A week before ballots are counted, former President Bill Clinton addressed crowds at Hinkley High School in Aurora on Monday night and the Sheraton Denver West Hotel in Lakewood on Tuesday, sharing the stage with U.S. Sen. Mark Udall and Gov. John Hickenlooper, two incumbent Democrats locked in neck-and-neck races.

Congressional candidate Andrew Romanoff made a pitch to help him unseat U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman at the Aurora rally and U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter, who is facing a challenge from Republican Don Ytterberg, asked Democrats to send him back for another term at the Lakewood rally.

Clinton’s appearance is part of the Democrats’ intensive get-out-the-vote effort, meant as much to recruit and inspire volunteers to chase ballots, organizers said. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and First Lady Michelle Obama headlined rallies last week in Aurora, Denver and Fort Collins; and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren toured Front Range field offices with the Udall campaign bus a week earlier.

Republicans brought in former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — who looks more and more like a 2016 presidential candidate — to stoke the GOP’s own ballot chase on Wednesday in Castle Rock. Another likely presidential candidate, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who heads the Republican Governors Association and has campaigned frequently in the state for Hickenlooper’s challenger, former U.S. Rep. Bob Beauprez, made a return appearance to the state for a rally on Thursday night in Colorado Springs.

U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet told the Aurora crowd that it “feels like déja vu all over again tonight,” reminding voters that Clinton appeared on his behalf four years ago when not a single public poll showed him ahead of Republican nominee Ken Buck. But the Democrats’ superior ground game pulled him across the finish line in 2010 and, he predicted, it would do the same again with Udall. There’s one way to overcome the outside money, tight polls and the conventional wisdom, he said, “and that is to vote.”

Donning his hat as “explainer in chief” — “Here are the facts. Here are the facts,” he said more than once — Clinton told voters that Udall’s Republican opponent, U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner, was offering Colorado voters “a pretty slick deal” by framing the election as a referendum on an unpopular President Barack Obama, whose support is upside down in a state the Democrat carried twice.

“Essentially, when Americans have a tough time and people are unsettled and the president’s approval rating is down, what (Republicans) are trying to get you to do is take our candidates off the ballot and put him on,” Clinton told the packed gymnasium in Aurora.

“It’s a pretty slick deal, if you think about it,” Clinton said,” because the President’s only going to be in office two more years. ‘You gotta vote for me because it’s your protest vote. Your protest is only gonna be good for two years. It’s a pretty high price — ‘You gotta give me this job for six years, and I’m gonna vote against you for six years, but you’ll feel so good on Election Day.’ Isn’t that basically what’s going on? Give me a six-year job for a two-year protest? I wouldn’t take that deal.”

Besides, Clinton maintained, Colorado voters shouldn’t be distracted by the Republican campaign message, which he suggested amounts to, “Just vote your fears and your anger.”

Saying that he’s “always thought of Colorado as the state of the future,” Clinton argued, “You just have to decide what you want. I think you should vote for the future — a future of shared opportunities and shared responsibilities, a future of people who do not hate people… or whether we’re going to go back to trickle-down economics, where 1 or 2 percent of the people get 90 percent of the benefits. I don’t care what they tell you, that’s what’s on the ballot,” he said.

The biggest problem in Washington, Clinton said, is “political dysfunction,” and the Republicans are asking Colorado voters to endorse more of it. Instead, he portrayed Udall as a senator who routinely works across the aisle to find bipartisan solutions, on everything from immigration and the farm bill to deficit reduction and the clean-up of Rocky Flats.

As for the gubernatorial race, Clinton, who was governor of Arkansas before winning the presidency, sounded stunned that voters were even considering firing Hickenlooper.

Unfurling a familiar set of talking points, Clinton noted that when Hickenlooper took office the state was 40th in the nation in job growth and now it’s in fourth place, unemployment stood at 9.1 percent and has dropped to 4.7 percent, the state was facing ballooning deficits and now has a surplus, all in the face of 13 federally declared natural disasters.

“Why is this a race?” he asked in Lakewood, and the crowd roared its approval.

Clinton also got in a few digs at Beauprez, noting that when he won a crowded GOP primary in June that he was dubbed the moderate of the bunch, even though he had advocated repealing the direct election of senators and had fallen in with the birther movement questioning whether Obama’s birth certificate was authentic.

“Doesn’t take much to qualify as a moderate Republican these days,” Clinton said with an impish grin.

Clinton also recalled that when he was governor, he had attended his only out-of-state fundraiser in Colorado, where he raised what seemed at the time a “princely sum” of $4,800, and noted that he held the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in Denver earlier this summer.

For his part, Udall sounded confident in the face of recent polling that has shown Gardner with a slim lead.

“This is a fact,” he told the crowd in Aurora. “We are surging. We have momentum. We’re going to win this election, we’re going to climb this mountain. I have no doubt.”

He noted that Democrats have more than 6,500 volunteers chasing ballots — a number bolstered significantly by the high-profile rallies, his organizers noted — and predicted that the pollsters will be confounded by their inability to measure turnout accurately.

Udall also got in a dig at the opposition’s vote chase, telling the crowd that he read recently that Americans for Prosperity was boasting about the number of voters they’d contacted.

The state director of AFP — “Americans for Plutocracy,” Udall cracked — said in a news story that the conservative organization had knocked on 140,000 doors since June.

“We knocked on 145,000 doors last week,” he grinned as the crowd went wild.

— Ernest@coloradostatesman.com

See the Oct. 31 print edition for full photo coverage.