Tom Tancredo’s gubernatorial campaign staffers are downright confident their candidate can beat Democrat John Hickenlooper—even if Republican Dan Maes stays in the race.

“I feel like we are gong to get this done,” Tancredo communications director Leo Jankowski tells The Colorado Independent. “We are going to win this thing.”

Yet the Talking Points Memo poll average shows Hickenlooper leading Maes and Tancredo, who is running on the American Constitution Party ticket, with each candidate’s support at 44.8 percent, 26.3 percent, and 22 percent, respectively.

Tea partiers are dismayed, notes TPM, which points to an open letter to 9-12 activists and tea party members in Colorado that Tancredo wrote back in December, claiming that any efforts to form a third party would be “suicidal and would only result in splitting the conservative vote and guaranteeing the re-election of liberals and socialists.”

That’s one of the reasons tea partiers worked closely with the GOP, bringing one of their own, Maes, to the ballot.

Tancredo, nevertheless, remains undaunted and campaigns on. And he’s finally named his running mate: former state Representative Pat Miller, whom The Colorado Statesman describes as a “solid pro-life candidate.”

Miller was elected to the state House in 1989 and served one term, establishing a pro-life, pro-gun, anti-tax voting record. She lost a re-election bid in 1992 to a Democrat and failed again two years later in a bid for the 2nd Congressional District seat then held by Democrat David Skaggs.