EDITORIAL: Will Colorado’s Legislature lean further left?
No question about it, Colorado’s political trajectory has favored ruling Democrats for the last several elections and likely will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Republicans can blame in part their own state party’s disarray as well as a former, one-term Republican president who, for all his appeal in some climes of the country, repels Colorado’s dominant unaffiliated voting bloc. Particularly unaffiliated women. Poll after poll shows it.
As for the overall political orientation of those unaffiliateds — their ranks swollen by an influx of transplants from other states — they may well lean more left than right with or without Donald Trump serving as a lightning rod on the ballot. Veteran GOP political sage and Gazette columnist Dick Wadhams believes young, unaffiliated newcomers in places like Denver are “really liberal Democrats” by a different name, he recently told a Gazette reporter.
The real question for now, as we noted here only recently, is what will come of the growing rift within the ranks of Democrats? They hold all of Colorado’s statewide elected offices and overwhelmingly control both chambers of the legislature.