney with 47% of Hispanics and Obama with 49%.

In 2008, Obama took 57% of the vote compared to McCain’s 42%.

As we all know, a large portion — though not all — of Florida’s Hispanic population is Cuban-American, and that community tends to lean Republican more than Latinos who trace their heritage to other Latin countries. Having said that, there had been buzz in recent years that Florida’s Cuban-Americans were growing less solidly Republican, and the 2008 result might be seen as evidence of that. Either 2008 is an outlier, or Romney is winning them back, so far.

Middle Cheese continues:

WSJ/NBC/Marist Nevada Poll this week shows Romney with 36% of Hispanics and Obama with 62%.

In 2008, Obama took 76% of the vote compared to McCain’s 22%.

ARG Colorado Poll this week shows Romney with 38% of Hispanics and Obama with 53%.

In 2008, Obama took 61% of the vote compared to McCain’s 38%.

Team Romney has made some very smart adjustments in both the tone and substance of Romney’s stance on immigration, which is a gateway issue for Hispanics. For example, Romney announced that he would allow undocumented “Dreamers” who were offered a two-year deferral on deportation by Obama to stay in the country if he becomes President, and that he would seek a permanent legislative solution for these undocumented young achievers who pursue higher education or serve in the military.

By doing so, Hispanics — who have experienced sharply higher rates of joblessness under Obama than the general population — are increasingly receptive to Romney’s core message of promoting upward mobility and creating 12 million jobs through pro-growth policies.To wit, a new Latino Decisions national poll has Romney at 33 percent among Hispanics, a seven point increase from a month ago.

The bottom line: Obama is not where he was with Hispanic voters in 2008 and Romney is steadily improving on McCain’s showing, which will be critical in carrying these battleground states.

Mitt’s strong debate performance the other night will no doubt boost his numbers among independent Hispanics voters. I am going to go out on a limb and predict that Mitt Romney will do at least as well as George W. Bush did among Hispanics in 2000, and he will win a majority of Hispanics in Florida.

The Romney campaign has to be pretty happy with the front page of the Durango Herald this morning:

Of course, the endorsement of former Denver Broncos Hall of Fame quarterback John Elway is going to be terrible news for the Romney Get-Out-The-Vote effort in Cleveland . . . and perhaps Baltimore as well.

Many, many readers have asked for updates from my nicknamed sources from previous election cycles. Circumstances prevent communications with one of my regulars, but “Middle Cheese” — nicknamed such because he was ranked in between the “big cheeses” and the “little cheeses” of the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign – is able to reappear. Since that cycle, Middle Cheese has moved around to various positions in high-level GOP politics, and still talks to the “Big Cheeses” of the Romney campaign.

His latest thoughts:

Glad to be back at “The Kerry Spot,” as it was called in back in 2004 when I first started giving my “Middle Cheese” reports.  Time flies!

You asked about the Romney and RNC ground game– is it real?  Yes, it is and it’s a record-breaking one.  Just look at the numbers:  73,000 volunteers have made more than 26 million voter contacts.  2 million more door-knocks and six times more phone calls at this point four years ago. The Victory program has identified more than 2.2 million swing voters.

You ask:  Are any swing states looking particularly good or bad?  My sources in the Romney campaign say that they have expanded the battlefield into Obama 2008 states like Wisconsin, Colorado, and North Carolina.  The latter is clearly moving out of the Obama column, while the first two remain highly competitive (I think Paul Ryan will have significant coattails in Cheesehead land).

The hand-wringers in the GOP Beltway Establishment are fixated on the recent polling data coming out of Ohio and Florida.  To be sure, Obama is ahead in both states, but the fact the race remains close in most national polls makes it impossible for polls showing wide margins in Ohio and Florida to be accurate. 

I don’t want to be accused of sugarcoating the state of the race.  It’s very close, and Mitt is trailing slightly in a few swing states.  But it is a lifetime until Election Day, with three Presidential and one Veep debate to go.  Our ground game is strong. Overall, Romney-Ryan and the GOP has a $40 million cash on hand advantage over the Obama-Biden campaign.  More importantly, I expect to see Romney to make a larger case for how he would take our country in a fundamentally different direction than President Obama, not on on the economy, but on foreign policy as well. 

Lefty commenters and folks on Twitter, shortly after the last post, paraphrased:

“Only a nitpicking partisan hack would think it was appropriate for a president to drop everything and go to a major natural-disaster site!”

The news, an hour ago:

WASHINGTON — President Obama will travel Friday to areas of Colorado devastated by wildfires, the White House announced Wednesday afternoon.

The president has spoken with Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and the mayor of Colorado Springs to get the latest developments and express his concern about the extent of the damage, the White House said in a statement.

During his visit, he will “view the damage and thank the responders bravely battling the fire,” according to the statement.

The reaction from those same folks, momentarily: “Thank goodness our wise, sensitive, and empathetic president is dropping everything to go to a major natural-disaster site!”

Putting snark aside for a moment, I’ll just put up the link to HelpColoradoNow.org again.

Last night, former White House press secretary Dana Perino pointed out that President Obama could have, and should have, ditched the fundraisers and gone to Colorado Tuesday.

Whatever disappointment he would have generated in his donors at the events, he would have generated a warm reaction from the public, both nationwide and in a key swing state suffering a hellacious forest fire of gargantuan scale. Some argue that a presidential visit in the middle of a disaster area is a bad idea that only ties up police resources, and it’s a fair point, but there are probably some ways to minimize the impact. Denver itself is not currently endangered by the blaze, and Colorado’s Governor John Hickenlooper has been flying overhead and monitoring fire-fighting sites. (I’m sure of all of these Obama defenders were also vehemently defending President Bush for not visiting Louisiana for seven days after Katrina hit back in 2005.)

So let’s assume that a presidential visit is a bad idea for logistical reasons. Obviously, either at one of his campaign events or in any other format, the president could mention ways to help Coloradans in a dire spot right now, something like the organizations and programs listed at HelpColoradoNow.org.

The wildfires began Saturday, June 23.

The word “Colorado” does not appear in any of the transcripts of the five campaign events Obama has done since the morning of June 25.

UPDATE: Over on Romney’s Facebook page, posted around noon:

Our prayers go out for all those in Colorado affected by wildfires and the brave men and women working to contain them. Please donate to the Red Cross relief effort http://mi.tt/LBn1mR

No word of Colorado on Obama’s Facebook page yet. However, there is a picture of Obama with his dog, Bo, posted around midday.

BOOM.

President Barack Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney are deadlocked in three key presidential battleground states, according to a new round of NBC-Marist polls.

In Iowa, the two rivals are tied at 44 percent among registered voters, including those who are undecided but leaning toward a candidate. Ten percent of voters in the Hawkeye State are completely undecided.

In Colorado, Obama gets support from 46 percent of registered voters, while Romney gets 45 percent.

And in Nevada, the president is at 48 percent and Romney is at 46 percent.

As discussed yesterday, if a Republican is tied among registered voters, he’s probably narrowly ahead (or perhaps not-so-narrowly ahead) among likely voters.

All three swing states looked better for President Obama recently. In the RealClearPolitics average, Obama leads in Iowa by 4 (but he led by 10 in the one head-to-head poll conducted this spring), led in Colorado by 5.6 percentage points, and led in Nevada by 7.4 percentage points (note only two head-to-head polls conducted this year).

Of course, this doesn’t mean Romney will win or even necessarily be close in November. But the Romney campaign must feel a bit reassured to see some light-blue swing states finally turning purple.

So, how are Missouri Republicans greeting their chance to participate in a sort-of-hotly-contested primary that will determine exactly no delegates today? Turnout is “very low, much lower than expected.”

The Missouri presidential primary winner won’t receive any delegates, and that’s resulting in low voter turnout.

In most precincts in southeast Missouri, the presidential primary is the only vote on the ballot, leaving many voters at home.

“It’s disappointing,” said Cape Girardeau County Clerk Kara Clark Summers. “We put a lot of time into the election, and not to mention a lot of money.  We’d really like to see voters turn out because it’s a good indicator of who could win the caucuses next month.”

Polls are open until 7 p.m. local time.

Perhaps Colorado turnout will be higher . . . oh, wait:

Residents of Denver and a wide swath of nearby cities and towns awoke to find another several inches of snow, frigid temperatures and hazardous driving conditions on Tuesday, worrying local Republican leaders who fear the weather may dampen voter turnout at tonight’s Colorado caucuses.

Whoohoo! Non-binding caucuses! Non-binding primaries! Can you smell the excitement?!

Today in Colorado!

Tuesday 7 February 2012: Precinct Caucuses meet in each precinct to choose delegates to the County Assemblies and District Conventions.

There is no formal system applied in the Precinct Caucus to relate the presidential preference of the participants to the choice of the precinct’s delegates to the Colorado County Assemblies and District Conventions; however, a non-binding Presidential Preference poll of the delegates will be conducted. (NOTE: It is the District Conventions and the State Convention that will actually pledge Republican National Convention delegates to presidential contenders).

Since no National Convention delegates are bound to Presidential contenders, the Precinct Caucuses do not violate the RNC’s Tuesday 6 March 2012 timing rule.

Today in Minnesota!

Tuesday 7 February 2012: Republican Party Precinct Caucuses meet to choose the precinct’s delegates to the BPOU [="Basic Political Organization Unit" (the next higher tier: County, State Senate District or State House District)] Convention. There will also be a non-binding straw poll re: Presidential Preference held in coordination with these Precinct Caucuses. (NOTE: It is the later Congressional District and State Conventions that will actually elect Republican National Convention delegates).

There is no formal system applied in the Precinct Caucuses to relate the presidential preference of the Caucus participants to the choice of the precinct’s delegates to the Republican Convention of the BPOU [which may be a County, State Senate District or State House District] in which the precinct is located. The participants at each Precinct Caucus alone determine if presidential preference is to be a factor in such choice and, if so, how it is to be applied.

Today in Missouri!

Missouri Republican non-binding Primary. Today’s primary has no effect on delegate allocation.

Also note that today’s Missouri ballot will feature Herman Cain, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Jon Huntsman, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul . . . but no Newt Gingrich.

This is going to make for a pulse-pounding, dramatic wrap-up piece tomorrow morning!

The good folks at the Republican National Committee send along word about what is really at stake in tomorrow’s caucuses . . . which is . . . not that much:

To:       Political Reporters

From:  Sean Spicer, RNC Communications Directors

Subj:   Reporting on Delegates for Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri

For those of you covering the race for the GOP presidential nomination and writing about the current delegate count, please keep in mind that no delegates will be awarded tomorrow.

Colorado is a non-binding precinct caucus. Their 36 delegates will be chosen at district conventions held between March 31 – April 13, 2012, and at the state convention on April 14, 2012.

Minnesota is a non-binding precinct caucus. Their 40 delegates will be chosen at district conventions held between April 14 – 21, 2012, and at a state convention on May 5, 2012. Delegates are not bound unless the state convention passes a resolution to bind the delegates.

Missouri will hold a primary tomorrow that is not recognized as being a part of any delegate allocation or selection process. A precinct caucus will be held on 3/17/2012 to begin the process of choosing their 52 delegates which will be chosen at district conventions on April 21, 2012, and a state convention on June 2, 2012. Candidates for delegate must state a presidential preference at the time of nomination and will be bound to support that candidate for one ballot at the national convention.

Right now, Mitt Romney has 73 delegates, Newt Gingrich has 29, Ron Paul has 8, and Rick Santorum has 3. Another 30 are currently unbound.

(Remember, Iowa awards its delegates based on the results of the state convention.)