1. “Democrat John Hickenlooper is really popular.”
2. “Republican Scott McInnis lost his best narrative for winning when Gov. Bill Ritter announced he would not run for re-election.”
3. “McInnis can talk about building business and growing jobs, but Hickenlooper has actually done it in the private sector. Repeatedly.”
4. “An incredible 37 Governors are up for re-election in 2010, including 22 that are open seats. Hick is going to raise as much (and likely more) money than McInnis, and given all the points above, it’s hard to see how McInnis is going to convince big national GOP interests that his race is worthy of top-tier consideration.”

Reasons two and four strike me as the most important for the McInnis campaign to reckon. Scott McInnis never really had to introduce himself to the public early in his bid, because the important thing was he wasn’t Bill Ritter.  Now, Team McInnis must recast the narrative–and point three from Colorado Pols nails the challenge there–and get his fundraising machine well oiled and tanked up, potentially without a lot of help from the national Republican party.

To be sure, information about the telephone poll is limited. In addition to knowing that 500 likely voters were called, I’d like to know where those voters live (roughly). Specifically, I’d like a sense of how Hickenlooper polls among likely voters a) outside of Denver and b) on the Western Slope in particular, where McInnis ought to enjoy a broad base of support, being as he calls Grand Junction home.

It’s early, and such minutiae will come. In the meantime, Democrats must be pleased to see so much swing so soon just by virtue of tapping a quality candidate to replace Bill Ritter. So that tells us about name recognition. Now let’s see how both campaigns approach the issues.

By comparison, Scott McInnis, Politician, enjoys 1,954 Facebook fans.

For those who don’t know him, Tancredo is the former presidential candidate who ran in 2008 on a platform of closed borders and expanded militia resources. On the whole, Tancredo is a wingnut uberconservative of the radical fringe, and his politics of hate have no place in the state or the nation.

And yet, I’d like to see him enter the race.

The Denver Post suggests this morning that with Penry’s exit, GOP heavyweight Scott McInnis can tack to the center to press a vulnerable Bill Ritter. Penry had posited himself as the young, big-tent Republican with a strong ethic for fiscal responsibility and a willingness to steer the GOP away from hot-button social issues that have driven young conservatives away from the party in recent years (abortion, gay rights). In other words, Penry had already grabbed the open-minded centrist role, and McInnis played to the right of that.

Tancredo’s presence in Colorado’s gubernatorial race won’t change McInnis’ position; indeed, if anything, McInnis will only look more and more sane the more Tom Tancredo speaks out. What a Tancredo bid will do is galvanize the state’s radical right (lately I like to call them the Dan Hayes Repulicans). In other words, Tancredo’s appearance in the GOP primary will do exactly what McInnis has sought to avoid: divide the party and create fodder for the general election. Tancredo is just pesky enough–and just crazy and arrogant enough–to make the primary process messy, and that bodes well for incumbent Bill Ritter.