Does Colorado hold the key to unlocking electoral success for Democrats? The Progressive Policy Institute thinks so.
The group recently held a confab in Denver to talk strategy for the upcoming midterm elections and the 2028 election cycle, and Politico reports the group is leaning heavily on the idea that the state should be a model for Democrats nationwide.
“The Colorado Way,” as it’s known by its adherents, is a marriage of political strategy and policy framing that Democrats have used to take over state government from the bottom up, giving them a platform to then take over statewide races and ultimately control Colorado’s 10 electoral votes. Many of the most prominent state lawmakers who emerged in the early 2000s focused on voters’ pocketbooks above everything — from reducing government regulation and lowering taxes while selling ideas like renewable energy and universal pre-K — not on the morality of the issues but rather on how much money they would save Coloradans. It’s a framing that many of the weekend’s attendees — who came from places as near as the Denver suburbs and as far away as Labour Party headquarters in London — hope will win over working- and middle-class voters who have drifted from a Democratic Party that many say cares more about passing ideological purity tests than the health of average Americans’ bank accounts.
Ask Colorado gun owners how focused Democratic lawmakers have been on economic issues over the past decade. While proponents of the "Colorado Way" might want to downplay the anti-gun impulses of lawmakers, the state has seen a steady erosion of the right to keep and bear arms since 2013; starting with bans on "large capacity" magazines and the establishment of "red flag" laws, and progressing to a permit-to-purchase law for so-called assault weapons and new restrictions on the right to carry, to name just a few.
The Progressive Policy Institute's president and founder Will Marshall told Politico that moving to the left under Joe Biden helped to shrink the party's appeal nationwide, which is true enough. But that includes Democratic demands to ban or restrict the sale and possession of the most popular rifles in the country; a position that Marshall himself has taken.
In 2022 Marshall penned a screed blasting the "Republican Party’s dogmatic opposition to common sense gun safety measures", which he claimed "grows out of the right’s paranoiac and absolutist view that any limits on gun ownership and use will necessarily lead to extinguishing American liberty."
This is patently false, as a quick survey of how Great Britain, New Zealand and other free and democratic countries contain gun violence shows. But then today’s Trumpified GOP — steeped in a miasma of lies, conspiracy theories and tribal hatred — evidently is incapable of rationally discussing gun safety.
Great Britain bans handguns. New Zealand forced gun owners to sell their semi-automatic rifles to the government after the 2019 mass shooting in Christchuch (only to see violent crime increase in the following years, incidentally). Marshall's "modest" proposal was to ban the sale of "assault weapons" to adults under the age of 21, because "there's no earthly reason why adolescent males... should have easy access to war weapons."
Marshall's anti-gun extremism may not stand out in a state like Colorado, where, in fact, adults younger than 21 are prohibited from buying any firearm at retail. He's deluding himself, however, if he believes that Colorado's embrace of more restrictions on the Second Amendment is a winning strategy to woo Trump voters nationwide.
According to Pew Research, 85 percent of Trump voters in 2024 believed it was more important to protect the right of Americans to own guns than to control gun ownership. 80 percent of Biden voters, meanwhile, believed the opposite to be true. Support for the Second Amendment was silghtly higher among Biden voters (19 percent) than support for gun control among Trump backers (14 percent), which suggests that Democrats would be better off respecting the right to keep and bear arms than trying to convince Trump voters to support candidates who want to eviscerate their right to keep and bear arms.
There are multiple reasons why Colorado has veered sharply left over the past couple of decades, including an influx of voters from blue states and the explosive growth of the Denver metropolitan area. The city and the surrounding counties are home to almost half of the state's voters, and its outsized influence has made it difficult, if not impossible, for Republicans to win statewide office or control of the state legislature.
Colorado's demographic shift and the erosion of the rural vote can't be replicated nationwide. And despite Politico's repeated claim that Democrats in Colorado are more libertarian than the party as a whole, that's certainly not the case when it comes to the Second Amendment. The state legislature was poised to enact a ban on almost every semi-automatic rifle on the market this year before Gov. Jared Polis signaled he would veto the bill and worked with lawmakers to change the language to instead require a permit to purchase those guns going forward.
While Polis might be slightly more libertarian than, say, Gavin Newsom or Phil Murphy, he's still signed numerous gun control bills into law. He told Politico that “Democrats need to speak to a larger coalition,” which is true enough if they want to grow the party. But so long as Second Amendment supporters are still persona non grata, Democrats aren't going to be able to woo Trump or MAGA voters to their side, no matter how much they claim to be economic populists.
