WASHINGTON — When Barack Obama accepted his party’s presidential nomination 18 months ago in a floodlighted football stadium in Denver, he pinned the hopes of a new Democratic ascendancy on the Intermountain West.
Helped along by demographic shifts in the region, Democrats looked as if they had done everything right over several election cycles, catching a wave of new voters and showcasing a bevy of bright-light politicians who included Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter.
“Western Democrats have enjoyed stunning successes over the last three elections,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared at a conference in Denver last August. “The road to the West Wing goes through the American West.”
Now, the region is emerging as a test of the staying power of those forces. Although Democrats are facing difficult prospects across the electoral map, nowhere has their light dimmed as quickly as in the Rocky Mountains and Southwest.
President Obama arrives in Colorado today with approval ratings in the state lower than his national average. Early polls suggest Reid’s re-election bid may be the biggest loss for the party since the unseating of Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle in 2004. Ritter, lagging badly in polls and saying he needed to dedicate more time to his family, isn’t running for a second term.
“Colorado led on one end, and now it looks like it will be leading on the other,” said Jennifer Duffy, who tracks Senate races across the country for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
She pointed out that both top-line races in the state — for governor and U.S. Senate — are at best toss-ups.
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, a beneficiary of Obama’s fundraising stop today, trails Republicans in most statewide polls. Reid, for whom Obama will appear Friday at a Nevada fundraiser, also lags behind his top Republican opponents in surveys there.
The permanence of the Western strategy for the Democrats “may have been a myth,” Duffy said.
Analysts point out that the region’s long-term demographic trends that buoyed the party recently still work in Democrats’ favor. The Latino population is swelling, and those voters typically swing blue by a nearly 2-1 ratio. And the rapid population growth of states such as Arizona, Nevada and Colorado has been driven by newcomers who are better-educated, environmentally conscious and less tied to traditional party structures.
But rather than transforming the region into a Democratic stronghold, the quick disaffection with Democrats in Washington suggests that key states in the Intermountain West may emerge as more of a bellwether — like Ohio — where parties fight for fickle independent voters tooth and nail and the political mood can swing violently.
“We used to sit around and talk about a cycle of 24 years that would swing between Republicans and Democrats, but now the cycle may be 24 months,” said Floyd Ciruli, a Denver pollster and an early proponent of the idea that the West’s political landscape was shifting more permanently toward Democrats.
“A combination of technology, polarization, the amount of money coming into cycles — there are just a lot of things that are making these swings a lot bigger and faster,” he said.
3 states tell wider story
Just after Republican George W. Bush’s first election as president in 2000, the region was a GOP citadel.
In the swath of states that includes Idaho, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada, Republicans held every governor’s seat and 13 of the 16 Senate seats. Three-quarters of House seats were in Republican hands.
Slippage began two years later, when Democrats won governors’ seats in New Mexico, Arizona and Wyoming, but picked up steam in 2004. That year in Colorado, Ken Salazar won a U.S. Senate seat for the Democrats and his brother, John, won a traditionally Republican House seat. Both houses of the state legislature swung blue.
The party has had a string of successes in the region since then and now controls more than half the region’s seats in the U.S. House and seven of its 16 Senate seats.
But proof of the Democratic ascendancy in the region came in the 2008 presidential race, when a black lawyer from Chicago won New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada, the last two states by margins above his national average.
“We had Obama win the state by 9 percentage points. That can’t happen. That’s just not Colorado,” Ciruli said.
Just 15 months later, nearly all indicators suggest that warm embrace has turned cold.
In Nevada, Reid’s Senate seat and the House seat won in 2008 by Congresswoman Dina Titus are in danger.
Harry Teague, who also won in a typically Republican district two years ago in New Mexico, faces one of the toughest re-election races in the country.
And in Colorado, Republicans have a shot at retaking the governor’s mansion, a U.S. Senate seat, and the U.S. House seat won in 2008 by Democrat Betsy Markey of Fort Collins.
Those three states are telling, because it’s there, along with possible gains in Arizona, that Democrats see the future. Quick growth has opened opportunities to hold those states long term, party strategists believe, creating a potential counterweight to two decades of losses in the South.
“If you look at the . . . states that Obama won where Kerry didn’t, the Nevada-Colorado- New Mexico axis is his most comfortable subset,” said the University of Maryland’s Tom Schaller, author of “Whistling Past Dixie,” an early effort to push Democrats to focus on the Intermountain West as a way to win presidential elections.
Agenda vs. economy
Democrats take some solace in the fact that their current standing in the region may have as much to do with temporary troubles as the party’s ideas.
In Colorado, Ritter suffered a series of self-inflicted wounds, and when Ken Salazar was chosen as Obama’s interior secretary, the governor picked a little-known school superintendent from Denver to fill Salazar’s Senate seat.
Nevada’s economic fall has been worse than just about every other state, and it now suffers 13 percent unemployment, second only to Michigan. As Senate majority leader, Reid has had to carry the weight of Democrats’ national agenda, including negotiating several now notorious deals with moderate lawmakers in order to pass health care reform.
But there are also signs that the party’s expansive agenda during the first year of the Obama administration was simply out of step with the views of many of the region’s voters.
“By leading with a major health care reform policy when the economy is bad, by talking about global climate policy while the economy is bad, that’s a tough sell, particularly in the mountain West,” said Eric Herzik, a political scientist at the University of Nevada.
Herzik said that as the party has expanded its base in the region, it is targeting moderately conservative voters whose views are often at odds with the Democrats’ more liberal base in the Northeast.
A critical factor in the party’s short-term prospects in the region will be the army of young and minority voters mobilized by Obama’s campaign two years ago.
“Surge electorate”
Both Bennet and Reid are well ahead of their competitors in fundraising, and the president’s trip to both states this week is likely part of an effort engage exactly those voters who failed to show up in recent elections in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts — each of which was won by a Republican.
Besides the traditional big-dollar fundraiser, Obama is also holding a “Grassroots Rally” at the Fillmore Auditorium in Denver, where supporters can attend for as little as $25.
“The biggest question for the 2010 midterms is to what degree is the surge electorate that Obama turned out in 2008 replicable in a midterm election,” said the University of Maryland’s Schaller.
“People who tend to turn out lower in midterms are younger people, non-white, independent voters and first-time voters,” he said. “But this is the terra nova. This is the first post-Obama election. Maybe there will be a worse drop-off because of Obama, but maybe there won’t be.”
“I don’t know the answer to that question,” Schaller said. “But I do know that is the question.”
Michael Riley: 202-662-8907 or mriley@denverpost.com.
Obama at Denver fundraiser today
President Barack Obama stops in Denver today to raise money for U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and other Democratic campaigns. He is expected to arrive at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora shortly before 3 p.m. and will depart about 5:30 p.m. The arrival and departure are not open to the public. The president will address a “Grassroots Rally” at the Fillmore Auditorium in Denver before heading to a cocktail reception at the downtown Sheraton. Details: bennetforcolorado.com
