If you need any more insight into the crisis facing the Republican Party in Colorado, check out this bit of trivia — which isn’t actually trivial at all — from the close of the state legislative session.
Beginning next year, no Democrat in either house of the state legislature will know what it’s like to have served in the minority. And, conversely, no Republican will know what it’s like to have been in the majority.
That’s not surprising, of course. But it is, in its way, a watershed moment.
Despite what you may think, the sad position of the state GOP is not entirely — OK, mostly, but not 100% — its own fault.
It’s easy to blame erratic GOP party chair Dave Williams who, it must be said, has seemingly done everything in his power to further shrink his ever-shrinking state party. Did he think that kicking Sun reporter Sandra Fish out of a state assembly would mean that no one would notice?
It’s just as easy to blame the carpetbagging canoodler, Lauren Boebert, who, of course, has helped make the state GOP a national laughingstock.
But Democrats have been gaining in Colorado for years, from long before Boebert drew her first gun and even before they turned “Beetlejuice” the movie into a Broadway play. Over two decades, we’ve seen the state go from bright red to purple to dark blue. Part of that is due to changing demographics. Part of that is due to changing times.
In any case, this is a trend that is much bigger than any single member of the state GOP clown show. It’s one that parties are dealing with across the country. Colorado is just one of 40 states governed by what is known as the trifecta — in which one party holds the governor’s seat and a majority in both houses of the legislature.
You don’t need anyone to explain this to you. As hyperpartisanship continues to grow on the national level, it has seeped down into the state level and, for that matter, the county level. In a country divided in so many ways, we divide ourselves geographically, too, into what we call partisan bubbles.
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Check out these numbers: Of the 40 states with one party domination, 23 are Republican and 17 Democratic. But here’s a more revealing statistic — 41.7% of Americans live in states with a Democratic trifecta, and 41.0% live in states with a Republican trifecta.
Of course if you’re a MAGA cultist, you’re supposed to look at those 41.7-to-41.0 numbers and say they’re rigged, but that’s another story.
The undisputed truth is that the 40 states represent the highest number of state trifectas in decades. And whoever wins the presidential race this November — the latest handicapping has Trump possibly losing his hush-money trial, going to jail and yet still possibly winning the election — don’t expect much to change on the state level.
You may have seen the disturbing — if you’re not a Trumpist — numbers in the latest New York Times/Siena College swing-state poll showing Trump leading Biden, sometimes considerably, in five of six key swing states.
That’s disturbing on a few levels, beginning with the notion that, thanks to the absurd system by which we elect presidents, as few as six states — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona — could decide who wins the entire race.
But there’s also this strange caveat that election-analytics guru Nate Cohn points out: Democrats lead in four contested U.S. Senate races in these same six battleground states, and that may be enough for Democrats to keep control of the Senate. Three of the four Democrats are incumbents, which explains something. And in Arizona, the Democrat Ruben Gallego leads Republican Kari Lake, who is that state’s equivalent of, yes, Dave Williams and Lauren Boebert.
The explanation seems to be that Democrats, including in these states, are basically satisfied with their own Democrats, but not so much with Joe Biden. It’s strange, but as Trump intermittently dozes off during testimony in the New York courtroom, it’s Biden’s Sleepy Joe that seems to be sticking.
Or maybe it’s that Americans are so dissatisfied with their government that people want immediate change at the highest levels, even if that change brings back Trump. And it isn’t just Americans, and it isn’t just Biden. A recent poll showed that the approval rates of 18 leaders in 22 democratic countries were under 50%.
And while it may be a little harder to change the world when voting for your state legislator, you can change the things that directly affect you. And so what happens instead is that in Democratic trifecta states, you tend to get abortion-rights and gun-safety legislation, as in Colorado, whereas in Republican states, you tend to get radical anti-abortion legislation and, I don’t know, banned books.
If Republicans are ever going to regain control of the state legislature or much else in Colorado, they can’t remain the party of election deniers and abortion banners. You don’t need a poll to know the state electorate has moved on. You just have to count all the legislators in all the blue seats, year after year, under the Capitol’s golden dome.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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