Decoding this odd Colorado election
O dd-year elections often produce head-scratching results.
But the outcomes of elections here in Colorado have become somewhat predictable, locked in a general pattern for almost two decades. In presidential elections, Colorado votes for Democrats and will continue to for the foreseeable future. In midterms when a Democrat is president, Republican candidates and conservative interests in Colorado perform over par. In midterm elections when a Republican is president, Democrats win races up and down the ticket.
There are exceptions, of course, like when Gov. John Hickenlooper weathered intense red waves in both 2010 and 2014 (aided greatly by a largely dysfunctional state GOP) and when Colorado voters approved a meager income tax cut during the blue wave of 2020 while simultaneously approving the most generous paid family and medical leave program in the country.
Odd years like 2017 and 2019 are generally lower turnout affairs where older, more conservative voters tend to outperform younger more progressive voters and progressive issues lose more often and conservative issues win more often.
But the 2021 election, at least in Colorado, threw this reliable pattern out the window. It’s too soon to tell if it’s an outlier or if it marks the beginning of a new pattern, but it is certainly worth examining closely.
Conservatives won city council races in progressive cities like Aurora, aided by the fact that municipal races in Colorado are nonpartisan and that right-wing dark money groups and candidates outspent their progressive counterparts by at least nine-to-one. Progressives trounced an insurgent anti-mask, antivaccine slate of school board candidates in Jefferson County and delivered a progressive majority to the Lakewood City Council for the first time in memory.
And three well-funded statewide ballot measures all went down in flames. Each of them had proponents regularly telling the political chattering class in the state how popular their ideas were, how high they were polling, and all of the ballot questions had little organized opposition.
The confusing-yet-well-messaged Amendment 78, which read to voters like a government accountability measure, needed 55% of the vote to win as constitutional amendments now have a higher threshold to pass after 2016’s successful Amendment 71. As of this writing, the initiative was losing with 56% of voters saying “no,” kind of the opposite of what proponents needed.
Proposition 120, a property tax cut offered during a period of historic infla
tion, a weird labor market, and a stratospherically skyrocketing real estate boom that will seemingly never end was defeated in 57 of 64 counties, including losing the conservative strongholds of El Paso, Mesa, and Douglas Counties, places that have almost never seen a tax cut they didn’t like.
And Proposition 119, which used the once-reliable formula of “bongs for books,” increasing state marijuana taxes to ostensibly fund after-school programs, followed the other two down the tubes. Despite a relentless campaign highlighting support from political superstars like former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, Gov. Jared Polis, Democratic and Republican former Govs. Bill Ritter and Bill Owens, organizations like Servicios de la Raza and The Boys & Girls Club, an all-star crew of both Democratic and Republican consultants, and over $2.3 million in spending; the initiative lost to a ragtag crew of former educators largely mailing homemade postcards and writing letters to the editor and Opeds in local newspapers.
So what can we learn from this? Some of the same right-wing interest groups who lost on Tuesday are already gearing up for yet another tax cut fight in 2022, where history suggests they should have an advantage, but this year should have deep-pocketed conservative donors thinking twice about writing big checks to big losers.
Progressives would be smart to run local campaigns ensuring that voters in municipal and school board elections know what party their candidates belong to so they aren’t snookered by huge blitzes of dark money advertising from groups that categorically do not share their values.
But anyone who tells you that the results in Virginia means that popular politicians like Congressman Ed Perlmutter, Gov. Jared Polis, or Sen. Michael Bennet are in any kind of political danger whatsoever are selling something that generally comes from the rear end of a steer, and should be treated as such. The results in Virginia more or less followed historical trends of Republicans winning when a Democrat is a president, and the results in Colorado bucked the trend of Republicans gaining support during odd elections.
There may very well be lessons to learn for Colorado politicos from the totally unexpected trouncing of three seemingly-popular statewide ballot initiatives, but in fairness, odd-year electorates in Colorado are generally not very representative of the state at large or the higher-turnout even-year midterms and presidential elections where we decide who our statewide leaders will be.
But one thing is for sure — if Republicans couldn’t get their allegedly popular ideas through an oddyear electorate warped by low turnout that has historically favored conservatives, their chances of getting their candidates elected or initiatives approved by the increasingly progressive Colorado electorate in even years are evaporating.