Colorado: It's not just a ski resort that burns down each summer

The University of Denver and the Glover Park consulting group conducted a press conference last Monday in Washington, DC, to discuss Colorado politics, the presidential debates, and the 2012 election. I was one of four DU faculty members in attendance, along with DSCC Executive Director Guy Cecil and former Colorado Republican Party Chair Dick Wadhams. Dee Dee Myers hosted. You can see all the action here on C-SPAN.

Legislative Leviathan (R - Highlands Ranch, CO)

Legislators and reporters gather around
Speaker McNulty late last night to
ask about bringing the chamber
out of recess.

If you weren't watching the proceedings of the Colorado House of Representatives last night, you missed quite a show. The Republican-controlled House is set to adjourn today, and a number of bills still remained on the calendar last night, one of which was a bill that would have allowed civil unions for same sex couples. The bill had already passed the Democratic-controlled Senate, and it had passed several Republican-controlled House committees with the help of some defecting Republicans. The governor had said he'd sign the bill. Whip counts showed that there were enough votes for it to pass the House.

So at around 9:30PM last night, Democrats moved to consider the bill on the House floor. Republican Speaker McNulty immediately moved the chamber into recess, preventing the consideration of any further legislative business. Despite lobbying by Governor Hickenlooper and Minority Leader Mark Ferrandino, McNulty kept the chamber in recess, effectively killing not only the civil unions bill but another 30 or so bills that were awaiting a floor vote. Spectators booed the Speaker, and the gallery was cleared after one shouted "I hope you all f-ing die!"

So, yeah, this is what legislative hardball looks like. And this is one of the down sides of investing a lot of power in a single chamber leader. There are plenty of advantages, of course -- a leaderless chamber would probably pass almost no legislation, and there's no guarantee that anything that passed would come close to reflecting public opinion. And strong leaders allow parties to be responsible; that is, they can better deliver on what they promise in their platforms and in campaigns. But here we see the costs: one strong leader can prevent a vote on a bill that would otherwise pass and become law, even one with strong public support. (Notably, in a chamber with even stronger legislative leaders, this bill might have never even made it to the floor. Colorado's GAVEL amendment guarantees that any bill that passes committee come to the floor.)

This is quickly becoming a rallying point for liberal activists in the state. Nonetheless, one might consider things from the Speaker's perspective: should he have allowed a vote on which he knew his side would lose? One is surely tempted to say yes, sure, that's democracy! But let's imagine a counterfactual for a second. Let's say that you were the Speaker and a bill was coming before you that would, I don't know, reinstate slavery, and you knew it would pass if it got a vote. Would you allow the vote in the name of democracy? Or would you use (even abuse) your powers as Speaker to prevent something evil from occurring?

I'm certainly not likening civil unions to slavery. I'm just suggesting that when a leader is invested with agenda controlling powers, it's hard not to use them when the stakes are high.

Scatterplot dump: Colorado caucus edition

Just to follow up on my previous post about Tuesday's Colorado Republican caucus, I've played with a bit more county-level data and found a few interesting correlations. None of these are perfect, and a lot of things are moving simultaneously, so to find the one thing that caused Santorum's upset is a fool's errand. Nonetheless, these are suggestive.

I also encourage you to read Sean Trende's county-level analysis of New Hampshire's and Florida's primaries (he finds some similar things to what I found about Evangelical voters) and Nate Silver's interesting essay today.

Anyway, some graphs after the jump. All bivariate relationships are statistically significant at the p ≤ .05 level.

The tyranny of small majorities

One must pity Colorado House Speaker Frank McNulty, who runs the chamber with a one-seat majority. It takes so little to threaten majority control. Readers may remember last year when eye surgery kept a Republican member trapped in Colorado Springs during the session (his doctors forbade him to go over 7,000 feet above sea level, and it's hard to get from the Springs to Denver without doing that), almost costing Republicans the chamber.

Well, today we've got a new one. State Rep. Laura Bradford, a moderate Republican from the Western Slope, got pulled over on suspicion of a DUI recently. There was a dispute over whether she sought legislative immunity at the time or whether she asked the officer to treat her like any other citizen, and the police have been weirdly contradictory about this. Whatever happened, the Speaker initiated a House investigation of the case and stripped her of a committee chairmanship. Due to the lack of support from her party, Bradford is now considering bolting, leaving the chamber deadlocked at 32-32-1. A new Speaker vote would determine which party runs the chamber.

Now, of course, if Bradford ends up bolting, it won't be solely because of the traffic stop. She's butted heads with her party leaders on numerous occasions. But it's a good example of just how difficult it is to manage a small majority.

Meanwhile, in Dan Maes' universe...

Remember Dan Maes? The Republican gubernatorial nominee who managed to pull just 11% of the vote last year? Well, he's got a new book out in which he sets the record, um, straight? Among his claims:

• He would have beaten Democrat John Hickenlooper if Tom Tancredo hadn't jumped in for a third-party run.
• Tom Tancredo only ran because he thought Maes was Mexican.
• Maes speaks with "the firm voice, tone, and rhythm of Ronald Reagan."

Look, one can certainly question Tancredo's actions in that race, but it's hard to question his analysis: Maes really was going to lose, badly. Tancredo only jumped in because it looked like Hickenlooper was going to get such a free ride. Indeed, if Maes had dropped out, as many prominent Republicans were urging him to do, Tancredo, despite his years of extremist rhetoric, would have had a fighting chance against Hickenlooper given the 2010 political environment.

Oh, I should particularly praise Denver Post writer Tim Hoover for these two sentences of the book review:

The 222-page book was self-published and appears to have been self-edited. It is in need of judicious proofreading in many places.

I also enjoyed this paragraph about the people who messed with Maes:

He faults a number of people and institutions for his loss, including former Republican Party chairman Dick Wadhams, a variety of Republican funders, some Tea Party activists, a liberal press and even former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who he says did not throw him any support despite his e-mail conversations with her father-in-law.

It's a damned shame when an e-mail conversation with Sarah Palin's father-in-law doesn't translate into actual political support. 

Gold, slavery, and Colorado

Susan Schulten has another fascinating post up at the NYT's Civil War site. This one is about the interrelatedness of the slavery crisis in the East and the search for gold and silver in the West. As she notes, hundreds of thousands of prospective miners came to the western parts of the Kansas and Nebraska territories in the 1850s hoping to get rich. When southern states seceded in 1861, leaving the U.S. Congress almost devoid of Democrats, Republicans sought to quickly establish sympathetic territories and states in these newly populated regions. Enter the Colorado and Nevada territories. An interesting story and definitely worth the read.

Update: You can hear more about the intrigue surrounding Colorado's eventual statehood in Susan's interview on Colorado Public Radio. As she reports, Republicans pushed for Colorado and Nevada to gain statehood in the early 1860s as a way of assuring more Electoral College votes for Lincoln, whose reelection looked doubtful until shortly before the 1864 election. However, Colorado's own residents voted against statehood at that point, apparently concerned with the costs of self-government. Of course, Colorado became a state just in time to help Republicans rig win the presidential election of 1876.

The definitive (or, at least, the first) academic book on the 2010 elections

Please forgive the shameless plug, but if you're teaching about the 2010 elections this spring, or if you'd just like to know more about them, please consider Pendulum Swing, edited by Larry Sabato. It contains fascinating studies about many key races by leading academics, analysts, and journalists. There's also a chapter by me. I wrote about Colorado's gubernatorial and senatorial contests. You can see cool polling graphs, like the one at left!

When a minor party becomes a major one

So the nominee of the American Constitution Party (that'd be Tom Tancredo) won way more than 10 percent of the vote in Colorado's recent gubernatorial election.  By state law, that makes the ACP a "major" party for the next four years, which comes with a number of benefits, including higher placement on general election ballots and easier fundraising.  But, as the Denver Post reports, there are some notable downsides.

• The party has to hold caucuses in each of the state's 3,215 precincts in early 2012. The party currently has 30 dues paying members to carry out this task.
• The party has to conduct primaries, which is ironic since its own platform opposes primaries.
• It has to appoint members to 17 state boards.  Again -- only 30 party members to begin with.

This is all fairly amusing, but it also highlights some of the important differences between major parties and minor ones.  Minor parties usually get the luxury of ideological purity in exchange for not bearing any of the burdens of actual governing.  They run candidates to make statements or raise issues that are otherwise being ignored.  There's usually little real chance of their candidates actually winning anything.

Now the ACP has a much bigger platform than it ever had before.  I wonder if they'll see this time as a blessing or a curse.

As Colorado goes...

If reports are correct, Republicans have finally won enough seats in the Colorado state house to claim a majority.  Which means the coming session will feature a Democratic executive branch, a Democratic Senate, and a Republican House.

Eerie.

Defying the district

I'm pleased to report that the Charlotte Raleigh News & Observer has picked up my article (with Steve Greene) on the electoral consequences of the health reform vote.  That article was based on my blog post in which I found that Democrats who voted for health care reform were running about three points behind those Democrats who voted against it.  It didn't seem appropriate within the article, but I would like to weigh in on some of the normative implications of this finding.

It's pretty easy to interpret this finding as a plus for Republicans.  They said the bill was a clunker that would be rejected by the American people, and here's a good chunk of evidence in support of that.  But what do we think of people, like Reps. John Salazar and Betsy Markey, who are in conservative districts but nonetheless voted for the bill with full knowledge that it would make some of their voters angry?  Are they heroes or fools?

Well, they may have made a strategic calculation that, while the vote would be costly among voters, it would earn them some love from liberal donors and the party establishment, and surely it has done that.  Still, even essentially bottomless campaign coffers aren't likely to overcome a three-point hit.

Beyond this strategic thinking, though, should we be thinking of these representatives as heroes?  After all, they cast a vote based on what they believed was right even though they knew it might cost them their jobs.  Isn't that something we should celebrate?  Are they like Jeannette Rankin, who refused to vote for American engagement in either WWI or WWII, and subsequently shattered her political career?  Or Gov. Ralph Carr, who gave up his future in Colorado's Republican Party by opposing the internment of Japanese Americans?  Or Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, whose vote in support of Bill Clinton's first budget ended her political career?

Jonathan Bernstein has written extensively on this subject, arguing that politicians should worry more about being good representatives than doing "what's right."  And we should be particularly wary of politicians who are trying to do "what's right," if for no other reason than the definition of "right" is rather vague.  This also goes to the more complicated question of whom exactly representatives are supposed to be representing.  Every person in their district?  Every voter?  The people who elected them?  Their party?

I don't really have answers for these questions.  I'm just not convinced that the interpretation of representatives defying their constituents is all that straightforward.

Only One Major Party?

ColoradoPols highlights one of the particular dangers facing the Colorado Republican Party right now resulting from the bizarre governor's race.  According to state law, a "major" party is one whose gubernatorial nominee received at least ten percent of the vote in the most recent election.  Republican gubernatorial nominee Dan Maes is now polling below 17 percent and is still dropping like a stone.

If Maes finishes below ten percent, then the Colorado Republican Party is technically not a major party for the next four years.  This, it turns out, strongly affects how the party can raise money.  Major party candidates are allowed to raise money in both the primary and general election cycles.  Minor parties, however, can only raise money in a primary cycle if there's a primary challenger.  This would substantially reduce Republican candidates' ability to fundraise during the next two cycles.

Turning the Republican into a Third Party Candidate

There's a great story going on in the Colorado governor's race with regards to third parties.  When Tom Tancredo jumped into the race as the nominee of the American Constitution Party, he was polling around even with Dan Maes, the Republican nominee.  That's certainly impressive, and attributable to Tancredo's own widespread name recognition throughout Colorado (and Maes' relative lack thereof).  Given what usually happens with third party candidates, one would generally expect that Tancredo's support would wane and Maes' would increase as the campaign brought Republican voters back to their own party's nominee.

That hasn't happened.  Indeed, recent polling suggests that Tancredo's share of the polls is increasing at Maes' expense.  Tancredo's also massively outpacing Maes in fundraising.  During the first two weeks of September, Maes raised less than $15,000, most of which went to pay off a campaign finance violation penalty.

Why is this happening?  This strikes me as an endorsement story.  There's a good reason Tom Tancredo has never won an election outside of Colorado's 6th congressional district.  He's extremely conservative and bombastic.  That's normally toxic to mainstream party elites, who have generally avoided backing him in statewide (or presidential) runs.

But now GOP party elites are trying to get Dan Maes, whom they view as a colossal mistake, to drop out of the race, and they're doing so by backing Tancredo.  The list of Tancredo endorsers includes relatively mainstream party folks like Bob Beauprez (the GOP's nominee for governor in '06), Josh Penry (who dropped out of the governor's race last year), and former state Rep. Rob Witwer.  Their backing is an indicator to other Republicans that it's safe to like Tancredo this year.

(h/t ColoradoPols)

Symbolizing nothing

I took my students on a tour of the Colorado capitol building today.  Like most state capitol buildings, this one does a nice job honoring unique aspects of its home state.  It's manufactured primarily of materials from throughout Colorado -- it helps that this is a big mining state.

One mineral on display throughout the capitol is rose onyx, which comes from a quarry in Beulah, Colorado.  Rose onyx is a rare mineral, so rare that the entirety of the world's supply of it went into the construction of the Colorado capitol.  So, in honoring the materials of which Colorado is made, the builders actually removed one of those materials from the Earth entirely and placed it in the capitol.  So now the building honors something that no longer exists outside it.  Weird.

When the insiders blow it, part II

If you care about parties, you should be following the Colorado gubernatorial race right now.  Last month, I explained some of the background of how Republican insiders tried to clear the field for Scott McInnis prior to the primary.  This, of course, turned out to be a colossal mistake, as McInnis had a scandal that was about to emerge, which, along with some other weird trends this year, resulted in Dan Maes winning the primary.  And, of course, Tom Tancredo decided to jump in as a third party candidate, which managed to make an unlikely Republican victory essentially impossible.

Late last week, leaders of the state Republican executive committee met with Maes to try to convince him to drop out of the race.  Just to be clear, yes, leaders of the formal Republican Party are begging their own gubernatorial nominee to drop out.  Maes, who saw no love from the party establishment prior to the primary, now sees no need to acquiesce to their wishes, so he's staying in.

I find this all pretty astounding.  I can't recall a similar instance of a party's leaders trying to undermine their nominee for a top-ballot race.

Defending the 17th Amendment

The DSCC has released an ad criticizing Republican Senate candidate Ken Buck for his advocacy of repealing the 17th Amendment, which would return the power of selecting U.S. senators to state legislatures.  For the life of me, I don't understand why some Tea Party-backed candidates have championed this issue, which is about as close as you can get to the precise opposite of populism.  I'm only slightly less puzzled over the fact that the Democrats have chosen to attack him on this issue.  Yes, it makes him look extreme, but for all the issues on which his stances are pretty out-of-step (abortion, Social Security, student loans, church/state separation, etc.), the direct election of senators strikes me as an issue about which the vast majority of voters largely don't care.  I could be wrong, though.

(h/t ColoradoPols)

Does Maes have Tancredo to thank?

I can't help thinking that Tancredo's recent entry into the governor's race made Dan Maes' victory in yesterday's primary more likely.  I'm sure a lot of Republican voters were unhappy with Scott McInnis but were probably willing to vote for him anyway since they saw him as more electable than Maes.  But once Tancredo jumped in, what's the point in casting a strategic vote?  Hickenlooper has this in the bag anyway. Might as well vote sincerely for someone who makes you feel good.

Colorado elections - initial thoughts

The anti-incumbency/anti-establishment meme being pushed by the media isn't precisely true, but it's not precisely false, either.  As John Sides notes, very few incumbents are actually losing this year.  But I think it's fair to say they're having to work harder than they normally would.

To the extent we can divine any general trends from Colorado's results, we can see that the top-ballot anointed establishment candidates (Michael Bennet, Scott McInnis, and Jane Norton) had a tough time.  Yes, Bennet won -- quite handily -- but he faced a strong challenge from Andrew Romanoff that forced him to raise and spend and to draw upon national politicians' support a lot more than he'd planned to.  In a different year, going up against an incumbent who had enormous financial resources and the backing of the state's Democratic establishment and the president of the United States would have seemed suicidal.  Romanoff tried it anyway and pulled 46% of the vote.

Over on the Republican side, Jane Norton had basically all of the benefits of the establishment in her corner, but she still couldn't pull it off.  It probably didn't help her that her most prominent endorser was John McCain, who was never that beloved among Colorado's GOP base.  Similarly, establishment candidate Scott McInnis is, as I write this, slightly trailing insurgent Dan Maes.  Yes, we could say that the plagiarism scandal caused this, but Maes also beat McInnis back in the caucus and convention in the spring.

We saw another interesting race in the Republican contest for CD7 CD3, where insider candidate Scott Tipton held off a strong, Palin-backed challenge from Bob McConnell after many observers had written Tipton off.  Again, a tough race that probably wouldn't have happened in a more typical year, even if the insider still won the day.

So we saw substantial challenges to the party's anointed candidates, but those challenges were different across party lines.  On the Republican side, the challengers were notably to the right of the insider candidates (especially in the gubernatorial race), at least partially attributable to an energized Tea Party faction within the GOP.  On the Democratic side, though, Bennet drew a challenger that was almost his ideological twin.  The things that motivated that race -- insider v. outsider, who Gov. Ritter should have picked in the first place, etc. -- had little to do with ideology.

One final point: polling in this election wasn't great.  Those polls showing Buck up by 10 to 15 points were pretty unfounded, as was the recent poll showing Romanoff up by 3.  Of course, it tends to be difficult to poll in a primary, particularly when turnout is so unusually high.  No one was really sure who'd turn out to vote.

Election Day!

Okay, I'll admit I'm excited.  It's Election Day here in Colorado.  Well, it's more like Election Deadline Day -- roughly a third of the potential electorate has already mailed in a vote -- pretty amazing for a midterm primary.  But surely some folks are still turning ballots in today.

Anyway, I won't have a ton more to say about this election until the results start coming in.  I'm interested in it for many reasons, not least of which is that there are three top-ballot statewide races -- the Republican governor's race and both parties' Senate contests -- that are really too close to call right now.  The fact that all three winners of the caucus/convention/assembly system in these races could actually beat the insider favorites makes this an especially unusual and exciting contest.

I'm particularly pleased by the high turnout so far, which is a nice rebuke to letters like this, printed in today's Denver Post (link unavailable):

We must all be disheartened [and] perhaps sickened by the campaigns run by this year's slate of candidates for governor and U.S. Senate in Colorado.... It's sad to say, but this year, when casting my ballot "none of the above" is not only a viable choice, it's about the only option!

Give me a break.  With a few word changes, this letter could have been written about any competitive election in any election year since about 1800, and some newspaper would always have been willing to run it for some reason.  Of course candidates have been attacking other candidates.  It's an election!  Voters need to make a choice!  The outcomes are important!  Yes, the attacks can seem petty and trivial at first glance, but they generally go alongside substantial differences of policy.  Michael Bennet's governance of the Denver Public Schools, even if spun a bid shadily by the New York Times and the Romanoff campaign, is a legitimate campaign issue.  Ken Buck and Jane Norton are debating the role and size of government.  Okay, the governor's race is a mess, but generally, a tough, critical campaign is one we should welcome -- it means that the candidates think the race is close and they aren't taking any votes for granted.  If you want a positive election, follow one in which a popular incumbent has no chance of losing.  It'll make you feel good, but it bears only a slight resemblance to representative democracy.

NYT doing Bennet no favors

This is not what Michael Bennet wanted to read in the NY Times four days before the primary:

In the spring of 2008, the Denver public school system needed to plug a $400 million hole in its pension fund. Bankers at JPMorgan Chase offered what seemed to be a perfect solution.

The bankers said that the school system could raise $750 million in an exotic transaction that would eliminate the pension gap and save tens of millions of dollars annually in debt costs — money that could be plowed back into Denver’s classrooms, starved in recent years for funds.

To members of the Denver Board of Education, it sounded ideal. It was complex, involving several different financial institutions and transactions. But Michael F. Bennet, now a United States senator from Colorado who was superintendent of the school system at the time, and Thomas Boasberg, then the system’s chief operating officer, persuaded the seven-person board of the deal’s advantages, according to interviews with its members.

[...]

The Denver school board unanimously approved the JPMorgan deal and it closed in April 2008, just weeks after a major investment bank, Bear Stearns, failed. In short order, the transaction went awry because of stress in the credit markets, problems with the bond insurer and plummeting interest rates.

Since it struck the deal, the school system has paid $115 million in interest and other fees, at least $25 million more than it originally anticipated.

As ColoradoPols notes, the electoral impact of this story will be muted somewhat since so many ballots have already been mailed in.  Still, this has to hurt, as it paints precisely the picture of Bennet that Romanoff has been trying to paint, only in a much more objective and believable manner.

Diana wins another convert

In the original "V" miniseries, the evil Diana had a brainwashing procedure that would compel human subjects to endorse the Visitors and their mission on Earth.  It was effective, but it had a tell: people who'd been brainwashed experienced a change in handedness.  Lefties were suddenly righties, and so forth.

Scott McInnis has some 'splainin' to do.

(h/t ColoradoPols)