Cory Gardner has seen the polls, and they don’t look good, any way you look at them.

The incumbent U.S. senator, a Republican from Yuma, is headed into Labor Day turnstile to win a second term against former Gov. John Hickenlooper.

Polls, internal and public, have indicated the Democrat is nursing an edge just eight weeks before Election Day. The time for a shift in the race comes weeks before the Nov. 3 election, however.

Moreover, the earliest Gardner and Hickenlooper will face off, at this point, is Oct. 2 in Pueblo. Ballots are mailed out on Oct. 9.

The time for changing hearts and minds is nigh.

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If Hickenlooper is still sitting on a wide lead in public opinion in October, it will be difficult for Gardner, a skilled debater and retail politician, to avert a wave-year loss for a second term, after pulling off a surprise against an incumbent Democrat in 2014.

“I was behind Mark Udall six years ago,” Gardner recalled, though not by the deficits and outside forces he faces now, in a phone interview with Colorado Politics.

He takes polls for what they are, but doesn’t obsess over them, he said.

“They sort of give you an idea of what people are thinking at that moment, and it kind of gives you an idea of what the environment is like, but in terms of being a prognosticator I think you’ve got a better chance at a 25-cent arcade prophesy than you do a poll,” Gardner said.

Polls so far — for the last year, pretty much — have shown a hostile environment for Republicans. Two years ago, Democrats won every statewide office on the ballot. Besides Gardner, the only other statewide Republican officeholder is Heidi Ganahl, the University of Colorado regent-at-large.

Part of the reason is national mood and events of the times, but in Colorado the surge to the left is in the numbers, as well.

On Aug. 1 this year, Democrats had 1,047,924 active voters, a gain of 62,089.

The GOP over that duration lost Republicans, from 969,406 before the last congressional election to 960,613 this month.

As the Colorado Independent noted before the 2018 election, Democrats registered twice as many voters as Republicans during the month before ballots went out, as unaffiliated voters grew faster than both. Another such rally would prove a death knell for statewide Republicans, as Democrats already control both chambers of the Legislature and governor’s office.

Unaffiliated voters have doubled in Colorado since 2010, and they’re trending to the left, as well, outcomes show: Hickenlooper was reelected by 3 points in 2014 as Gardner won his Senate seat by 2 points.

Hillary Clinton won Colorado by five points in 2016, then Jared Polis became governor by 11 points two years later.

A poll in early July, soon after Hickenlooper easily locked up his Democratic nomination, gave him an 11-point lead. That poll was paid for by groups backing Hickenlooper, End Citizens United and Let America Vote. The same measure gave former Vice President Joe Biden a 17-point lead over President Trump in Colorado, 56% to 39%, with 5% undecided.

At the end of the month, however, a Morning Consult poll indicated Biden had a 13-point lead, but Hickenlooper’s lead shrank, 48% to 42%, solid but not decisive, given the 4-point margin of error.

The same poll suggested unaffiliated voters favored Hickenlooper 48% to 35%.

In August, left-leaning groups polled Gardner and Trump’s negatives in Colorado, but left out Hickenlooper’s; a spokesman for the main sponsor, dark money group Accountable US, said the reason had to do with the organization’s tax status.

Gardner had a 16-point gap in his approval — 36% thought he was a good senator, 52% disapproved, with 12% undecided.

Trump’s Colorado disapproval rate was 55% to 40% approval.

Not a great deal has changed in this race in a year, so a change of momentum would prove unexpected.

Almost a year ago, when 11 other Democrats were in the race and Hickenlooper still wasn’t, an Emerson College poll gave a hypothetical matchup to Hickenlooper by 13 points.

Recently experts from the University of Denver dissected the state of polling and the state of play in Colorado this year.

Pollster Floyd Ciruli, director of the school’s Crossley Center for Public Opinion Research, joined author and professor Seth Masket, who directs the Center for American Politics at DU, to speak with Channel 7’s Anne Trujillo at a special event for school donors.

The independent poll showing the race had narrowed to 6 points was critical to Gardner, Ciruli said.

If he had gone into Labor Day down 10 or more, Republican campaign money and national media focus would have shifted to other states, he said.

Hick-Gardner Senate race dominates home stretch in Colorado

“That 6 points is still a lot of ground to cover,” Ciruli said, noting that Gardner must support a president consistently polling around 13 points down in Colorado.

“His challenge is to get this in a one-on-one race with Hickenlooper and get people to think of this as a choice between them, because he’s a good campaigner and he thinks he’s had a good six years,” the veteran pollster said.

“That won’t be easy to do, because how people vote in the presidential race decides a lot about how they vote below that on the ticket.”

Masket said if it’s a referendum on Trump, “Cory Gardner is in a lot of trouble.”

“It’s a difficult needle to thread,” he said. “It’s difficult to change voters’ minds about what issues to focus on.”

If the polls tighten, it could force Hickenlooper to change strategy, to talk more to the press and show up for events to debate or discuss issues with Gardner. If he’s sitting on a comfortable lead, he won’t risk making a mistake, Ciruli predicted.

“The closer this race gets, the more pressure there will be on John,” he said. “He still has that one fabulous advantage, and that is the president, but there’s also another advantage. This state has moved to the left over the last six to eight years.”

Ciruli said of Gardner, “He’s good. If anybody can do it, he might be able to, but this is going to be a tough one.”

Like Gardner, the DU experts cautioned about locking in on polls too early.

Trump came from behind in 2016, they acknowledged, but circumstances and factors were different. Nationally, Biden’s lead has been bigger and steadier than Clinton’s over months, not up and down with the news cycles.

Ciruli said the gap in the polls has been so wide that even if the margin of error were 50%, Trump would still be in trouble, including in critical battleground states.

He expected the polls to tighten after Labor Day, when pollsters focus on the “likely voters,” instead of those less engaged.

“And Biden could make a mistake,” Ciruli cautioned.