Grand Junction Republican Jeff Hurd holds a comfortable lead in the six-way GOP primary in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District as ballots go in the mail to voters, new polling shows.

Hurd, an attorney and first-time candidate, was the choice of 27% of the likely Republican primary voters polled, with none of his rivals breaking out of single digits, according to results of a co/efficient survey conducted this week and made available exclusively to Colorado Politics. Just over half of those surveyed said they were undecided.

Covering most of the Western Slope and parts of Southern Colorado, the Republican-leaning district has been represented for two terms by U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, who moved across the state to another district earlier this year.

The winner of the June 25 GOP primary will face Democrat Adam Frisch, the former Aspen City Council member who nearly unseated Boebert two years ago.

The poll found former state Rep. Ron Hanks, R-Cañon City, in second place with 9%, followed by State Board of Education member Stephen Varela at 5%. Bringing up the rear were three political novices who are largely self-funding their runs, with Lew Webb and Russ Andrews at 3% each, and Curtis McCrackin at 2%.

The Kansas City-based Republican poling firm surveyed 1,110 Republican and unaffiliated voters who said they’re likely to vote in this month’s primary, using a combination of mobile text response and landline interviews. The poll, conducted on Tuesday, was paid for by an outside party that hasn’t been involved in the primary. It had a margin of error of 3.07 percentage points.

“The big headline out of this dataset is you have Hurd, who’s well-liked and significantly better known than the challengers, and then you kind of have the long tail of the rest,” Ryan Munce, co/efficient’s president and co-founder, told Colorado Politics.

He said Hurd’s broad support across nearly every demographic category is unusual compared to polling the firm has done in other congressional districts around the country.

“It’s rare to see any candidate as equally popular among the Trump-supporting base and what we sometimes call more moderate Republicans,” Munce said. “Hurd is actually very popular and almost equally well liked among both.”

Munce said the large number of undecided voters isn’t surprising, given that it’s a large field without a well-known candidate, and none of the campaigns has so far spent heavily on advertising.

“The undecideds will skew toward folks with higher name ID,” Munce said. “They’ll all pick up a handful of that 52%, with the lion’s share going almost certainly to Jeff.”

With less than three weeks remaining until polls close, Munce said it could take tremendous spending — in the seven-figure range — to influence the outcome.

“It’s overwhelmingly a resource question,” he said. “There are very few active information-seekers when it comes to campaigns like this. The majority require information to come to them.”

Munce noted that 56% of the voters surveyed haven’t heard anything about Hurd or haven’t made up their minds about him, meaning Hurd probably hasn’t hit his ceiling and has room to grow. So do the other candidates, but with just weeks to go before ballots are counted, they’re all far less known than Hurd, he added.

“That’s also a gap that Hurd has to close. This race is by no means over,” Munce said. “If nothing dramatic changes, this is the pattern we expect to see continue, but Hurd can’t just hang up his cleats — he has to carry it across the finish line.”

Added Munce: “Ultimately, it seems like Hurd is aligned for a nearly certain victory here, unless something crazy happens that we don’t see.”

Trump hasn’t made an endorsement in the race, but co/efficient’s polling found that if the former president does, it could make a difference.

According to the poll, 60% of respondents said a Trump endorsement would make them more likely to vote for a candidate, while 15% said it would make them less likely and 25% said it would make no difference.

Unlike the other five Republicans, who have made their support for Trump and his MAGA movement central to their campaigns, Hurd is the only candidate in the primary who hasn’t embraced the former president.

The polling showed that Trump is wildly popular among the district’s Republican primary voters, with 64% of those surveyed saying they fully support the Republican, 21% saying they dislike Trump personally but support his policies, and just 13% saying they don’t support him. Another 2% said they were unsure.