Does Colorado Have the Secret for What Ails the Democratic Party?

Politico

06-07-2025

DENVER — In the fervid first few months of the new Trump administration, as Democrats across the country began to reckon with the existential crisis their party faced, nearly 100 party stalwarts trekked to the Rocky Mountains in search of a way out of the political wilderness. Good news for the party was hard to come by at that moment in late April, but a faction believed Colorado offered some reason for hope.
Organizers at the Progressive Policy Institute chose Denver as the site of their first post-election gathering because few states over the last decade have been more successful for Democrats. Between 1972 and 2004, Republicans won all but one presidential election in Colorado. But since 2008, Democrats have swept the field — even routing Republicans by more than 10 percentage points in 2020 and 2024. And while solidly blue states like California and New York were rocked in 2024 by rightward shifts of 9 and 10.5 percentage points, respectively, Colorado's slide toward Trump was only 2.5 percentage points — one of the lowest rates of any blue state in the nation.
'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.
'We have to fight Donald Trump, and we have to fight Trumpism. That's critically important,' Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) told POLITICO Magazine after participating in a discussion session on how Colorado clawed its way from a red to blue state. 'But that's half the story. The rest of the story is how do we deal with the economic conditions that gave rise to Trump?'
Of course, Bennet and the others gathered in Denver are not the only Democrats who think they have the answer to that question. Progressive standard-bearers like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are drawing crowds of more than 12,000 in deep red Idaho, preaching Medicare for all and higher taxes on the wealthiest folks. Zohran Mamdani, a young democratic socialist, stunned the political establishment in New York City by winning the mayoral primary with a platform of free child care, free transit and a freeze on rent. Minnesota governor and Kamala Harris' running mate Tim Walz is touting populist, working class-focused policies like free school lunches and child tax credits as the roadmap for the Democratic Party. But if there is a distinction between those appeals and what was on offer in Denver, it's an emphasis on pragmatism over populism.
'We tried moving to the left under Biden. … It really helped shrink the party's appeal,' PPI president and founder Will Marshall told me a few days after the retreat. 'What will work in a deep blue district is one thing. What will work in swing states and swing districts is something else altogether.'
PPI's own polling and focus groups with non-college voters over the last three years showed a more moderate or even conservative outlook on issues like immigration or policing, Marshall explained. That's why they went to Denver: Marshall and others at PPI believe the key to the party's future success is to be found in the unique combination of libertarian ideals, progressive programs and pocketbook-focused governance that has become a hallmark of western liberalism. The pragmatic approach, they say, reflects the growing number of unaffiliated voters in the country.
PPI's plan to take the strategy sessions national has a compelling pedigree: After Democrats' dismal 1988 election showing — when George H. W. Bush beat Democrat Michael Dukakis with nearly 80 percent of the electoral college vote — PPI went to the American South looking for answers. Marshall and other PPI strategists held similar sessions that grew into the bones of the influential New Democratic movement. Involved in those strategic discussions was a little-known governor named Bill Clinton.
A lot has changed since the '90s. But PPI and the New Democrats have a similar mission to the one they implemented some three decades ago: to separate the party from its most left-leaning wing and market Democratic principles in a modern, changing landscape. From experience, Marshall says it'll require serious self-reflection and listening to people outside the Beltway. 'We wanted to test the proposition that Democrats are ready for the kind of searing self-examination and difficult conversations … that are going to be necessary to forge a whole new governing agenda and strategy,' Marshall said.
The person who has had as much as anyone to do with developing that governing agenda and strategy — and using it as an elected official — is Gov. Jared Polis, who welcomed the PPI attendees to the governor's mansion on the first night with the goal of '[talking] a little bit about what we do in Colorado … [and] presenting lessons that that can help contribute to the national level.'
A half hour earlier, I had sat down with Polis in the dimly lit carriage house across the garden of the governor's mansion, and asked him to explain the appeal of the Colorado Way. His response was a laundry list of policies, many of which are also popular with progressives: Universal Pre-K, expanding light rail, ending coal mining. But the key selling point for Polis, and which distinguishes him from some more left-leaning members of his party, is how he presents these policies as cost-saving for Coloradans rather than arguing for them as simply the right thing to do for the environment or low-income families.
'Coal is the most expensive form of power on the grid … The sooner we can retire it, the more savings we can pass along to the rate payers,' he told me. Over craft beer and hors d'oeuvres later that evening in the mansion, he also reminded the crowd that universal pre-K 'saves families $6,000 a year.'
'These [are] big items that have made a positive difference in people's lives,' Polis said. 'That's been part of the story of the ongoing electoral success, as well.'
The 'Colorado Way' has been more than 20 years in the making.
In 2003, Tim Gill, Rutt Bridges, Pat Stryker and Jared Polis, all wealthy Coloradans, came together to orchestrate a change in the state's politics. 'The four horsemen,' as they've been called, were already politically active. Gill started working behind the scenes after the passage of the state's 1992 anti-gay ballot amendment (which was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1996, in part thanks to Gill's investment in organizations fighting the amendment). Stryker, heiress of a billion-dollar medical tech fortune, funded arts programs and education efforts in the early 2000s before moving into electoral politics. Bridges, a geophysicist and venture capitalist, ran a handful of unsuccessful races for office and founded the centrist Bighorn Center for Public Policy in 1999. Polis, meanwhile, was already serving on the state board of education after making millions as a tech entrepreneur.
They eschewed the state's Democratic party apparatus, which Gill political adviser Ted Trimpa called a 'hot mess' because of what he said was its inability to pick good candidates or raise money. Instead, they partnered with local unions, trade groups and lawmakers like then-state Sen. Ed Perlmutter who in 2000 had orchestrated a successful but brief Democratic takeover of the state senate. Republicans flipped it right back in 2002, the same year National Review alsodeclared Republican Bill Owens 'America's Best Governor.'
Gill and Stryker took the lead in building the coalition and funding its efforts, according to Trimpa. In meetings held at the office of the Colorado Education Association, Democratic-aligned groups ranging from the AFL-CIO, to environmentalists and the Colorado Trial Lawyers Association met regularly, sometimes over a bottle of wine, especially during campaign season. With a mission to attract unaffiliated voters, the group officially named themselves the Independent Table and workshopped non-partisan campaign names like 'Colorado First.' They supported the most promising candidates across the state, selecting them primarily based on polling. They didn't let policy disagreements or purity tests get in the way of supporting candidates who were connecting with voters. It wasn't always easy to disregard those policy differences, especially on hot issues such as education reform, but the final decision on which candidates to back always came down to polling.
'In order to exercise power, you have to have power. To have power, you have to win,' Trimpa said. The mentality, he said, was 'Let's win first and then figure out what we're going to do.'
The payoff of the new strategy was almost immediate. In 2004, Democrats won back the state senate and overcame a nine-seat deficit in the state house to reach a three-seat majority. In 2006, they turned the governor's mansion blue as Bill Ritter trounced his Republican opponent by nearly 17 points. Today, the governor and both U.S. senators are Democrats, and they're just a few seats short of a supermajority in the legislature.
'We were ruthlessly focused on winning and gaining an anchor,' Perlmutter, the former state senator and later member of Congress, said at the PPI retreat. 'And that started us winning.'
Anchoring is a long-term strategy that focuses resources on building control of state government one chamber or branch at a time. Dropping an anchor in one arena allows the party to build a sustainable relationship with voters and a pipeline of candidates to step into bigger state and eventually federal roles. Its use in Colorado received a lot of attention from out-of-state lawmakers at the Denver retreat. Former Alabama Sen. Doug Jones told POLITICO Magazine between sessions that if the national party apparatus backed anchoring strategies in states like Alabama, they'd have a better shot at keeping senators like him in office. Jones was soundly defeated in 2020 after serving the last three years of Republican Jeff Sessions' term.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold was one of the latest to flip a long-time red seat in Colorado. The millennial lawmaker became Colorado's first Democratic secretary of state in more than 50 years when she was elected in 2019. Raised in rural Colorado, Griswold used her personal experiences to reach new voters.
'They didn't see me as a politician, because I wasn't,' Griswold said of that first race. Finding and elevating candidates like her around the country is something the national party needs to do much more, she says: 'Invest in people who are normal. … Invest in people who show themselves to be fighters, who grew up rural, who grew up middle class.'
In addition to anchoring, the Independent Table made sure to avoid financial involvement in primary races and urged candidates not to attack other Democrats. (A fierce debate over whether it's appropriate to primary other Democrats is the practice that recently exploded the leadership of the Democratic National Committee.) Turning negative in primaries, they believed, only makes the party's candidates more vulnerable in the general election.
'There was an effort to make sure that we organized ourselves and avoided having circular firing squads,' John Hickenlooper, who was first elected Denver mayor in 2002, said on Capitol Hill the week after the Colorado retreat. It's a strategy that helped the then-governor become senator: In 2020, Mike Johnston, a former Colorado state senator, dropped out of the U.S. Senate race when Hickenlooper jumped in; Johnston is now mayor of Denver.
'That was a very critical time and a critical election,' Johnston recounted in a phone interview after the retreat. A Republican held the seat — Sen. Cory Gardner, who beat Democratic Sen. Mark Udall in 2014. Johnston, who also spoke on a panel at the retreat, said he didn't see a pathway to beat the sitting governor without going negative — so he dropped out. 'I was not going to spend my time trying to make the case why not to elect John Hickenlooper,' he explained. Hickenlooper won by nearly 10 percentage points.
'I would love to see that at the national level,' said Colorado state House Majority Leader Monica Duran. 'That, yes, it's diverse, right? It's a big group. But you all want the same thing. Why can't you come together to figure out how to get it done?'
Ask proponents of the 'Colorado Way' for an example of the need for a radical shift in Democratic thinking and they'll tell the frustrating story of Denver school reform.
In 2008, the Democrat-led Denver School Board implemented wide-ranging changes including more charter schools, letting schools break with district standards to innovate, allowing teachers at individual schools the ability to overrule some of the city's collective bargaining agreement if they so choose if it would facilitate that innovation (like changing the weekly schedule). They also instituted an evaluation model that focused on improvement year over year, rather than comparing schools with different resources and demographics against each other.
A recent analysis of the changes implemented between 2008 and 2019 by the University of Colorado Denver's Center for Education showed the reforms increased overall student performance. Denver Public Schools' graduation rate in 2008, for example, was 43 percent and by 2019 it had climbed to 71 percent. The analysis also concluded that after the reforms went into effect, Denver Public Schools improved from the bottom 10 districts in the state on math and English/language arts performance to the top half of districts in the state. But the backlash to Trump's election and his appointment of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos incited progressives to replace reformists with board members more sympathetic to the teachers' union, which opposed many of the reforms. (The reforms received criticism for linking teacher pay to test scores and for not improving outcomes for Black students in Denver in the way they had for white students, among other concerns.) Anything reminiscent of a Trump policy also became a target after 2016, and the Denver reforms had echoes of DeVos' rhetoric — even though proponents say the details were very different.
'There arose within Denver a narrative that what was happening in the school system was part of this larger effort by conservatives … to 'privatize public education,'' said Parker Baxter, director of UC Denver's Center for Education Policy Analysis and author of the analysis. Ironically, DeVos showed up in Denver and gave a speech criticizing the city for not doing enough.
'Here's DeVos coming and criticizing Denver for not being reforming enough,' Baxter recalled. 'And yet, from [Denver Schools Superintendent Tom Boasberg's] point of view, he was getting attacked within Denver by Democrats who … thought that his reforms were actually Trump's school reforms.'
Pro-union members took over the school board and rolled back some of the programs. A number of innovation schools — public schools with 'greater individual school autonomy and managerial flexibility,' according to the state's education website — have closed, for example, and changes were made to the school evaluation model. It isn't clear what impact this had on school performance, because Baxter's study only looked at student-level data through 2019. But Denver parents have already begun to swing back toward the reforms: In the last school board election, three union-aligned board members were replaced with reformists.
The controversy was catnip at the Denver retreat. When first mentioned by Mary Seawell, CEO of education think tank Lyra Colorado, the retreat was on its fourth session and attendees were beginning to sag, but panelists perked back up as she told the story.
House Armed Services Ranking Member Adam Smith of Washington jumped in to ask what reasons opponents used to campaign against the reforms. 'They were claiming that outcomes are not what should be driving education policy,' Seawell said. Smith laughed loudly and ruefully.
For attendees at a retreat where every policy discussion began and ended with outcomes, the refusal of progressives to consider an education reform regimen with quantifiable outcomes is a clear example of why Democrats are being rejected by voters who just want the government to work for them. In fact, these centrist Democrats might be nearly as frustrated with the left's purity tests as their Republican counterparts.
'When you agree with somebody 85 percent of the time, and that's not good enough, that's the sign of a regressive party,' former Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, one of the more prominent out-of-state attendees, told POLITICO Magazine. 'There are people who would rather be right than win elections.'
The school reform controversy is just one example of the persistent tension between ideological and pragmatic Democrats that the two factions will need to overcome to win back control. Since Election Day, pragmatists like Polis and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer have faced attacks from grassroots groups and voters within their own party who do not tolerate any Democrat who does not check all their boxes. Whitmer was roasted by the left for meeting with Trump at the White House and appearing with him again when he visited Michigan. Polis, meanwhile, drew ire when he posted support of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s willingness to 'take on big pharma and corporate ag' instead of rebuking him for his anti-vaxx ideas.
Despite the pushback, Polis is unapologetic.
'Democrats need to speak to a larger coalition,' he told POLITICO Magazine. He isn't 'a fan' of what the Trump administration is doing and disagrees with Kennedy on some key issues like vaccine efficacy but wishes people would investigate RFK's positions for themselves rather than attack Kennedy as a default. Many Colorado Democrats share Kennedy's positions on issues like improving health and nutrition, he argued, and the party can't win without accepting a wider range of perspectives.
'That means welcoming voters that like RFK. It means welcoming voters that value freedom and liberty and government efficiency,' he said. 'And those should be folks that we welcome to the Democratic Party and that we incorporate into our agenda.'
The last piece of this puzzle, however, is the one without an answer: How to nationalize the 'Colorado Way.'
The presidential election is three years away and Democrats need every minute to successfully rebrand along the more libertarian lines favored by voters in the West. But the organizers think the western approach will translate even in eastern states.
'Westerners are not looking for handouts. They want opportunities, they want obstacles to opportunity removed,' PPI's Marshall said when asked how the Colorado Way scales up across the country. 'I'm from the southern part of Virginia. I don't find that very different from what a former Democratic voter now voting for Trump would think about the government's role in the economy.'