GOP tries to right its ship in Colorado
By Jeremy Pelzer 
| July 5, 2009 | 11:18 PM
The Republican party hopes to once again plant its flag in Colorado. (RMI photo illustration/iStockphoto)
The 32-year-old sales marketer from Denver had voted straight Republican in every election since he first cast a ballot in 1996. Last year, he was a delegate for John McCain in the Republican presidential caucus.
But in the general election last November, Curtis voted Democratic for the first time in his life, picking Barack Obama and Mark Udall for president and U.S. Senate, respectively.
And he says he’ll do it again next election.
“I feel like the current state of the Republican Party would lead me away and have me vote Democratic,” Curtis said. “It’s a situation where moderates like myself — the (Republican) party just doesn’t want us right now. . . . There’re still a lot of principles that I agree with, but I think there’s too much focus on the social issues.”
Curtis is one of thousands of Colorado voters who have sparked one of the most sudden and dramatic political turnarounds in America. On Election Day in 2002, the Republican Party emerged dominant on almost every level of Colorado government: The GOP controlled the governor’s mansion, both houses of the state legislature, five of the state’s seven congressional seats and both U.S. Senate seats.
Almost seven years later, the Democrats are in the exact same position. Last year, Barack Obama handily won Colorado, becoming only the second Democratic presidential nominee to win the state since 1964. Democrats control every elected statewide office except for attorney general.
And the political world has taken notice. The rise of the Democratic Party in Colorado has been touted by national magazines such as The New Yorker and The Weekly Standard as a guide that Democrats can use to overthrow Republican hegemony in the Rocky Mountain West and throughout the country.
But now, with the Grand Old Party at its lowest point in decades, can Republicans nationwide also take lessons from Colorado as they look to recover power?
Canary in the coal mine
Despite the current Democratic dominance, Colorado is not a blue state. But what used to be a fairly red state is now solidly up for grabs. Voter registration, which used to favor Republicans, is now divided into thirds among Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters.
Colorado, said veteran nonpartisan Denver pollster Floyd Ciruli, is what the future of the Rocky Mountain West looks like: lots of unaffiliated voters, a growing bloc of Hispanic voters who heavily favor Democrats, and a group of social conservatives who are motivated but don’t dominate.
“I think Colorado is one of several (states) that could be called the canary in the coal mine” for Republicans, said University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato. “Colorado, Nevada, Virginia and maybe Indiana: These are places that used to be rock-ribbed Republican. They were dependably GOP in competitive races, and of course they all voted for Obama — some by wide margins, surprisingly large margins.”
What happened
It’s impossible to contemplate how Republicans can regain power in Colorado without understanding how they lost it in the past six years: that is, how the political landscape changed, what Democrats did right and what Republicans did wrong.
Colorado’s voter rolls have been getting more Democratic. Hispanics, who, as a group, overwhelmingly favor Democrats, increased in number from about 17 percent of Colorado’s population in 2000 to almost 20 percent in 2008, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Non-Hispanics who moved into the state also have tended to be Democratic, as were businesspeople lured to the state’s growing high-tech and telecommunications industries.
Thus, while registered Republicans in Colorado outnumbered both registered Democrats and unaffiliated voters in 2004, the three groups were virtually even by 2008. And while Democrats gained more than 114,000 registered voters during that time, Republicans lost more than 50,000 registered voters (registered unaffiliateds increased by about 44,000).
Ask a Colorado Republican these days how Democrats have been able to win in Colorado, and there’s a good chance he or she will bring up the “Gang of Four.”
That’s the nickname for four Colorado multimillionaires –- Rutt Bridges, Tim Gill, Pat Stryker and Jared Polis –- who have poured money into Democratic campaigns across the state on an unprecedented scale.
“You know how you hear about elections that are bought? That’s what happened to me –- my election was bought,” Ray Martinez, a former mayor of Fort Collins who ran for state Senate in 2004, told the conservative magazine National Review. “My campaign cost about $350,000, and the other side spent as much as $1.7 million against me.”
Republicans also like to blame the Colorado Democracy Alliance, a loose network of nonprofit and political groups that has the goal of advancing progressive interests.
These Democratic groups formed in the wake of Amendment 27, which put a $400 cap on donations to state political candidates. The formation of nonprofit groups allowed progressives to circumvent these limits to support Democratic candidates.
Republicans haven’t yet built a network comparable to the one helping Democrats. In 2004, several wealthy Republicans — including Gov. Bill Owens — started the Trailhead Group to counter the Gang of Four’s donations. The group raised $5.2 million in 2006 but shut down a year later following accusations of misleading attack ads and campaign finance violations, as well as criticism from Republicans themselves who said the group targeted the wrong political races and spread the money too thin.
But Democrats didn’t win in Colorado just because of money. They also found a string of moderate candidates who appealed to the center and pushed a string of moderate wedge issues, from renewable energy (Gov. Bill Ritter) to water rights (U.S. Rep. John Salazar).
As Democrats began recruiting and spending after the 2002 election, Republicans began doing what most parties in power eventually do — attack each other.
In the Colorado Republicans’ case, a schism arose between the moderate and business wings of the party and the fiscal and social conservative side. The two sides clashed in 2003 over Referendum C, which waived for five years state spending restrictions set by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. Fiscal conservatives saw TABOR as a critical check on government spending, but moderates led by Owens said that the restrictions handcuffed the state’s ability to recover from a recession.
Republicans also dragged each other down via several vicious primary battles –- the most notable being the 2006 gubernatorial primary between Bob Beauprez and Marc Holtzman.
Of course, the national decline and fall of Republicans hurt, too. Political discontent over George W. Bush — especially over the Iraq War — caused Colorado moderates to flock to the Democrats in droves.
And fiscal conservatives who have long blasted “tax-and-spend” Democrats became disillusioned as federal spending ballooned under a Republican president and Congress.
What Republicans need to do
Although Republicans are being mauled in top-of-the-ticket races, many voters have kept supporting them on a local level, where candidates tend to be more pragmatic than ideological. Last year, the GOP gained two seats in the Colorado House, lost only one state Senate seat (by 195 votes), and most Republican county commissioners kept their seats.
If the Republican Party is going to stage a comeback, many pundits agree that it needs to swing back closer to the center on social issues.
“You cannot win Colorado with just a (Rush) Limbaugh vote — period,” Ciruli said. “If you have that, you have the (Tom) Tancredo vote essentially, or the (Marilyn) Musgrave vote, and you will lose by 20 points.”
Colorado Republicans are already starting to de-emphasize social issues. Until last year, two of the most reactionary members in Congress were Colorado Republicans: Musgrave and Tancredo. Now both of them are gone — Tancredo retired, and Musgrave lost her re-election campaign.
Succeeding them are a new wave of Republican faces — such as likely gubernatorial candidate Josh Penry — who, while staunchly conservative on issues such as abortion and gay rights, de-emphasize those stances in public.
“We do have to fix that brand from the perspective of the Republican Party,” Penry said in a March television interview. “We cannot be seen as a party that looks down its nose and judges people harshly just because they see the world differently than we do.”
Republicans also have to find ways to match the financial power of progressive 527s. And it needs to address its continued trouble winning over Hispanic voters. There’s not much chance Republicans will win over a majority of Hispanic voters in the foreseeable future, but with effort, Republicans could start to cut into the group’s overwhelmingly Democratic voting margins.
Finally, the Colorado Republican Party needs to build a “farm team” of up-and-coming politicians and find a leader who can help rally the conservative base as well as lure in Democrats and unaffiliated voters.
While state Republicans say that they’ve seen more people this year interested in running for office as a Republican than in previous years, it remains to be seen how many will be the GOP’s future leaders and how many are fringe candidates.
The jury’s also still out on finding a leader for next year’s elections. The Republican primary race for governor could turn into a devastating battle between Penry and Scott McInnis, while the leading Republican candidates for U.S. Senate — Aurora City Councilman Ryan Frazier and Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck — are virtual unknowns.
The future is now
The 2010 election will be incredibly important for both parties in Colorado. The governor and legislature will play a pivotal part in redistricting after the 2010 Census — if Democrats can hold on, they can redraw legislative and congressional district lines to help cement their control.
The election also will test whether Democrats can hold on to the wave of new voters that turned out last year for Obama. And now that they’re in power, will they be blamed if the economy continues to lag and — as seems inevitable — they have to make enormous cuts to the state budget next year?
If Republicans do find success in Colorado in the next few years, you can be sure the rest of the country will take notice.
“Frankly, if there is a new Republican governor and senator here, those individuals will be immediately national leaders,” Ciruli said. “How they got there will be told and retold in the hallways of the Republican consultants on K Street and at the national committee level because they will have found the message and the formula to get back in this game.”
Read more about Colorado politics from Jeremy Pelzer at MileHighPolitics.com.
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