The strategy Democrats are betting will save Mark Udall, and the Senate

But Democrats believe they’ve seen this movie before. In the 2010 Colorado Senate campaign, Democratic nominee Michael Bennet trailed (or was at best tied) in the last 11 polls of his race against Republican Ken Buck. But then on Election Day, Bennet eked out a less-than-1 point win, a rare bright spot in an otherwise tough cycle for Democrats. The win was attributed by the press to his campaign’s singular focus on two core Democratic constituencies — women and Hispanics — and an unprecedented, data-driven get-out-the-vote effort…

“What we saw there in 2010, the question was, how are you going to overcome this Republican wave in Colorado?” he said. “We found that what works is we have ways to mechanically turn the electorate, that the way which we can do it is with targeting and prioritization.”…

The big test for Udall’s team is whether they can successfully execute this strategy when the Republican campaign has seemed explicitly engineered to avoid a repeat of 2010. Buck was a notoriously blunt candidate that year, with cringe-worthy lines like “I do not wear high heels.” But since he announced his candidacy in early 2014, Gardner has been straining to moderate himself. His campaign began with a renunciation of his support for a state “personhood” amendment, which would outlaw abortion and many kinds of birth control.