Colorado’s growing political divide leaves rural communities feeling forgotten and voiceless
A political transformation in Colorado is exacerbating the tension in elections and at the Capitol
He and his neighbors worry that rural Colorado is being left behind as the economic disparities and political polarization widen between northeastern Colorado and Denver. Often the two Colorados struggle to even understand each other.
Like the time a transportation official from Denver asked whether he could relocate prairie dogs to the Eastern Plains, not knowing the dangers the animals can pose to grazing cattle. Or the time a Denver politician had no idea that all rural areas didn’t have high-speed internet.
Once, rural officials considered lobbying for money to add shoulders to their roads by calling them bike lanes because it would be more appealing to urban lawmakers.
“People just don’t know what all this is about,” said Don Ament, a former state lawmaker and agriculture commissioner from Iliff in Logan County.
The leaders in this part of the state held a referendum in 2013 on whether to secede and form a 51st state — a largely symbolic vote of discontent dismissed at the time but now seen as a harbinger of the frustration that made working-class America solid Donald Trump country in the 2016 election.
The well-documented division between the haves and have-nots in the state — whether related to water, internet access or health care — is felt the strongest in the political arena, where urban and rural compete for finite attention and resources.
That dynamic, many political observers say, influences every election and major policy decision in Colorado.
RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post
Jim
Underwood, 73, a retired truck driver, lights a cigarette as he watches
a political video on Facebook at his home on Oct. 30, 2017 in Fort
Morgan. Underwood, a Trump supporter, said he spends a lot of time on
social media looking at political coverage.Inside the cab of his green, 12-row harvester, Hernandez adds an exclamation point to Salazar’s sentiment: “When it comes to politics, for sure,” he says.
The 34-year-old married father of three pauses the conversation to transfer the feed corn to a waiting cart in the middle of the field. Once finished, he explains why he voted for a New York billionaire and reality TV show host for president. “I was ready for a little different direction to shake things up. I guess that’s what it’s about,” he says.
Hernandez never expected Trump to win — but he stayed awake until 2 a.m. to watch him declare victory. Hernandez called it a “pretty exciting day.”
The fact that Trump lost in Colorado only reinforces the isolation felt by the state’s rural voters. The Republican candidate won two-thirds of the state but finished behind Hillary Clinton by 136,386 votes, or 5 percent, thanks to an overwhelming Democratic vote in urban areas.
Like others in these parts, Hernandez said the sense of being overrun can make him feel voiceless, like shouting into the bitter wind of the winter storm that approached from Denver one recent fall afternoon.
“We are a minority out here (compared with) urban areas,” he says, “so it gets to be a little bit of a challenge, I guess you could say, when it comes down to politics.”
RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post
A large American flag is painted on the side of a building at a farm in Kit Carson County, Nov. 05, 2013.Democratic divide
The political balkanization in Colorado is as bright as the red line on the map that marks the Continental Divide, except in this case, it’s a band of blue.A column of Democratic territory — stretching from north of the Denver metro area west through the liberal mountain resort towns, southwest to like-minded Durango and southeast to Latino-rich Alamosa — carves the state roughly in half in recent presidential elections.
In red-blue abstract, the 2016 vote looks like a Democrat holding a paintball gun aimed eastward while being surrounded by Republicans from the Western Slope and Eastern Plains.
Four decades ago, it looked much different. From 1968 to 2008, Colorado voted for only one Democratic candidate for president, Bill Clinton in 1992. But since Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, when Democrats held their national convention in Denver, the state morphed to blue.
The political transformation was accelerated by an influx of younger and more educated transplants to the Front Range who lean Democratic, adding to the tension with natives in rural areas.
More than half of the state’s registered voters now live in just five of 64 counties — Denver, El Paso, Jefferson, Arapahoe and Adams. And Democrats beat Republicans in terms of voter registration in all of those but El Paso County, home to Colorado Springs.
“There’s simply not enough voters who live in what we call the rural areas to make a dent in the Front Range vote,” said Ryan Winger at Magellan Strategies, a Republican political consulting firm.
In addition, the map shows blue Colorado getting bluer and red Colorado getting redder. Democrats lost votes in 33 mostly rural counties since the 2000 election, according to state data, but beat Republicans in 2016 because of significant increases in turnout in the Denver metro area.
The 2016 election showed that parochial split is one of the most potent political forces in the state. As Trump harvested discontent in rural America to win the White House, a ballot measure endorsed by all five living governors sowed a similar seed of division in Colorado to successful effect.
The “Raise the Bar” campaign asked voters to approve Amendment 71 to make it harder to amend the state constitution. The measure required a broader geographic range of voter signatures to earn a spot on the ballot and a higher threshold to win approval.
Proponents labeled it as a rallying cry for outnumbered rural Colorado and a push against the growing urban areas. The strategy essentially made Denver and Boulder into four-letter words.
“Right now, you can gather all your signatures in Boulder if you want to, in Denver if you want to, and most of the time rural Colorado is locked out of that process,” Greg Brophy, a former rural state lawmaker, said at an election forum in Akron, 50 miles south of Iliff.
He added: “I can think of nothing that we’ve had an opportunity to participate in that is more important to rural Colorado than the protections offered by Amendment 71. When you think about how many more people are coming to this state, this may be our final shot — before some anti-agriculture group runs a constitutional amendment that permanently damages the economy of eastern Colorado in a way that the Front Range doesn’t even notice but would be utterly devastating to us.”
The measure won 56 percent support. A majority of only four counties — primarily Denver and Boulder — opposed it.
Rural areas losing clout
Cathy Shull is responsible for delivering rural Colorado’s message to Denver. But she admits that sometimes she feels like she’s in a scene from “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”It’s not that she’s naive, it’s that she feels like “the little guy fighting for attention.”
Shull is a leading advocate for the Eastern Plains as executive director at Pro 15, one of three regional organizations that formed to boost the voice of rural Colorado at the statehouse.
The oldest is Club 20, started by Western Slope business leaders in 1953 to advocate for paving rural roads.
The mission of the regional organizations remains much the same decades later: to push their priorities and fight for their share of state dollars.
The effort, however, is more difficult. The tax-rich urban areas send money to rural Colorado to help cover its needs, but now with more people in cities demanding more services, the situation is more contentious.
“It’s not that we have big projects or anything,” Shull said. “It’s that we want to make sure we don’t get left behind.”
And much like the state’s electoral math, rural representatives are outmatched in the Colorado General Assembly. The powerful “Cowboy Caucus” from the 1980s is a distant memory, replaced by districts now more concentrated in the populous cities.
“At the Capitol, rural Colorado doesn’t have the votes,” said former state Rep. Ed Vigil, a Fort Garland Democrat who retired this year.
Vigil represented eight different counties, and his counterpart in the state Senate, Republican Larry Crowder, represents 16 — a quarter of the entire state. “With the divide, rural communities have less representation,” Vigil said in resignation, adding, “It’s just not fair.”
RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post
Jim
Underwood, 73, a retired truck driver, stands outside his home on Oct.
30, 2017 in Fort Morgan. Underwood is a big Trump supporter and hopes
Trump is able to build a wall on the Mexico border.Still, Vigil acknowledges that the most populous places face their own problems and demands. “The legislators in urban areas … have to take care of the people in their districts when the rubber meets the road,” he said.
The 100 legislative districts tend to favor one party or the other, and a minority of them straddle urban and rural areas. Eight Republican state lawmakers — four in each chamber — sit in districts won by Clinton in 2016, according to state election data. One Democratic lawmaker holds turf that Trump won.
The posture matters most when urban and rural leaders advocate at the Capitol for competing priorities, often on the same topic.
In the Denver-metro area, the priorities are larger highways, mass transit, higher minimum wage, marijuana regulation, tighter gun restrictions and affordable housing.
In rural parts of the state, the priorities are job growth, road repairs, water storage, cheaper health care, teacher shortages, and fewer regulations on agriculture and energy production.
Denver Mayor Michael Hancock said the divide presents an obstacle for his city to meet its increasing needs amid rapid growth, and he often finds himself trying to educate rural Colorado.
“We are the big urban banana, if you will,” he said. “So we have to work extra hard to make sure that legislators from our suburban as well as primarily from our rural counties understand the issues that may play in the big city.”
The leaders in rural Colorado say the same — that urban Colorado doesn’t understand their perspective. And too often, they argue, rural areas shoulder the burden of budget cuts, whether through the loss of severance tax money from oil and gas extraction or unfair funding formulas.
“Our needs are the same,” said Tammy Berbee, the Pro 15 board chairwoman. “We need the education, we need the highways, we need the infrastructure. It’s not different living in the rural areas than it is in the city, it’s just that there are fewer of us.”
U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner, who represented northeastern Colorado as a state lawmaker and congressman, said he sees inherent differences in the two camps. And he said the deference once afforded rural lawmakers to take care of their communities is vanishing.
“If you’re a rural policymaker, you have to understand what’s happening in the urban areas because they drive so much of the business and the conversation of the state,” the Yuma native said. “But if you’re an urban legislator or urban policymaker, you don’t have to pay attention to what’s happening in those rural areas.”
Ament echos the sentiment as he drives his Ford pickup truck through the farmland in Iliff that his grandfather began working more than 100 years ago, part of which he now leases to Hernandez and his family.
The 75-year-old former Colorado agriculture commissioner has a simple explanation for the disconnect with what he calls “his urban cousins.”
“They don’t have Grandma and Grandpa on the farm. … That just doesn’t happen anymore,” Ament said. “They are gone.”
RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post
Former Colorado Agriculture Commissioner Don Ament fixes a water tank at his farm on Oct. 26, 2017 in Iliff.Crossing political divide
Sean Conway, a Weld County commissioner who helped lead the secession movement in 2013, said the solution to repair the urban-rural rift is clear: more education and awareness in urban areas about the contributions of rural Colorado, particularly when it comes to food and energy.“I do think it is a silver bullet,” he said.
He takes an optimistic view about what came from the 51st-state referendum, even though it was rejected in six of the 11 counties where it appeared on the ballot. “There has been a seminal change from that 2013 secession (vote) to now,” he said.
Conway believes the divide still exists, but “there is more interest in representatives who represent a primarily urban constituency to listen and learn.
“From that standpoint,” he says, “I think that it’s been positive.”
Christian Reece, the Club 20 executive director, said the schism is less dramatic than it appears, pointing to collaboration from urban and rural lawmakers in the 2017 legislative session.
She cites the following as a prime example: a law approved earlier this year related to hospital fees that included an extra $30 million infusion for rural schools and money earmarked for rural roads — two concessions Denver-area lawmakers made to win support from conservative rural lawmakers who rejected a similar measure in the prior two years.
“I think there is a respect for rural Colorado because we were all rural at one point — that’s where our foundation as a state came from, that’s where our principles and identity as a state came from,” Reece said. “And I think that’s an identity people throughout the state still hold on to.”
A shared identity may help bridge the divide, but urban and rural leaders in Colorado acknowledge the chasm will not close anytime soon, if ever. The best hope, both sides say, is an understanding that urban Colorado cannot succeed without rural Colorado, and vice versa.
“We are all in it together,” Reece said.
Explore shifts in presidential voting patterns at the county level in the following graphic:
Denver Post staff writer Kevin Hamm contributed.
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