Democrats Hillary Clinton and Michael Bennet are leading their Republican opponents by wide margins in Colorado, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll of battleground states released Friday.

Clinton leads Donald Trump by 14 points, 46 percent to 32 percent, among registered voters in Colorado in a two-way race, the poll says. Her lead has expanded from an 8-point margin in the same poll released a month ago.

Clinton leads by 12 points when two other candidates are included in the question, with 41 percent to Trump’s 29 percent, followed by Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson at 15 percent and Green Party candidate Jill Stein at 6 percent.

Bennet leads El Paso County Commissioner Darryl Glenn 53 percent to 38 percent in the poll. The incumbent had an identical 15-point lead in the same poll released at the beginning of July.

“The races for president and the U.S. Senate in Colorado are effectively over,” a senior Republican strategist told The Colorado Statesman after reviewing the Marist poll results. “Republicans in Colorado ought to accept this reality and need to immediately divert their resources toward salvaging a Mike Coffman victory and retaining the state Senate.”

Coffman, a Republican and four-term incumbent, is facing a challenge in the 6th Congressional District from state Sen. Morgan Carroll. Republicans control the state Senate by a one-seat majority.

Clinton also led Trump in three other key swing states – Florida, Virginia and North Carolina – in NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist polls released Friday. In polls conducted by the same firm and released earlier in the week, Clinton led Trump in Iowa, Ohio and Pennsylvania, too. In the seven states, the Democratic nominee’s lead is widest in Colorado, where her 14-point margin stands 1 point ahead of her lead in Virginia. She is ahead by single digits in the other five states.

“These are supposed to be battleground states, but right now, they don’t look that way,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, in a statement accompanying release of the polls on Friday.

President Barack Obama carried Colorado by 9 points over GOP nominee John McCain in 2008 and by 5.5 points over Mitt Romney in 2012. Republican George W. Bush won the state’s electoral votes in 2000 and 2004.

Obama’s job-approval rating among Colorado voters is 53 percent, according to the new poll.

Clinton and Bennet have led in every publicly released poll of Colorado voters conducted since the general election match-ups were set, after Glenn emerged from a five-way primary to win the GOP Senate nomination.

Friday’s poll is the first public polling of state voters released since the Republicans and Democrats held their national conventions in July.

In the earlier polling, Clinton was leading Trump by an average of 9.5 points, according to polls conducted in early July by Harper Polling, Monmouth University, Fox News and NBC News/The Wall Street Journal. Bennet was ahead of Glenn by 12.25 points, on average, in the same group of polls.

The new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist Colorado poll was conducted Aug. 4-10 among 899 registered voters and has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 3.3 percentage points.

– ernest@coloradostatesman.com