Where Do You Think Denver Is Headed? Take the Colorado Polling Institute Survey!

Since the brand-new Colorado Polling Institute released its first survey on the direction that Denver is heading, it’s sparked much discussion on the results, which showed a split on whether the Mile High City is on the right track, along with data related to the top issues affecting residents: homelessness and housing affordability, according to the poll.

The research, conducted by Republican pollsters from Cygnal and Democratic pollsters from Aspect Strategic on August 17 and 18, reached a little over 400 likely 2024 general election voters. Cygnal's Brent Buchanan says the seemingly low number is actually a good sample size, despite being just 0.05 percent of Denver’s population of over 700,000.

“Four hundred is a really good sample for the size of a city,” he said in a media briefing held by CPI on September 8. "If you do a statewide survey, a 600 sample size is accurate.”

Curtis Hubbard — a Democratic consultant who is a senior advisor with CPI — said that in the future, the organization would like to include a larger sample size, but it will balance getting a representative sample with a small margin of error with keeping costs low. “We are confident in the results that we have here and feel like they are truly representative,” Hubbard explained. “They capture a broad slice of the electorate.”

Despite the positive outlook, some of the responses to questions still stick out — particularly the Denver International Airport earning a plus-48 net-favorability rating. The poll also found that 65 percent of respondents were supportive of encampment sweeps.

During the September 8 briefing, Aspect's Kevin Ingham shared that in polls he’s conducted over the years, voters were much more positive about the direction of the city. Back then, he said, over two-thirds of people felt Denver was headed in the right direction. This time around, only 44 percent felt that way, and another 44 percent said they feel it’s headed in the wrong direction. The rest had no opinion.

“Partially that might be due to these lingering issues that have come with the pandemic as well as issues of affordability,” Ingham said.

Is it? In response, Westword has decided to conduct its own poll to take the temperature of our readers.

It won’t be nearly as scientific: We just created a simple Google Form using most of the questions on CPI's poll (we removed some of the wordier, more tangential ones).

Since we aren’t professional pollsters, we won’t be able to measure our margin of error, and we’re not collecting demographic data like CPI did, because this survey isn’t secure enough for that. However, we will be able to see if another set of people (ideally, at least 400 of you) provide the same responses.

The Colorado Polling Institute, which was founded by social entrepreneur and investor David Carlson, says that its ultimate aim is to become a reliable source of information about where people in Colorado stand on certain issues.

According to Carlson, who also spoke on September 8, CPI wants to make public the polling data that has historically been kept private. The organization plans to conduct the same poll six months to a year from now to gain comparative results.

“This is all very high-quality, best-in-class research,” he said.

Along with Carlson and Hubbard, the CPI board includes Republican consultant Tyler Sandberg, public school nonprofit leader TeRay Esquibel and former Denver City councilmember Kendra Black. CPI is a pending nonprofit and is non-partisan, but it won’t share who is funding its work — so people will just have to trust that the anonymous funders aren’t swaying the results.

“Talking about donors or expenditures in public sidetracks us from our work,” Hubbard said at the September 8 briefing. “Our hope is to become a trustworthy outlet for public opinion.”

According to Buchanan, often when people ask who is funding a poll, they can then pinpoint leading questions inserted to achieve an outcome favorable to the funder.  Working with Ingham, CPI researchers shaped it to avoid such phrasing.

“How do we script this thing in a way that proves and shows that there is no agenda behind this?” Buchanan said they asked themselves.

Westword has no agenda with this project — and no funding for this initiative, either (though you can support our work in general by becoming an official member).

So please take a moment to fill out our survey using this link or the embedded poll below: